Adobe Creative Suite 3, Part 3

Acrobat 8 Professional, Plus Adobe Reader 8

If Photoshop is the industry standard in image editing, then the analogue for open document exchange and electronic book publishing is Acrobat 8 Professional. And while you can create a PDF with practically anything these days (it's built right into the Mac OS X print dialogue, for example, meaning that any application that can print can create PDFs), it isn't too surprising that nothing but Acrobat 8 Professional provides the full complement of sophisticated PDF capabilities like those needed for print publishing workflows and which you can find on display in even the most basic of ebooks.

First, the good news: as one of the recipients of the new approach to interface design evident throughout Creative Suite 3, Acrobat 8 Professional looks great. Gone are the tabs of the previous version, their job now taken over by icons along the left of the screen. (Too bad if you're not using a widescreen display, though, as you may miss the extra space taken up by the icons.)

Acrobat 8 Professional also supports a new real-time collaboration and meeting system called Adobe Connect; I haven't used it myself, but I can imagine that for certain settings the paid service could be just the thing for sharing your Acrobat creations with colleagues.

You can also now assemble sets of files together into one PDF package, where before it was only possible to merge files together, losing the connection with the independently saved originals. The packaging process can also automatically strip out headers and footers and the like which were present in the source files. Separately from the packaging process, a new redaction tool can also remove all occurrences of particular words or images.

Some new peculiarities have also appeared, however, and that's less good news. For example, the old 'Facing Pages' default (showing two pages side by side) has been replaced with a 'Two-Up' view that by default places the first page on the left -- meaning that print publications that always begin on the right now have the wrong edges facing the gutter. The old behaviour can be regained by selecting View > Page Display > Show Cover Page During Two-Up, but in my experience the setting would not stick, and to be reapplied manually for every document.

And text selection, wheel scrolling, and even cropping behaviour seemed inconsistent and unreliable; I cannot say for certain whether my computer was just too slow to keep up, but certainly it is well within the system requirements which Adobe recommends.

Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional and Adobe Reader 8 also seem to come with more than their fair share of behaviour that some users will likely find fairly irritating. Acrobat automatically inserts its toolbars into Microsoft Office applications without asking permission, for example, as well as altering print options (specifically, installing its print-to-PDF printer) without asking. A continuously running background application related to the online collaboration features also gets installed without warning and without any straightforward way of removing it -- sure, you can attempt to remove it, but when it's next launched, Adobe Reader will discover that and reinstall it. When angry customers revolted, an Adobe engineer finally had to give detailed instructions in a personal blog post on how to remove the beast for good. (Note that this was left to an individual employee's blog post, rather than something the company announced publicly and officially for the benefit of all Adobe customers.)

On Macs, Adobe Reader also automatically and without asking replaces existing Safari preferences and takes over as the default viewer when links to PDF documents are clicked. The remedy to this behaviour is to be found buried in a preference setting in the Adobe Reader application itself, meaning that you have to run the software whose installer caused the problem in order to get rid of the problem. I found this behaviour especially annoying, since in effect it meant that every time I clicked on a PDF in Safari, I had to sit through the automatic launching of the Adobe updater application, which checks for available updates for any and all Adobe Creative Suite 3 applications and automatically downloads them. Click on a PDF, download the latest update for Photoshop. Who knew?

The upshot? The new interface is a visually appealing improvement, and I'm sure the online collaboration tools will be a great help for some people, but personally I found it hard to get very excited about this particular component of Creative Suite 3.

More Components: Adobe Illustrator CS3, Flash CS3, Fireworks CS3, and Bridge CS3

This edition of the Creative Suite also includes several other components whic are included in most or all of the different editions. I'll say less about these, but they may still be worth exploring in more detail if you're comparing the benefits of the different editions.

Even older than Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator made its debut on the Macintosh in 1986 and Windows in 1989. The vector graphics companion to Photoshop, Illustrator has a long history of both excellence and struggles; this latest version features a completely overhauled drawing engine that restores the program's zippiness, extensive Flash integration, a facelift to match (mostly) the new CS3 interface, major refinements to path selection, improved colour capabilities, and several other new features. Illustrator CS3 is included in all but the Web Standard edition of Creative Suite 3.

The vector-based animation and interactivity of Flash technology was reportedly one of the primary reasons Adobe bought Macromedia, and Flash makes its first appearance as an Adobe product with the CS3 release. Adobe Flash CS3 Professional is included in all except the Design Standard edition of the suite. Flash now runs natively on Intel Macs and features tighter integration with Illustrator and Photoshop, plus the same updated interface of those and other Creative Suite 3 components.

