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Editorial: Like children in a Suite shop
Adobe's Creative Suite 3, reviewed in full in this issue, is better than we ever imagined.
Even the reviewers' guides were impressive. These are the product highlight sheets that manufacturers send out with their latest releases, giving each reviewer a quick walk around the latest, greatest features, before leaving them to explore the rest of the package on their own. Usually they're a quickly tapped out email, or if you're lucky a PDF, but Adobe's guides to CS3 are nothing short of spiral-bound tomes, and the three volumes sitting on my desk, each for a different part of the suite, stack up to be taller than my local phone book.
Perhaps you're not surprised. It is, after all, two years since CS2 was shipped, and reviewed in Mac User on April Fools' day 2005. That's a long time in software terms, now that we're accustomed to almost monthly updates to our operating systems and most-used apps,
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Yet in those two long years, a lot has changed. Apple has switched from PowerPC to Intel chips and, despite Apple's claims that porting existing apps to the new architecture would need no more than an extra box-check and a re-click of the compile button, Adobe was lumbered with some pretty serious from-scratch re-writing. And yet it still got it out in two years.
And then there was Macromedia, the merger, and the integration of its applications. Former rivals became compatriots, and teams that raced each other to integrate the next great killer feature had to undergo a fundamental shift in their working practices, and work collaboratively, rather than combatively. More importantly, as the applications were now to sit side by side in the same box, under the same branding banner, they had to take on a unified look and feel. That cosmetic transition might not have been entirely successful, but the pan-suite underpinnings that link the applications together and help them share data and features is truly impressive. And, let me say it again, despite this, it still got it out in two years.
Our feature runs to 16 pages, which I believe is the most comprehensive investigation you'll read on the subject, and of course I'm not going to summarise it here. As we say on the cover, though, I have no doubt you'll be queueing up for a copy as soon as it hits the shelves. Read the feature to find out why.
