Now that the dust has cleared on the launch of Acrobat 9 thoughts naturally turn to Adobe’s next major release Creative Suite 4. So what might we expect to see?

Well the launch of Acrobat 9 might well give us a very strong clue. The Acrobat applications are focussed on the business/office productivity market, but the introduction of new PDF capabilities gives the CS teams something to work with. And with Acrobat 9 that’s an understatement…

The first key is the merging of the Flash player into the free Adobe Reader. This enables traditionally static PDF ePaper documents to become fully interactive multimedia extravaganzas. InDesign already offers some electronic publishing capabilities but now the platform is in place to take this far further – and with the latest QuarkXPress 8 adding comprehensive Flash authoring capabilities the pressure is really on. For more graphics-intensive short-publication work this could also give the multi-page, Flash-oriented Fireworks CS4 a real – and well-deserved – central role.

The merger of Flash/PDF shouldn’t just benefit the page-oriented apps. The big limitation of the Flash platform at the moment is that you need to be online and in the browser to take advantage of it. By outputting Flash projects to PDF rather than SWF, Flash CS4 Professional would open up an important new offline delivery route (effectively a Flash document would be a projector without the hassle of EXE-based delivery).

The potential is even more exciting for the media-focused CS apps. Currently these seem semi-detached from the publishing apps but if Premiere Pro CS4, After Effects CS4, Soundbooth CS4 and Encore CS4 all add PDF output they would become full members of Adobe’s universal Acrobat strategy at a stroke. By wrapping the all-important FLV video format in a PDF wrapper you also get simple offline cross-platform playback.

And the merger of Flash/PDF was only one aspect of the Acrobat 9 launch – perhaps even more important was the launch of Acrobat.com with its free 5GB hosting and services. This isn’t just personal file storage – Acrobat.com creates a Flash version of each PDF for online display and sharing. The potential for integration with CS4 is mouth-watering.

What else? How about multiple page support for Illustrator at last (maybe not if Fireworks takes on this role)? The bundling of Flex? Live Color for InDesign? Photoshop makes your tea?

Of course this is all speculation and the truth might be very different. However I can’t help feeling excited about the prospects for CS4.