Another Macromedia import, the web graphics tool Fireworks CS3 hasn't benefited from an interface overhaul for its first appearance as an Adobe product, but it has acquired excellent under-the-hood capabilities including full support for the native file formats of both Photoshop and Illustrator and the fairly ingenious new 9-slice scaling feature (which also appears in Illustrator and Flash). This scaling feature divides an object into 9 chunks and enables you to specify which of those chunks will be scaled and which will not -- this means, for example, that you can stretch a rectangular object with rounded corners without altering the proportions of those corners. (Without 9-slice scaling, the shape of a button's corners, for example, will change as you stretch it to accommodate labels of different lengths.) Fireworks CS3 is included only in the web-focused editions of the suite and the Master Collection.

Finally, Adobe Bridge CS3, which appears in all of the Creative Suite editions as well as being included with all of the applications when purchased separately, acts as an organizer and repository for media assets. It also serves as a hub for additional components common to each of the Creative Suite editions, inlcuding Adobe Stock Photos (for purchasing stock photography), Acrobat Connect (the collaboration tool mentioned previously), Device Central (for previewing content intended for mobile devices), and Version Cue (for workgroup file management).

A Note About Software Expenses and Return on Investment

So you've read this far, and caught at least a glimpse of what Adobe Creative Suite CS3 can do. But you're wondering: does such expensive software even have a place in a small business?

Here's my take on the question.

I've known people who happily paid several thousands pounds extra when buying a car, specifically because they wanted features that would be helpful to them during commutes to work (for which they also paid an additional several hundred pounds in fuel, of course). But those same people were unsure about spending a thousand pounds or more on a high-end computer system, or a few hundred on high-speed internet service, to enable themselves to work from home at least part of the week. For some reason, the thought of spending money on a small thing like a computer or an 'invisible' thing like internet access or a piece of software, seemed far less appealing than spending it on a big and very tangible thing like a car -- even though they both could have a direct and quantifiable impact on their ability to do their job.

To my way of thinking, it's important to take the time to quantify the benefit as well as the expense, and to pay particular attention to the intangibles like time saved and quality of life. How much time do you spend working on your website? If it's only 5 hours per year, then software like Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 probably doesn't make much sense for you. But what if you spend 50 hours, or 500 hours? How much more could you achieve in that time -- or how much time you could save in order to allocate to other aspects of your business -- if you had more sophisticated software at your disposal? How much frustration do you experience with your current tools? And what would it be worth to your business if your site showed the results of your more effective efforts? It may be difficult to imagine in advance what more you might be able to achieve with better tools, but that doesn't make the question not worth considering.

Of course I recognize that an awareness of expected return on investment is just basic business sense. After all, I used to work in senior business strategy roles, where cash flow return on investment was seemingly everything. But I mention it here specifically because it seems to me that small business owners in particular often have blinders on when it comes to considering the potential payoff of investments in software. (This is much like the blinders that seem to come into play when considering the form of business insurance called a backup hard drive. What, me spend a few pounds on an extra hard drive or two? What for?)

The upshot is simply this: yes, some software is very expensive. So is some office furniture, and some office space. But there are overheads, and there are investments. Precious few business expenses fall into the category of pure overhead, and software is one that usually falls into the category of investment; it ought to be evaluated as such, with respect to expected return.

Adobe Creative Suite 3 System Requirements and Pricing

The system requirements for Adobe Creative Suite 3 vary depending on the edition of the suite. For the Web Premium reviewed here, the requirements are as follows; requirements for other editions are available directly from Adobe's Creative Suite 3 overview:

Windows

• Intel Pentium 4, Intel Centrino, Intel Xeon, or Intel Core™ Duo (or compatible) processor
• Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista™ Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise (certified for 32-bit editions)
• 1GB of RAM
• 5GB of available hard-disk space (additional free space required during installation)
• 1,024x768 monitor resolution with 16-bit video card
• DVD-ROM drive
• QuickTime 7.1.2 software required for multimedia features
• Some 3D features in Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended require a Microsoft DirectX 9 capable graphics card with at least 64MB of VRAM
• Internet or phone connection required for product activation

Macintosh

• PowerPC G4 or G5 or multicore Intel processor
• Mac OS X v10.4.8-10.5 (Leopard)
• Java™ Runtime Environment 1.5 required for Adobe Version Cue™ CS3 Server
• 1GB of RAM
• 7GB of available hard-disk space (additional free space required during installation)
• 1,024x768 monitor resolution with 16-bit video card
• DVD-ROM drive
• QuickTime 7.1.2 software required for multimedia features
• Some 3D features in Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended require an OpenGL 1.4 capable graphics card with at least 64MB of VRAM
• Internet or phone connection required for product activation

Pricing likewise varies depending on the edition. (You can compare editions directly at Adobe's site.) The top-of-the line Master Collection retails at $2499 or £2313.58, with upgrades from $1399 or £1444.08. The least expensive Web Standard edition retails for $999 or £828.38, with upgrades from $399 or £370.12. Large discounts are available for students and educators, with smaller discounts available from online resellers like Amazon US or Amazon UK.

I have no idea why Adobe gives UK prices in such strange conversions, or why they would charge UK users more than twice as much for the same products, at the exchange rates current as of this writing.