Gerard Mason is a freelance developer and musician living in Melbourne, Australia. With the recent release of Adobe® Creative Suite® 3 Web Premium package, Adobe are now able to fully realise the potential of owning not only the world's favourite medium for delivery of rich media via the internet, Flash, but also two of the primary tools for designing and creating content, Photoshop and Illustrator. The huge potential of this package lies in its ability to integrate these three important applications and move towards streamlining the production process from concept to delivery, but the question remains, has Adobe lived up to this potential and presented a unified and coherent suite, or have they just churned out new versions of the same old titles without taking advantage of this opportunity?
The acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe has finally borne fruit with the release of the Adobe® Creative Suite® 3 Web Premium package containing, among other things, the first version of Macromedia's flagship application, Flash, to be released under the Adobe moniker. This review will focus on Flash, arguably the most valuable asset acquired by Adobe when they took over Macromedia, as it remains the most popular method of delivering rich, interactive content to the web, and also because the new Flash CS3 has been one of the most eagerly awaited product upgrades for some time.
Many users will be wondering whether or not Adobe have done anything to build upon Flash and the other applications in the suite in terms of tighter integration, particularly between Flash, Illustrator and Photoshop. It appears that integration is a key aspect of this software that will determine its ability to remain the top choice for designers and developers the world over, and Adobe still have quite a way to go in this regard. This release is however a good step in the right direction.
First we'll take a look at the new features available in this new release of Flash CS3, followed by a closer analysis of how these new features work, some pros and cons, and what we might expect in the future. Finally, we'll take a look at how Adobe have done in packaging this set of applications together as a suite, and what the future might hold in terms of it's development.
The first thing one notices upon opening applications in the CS3 suite is the new, unified interface, especially apparent between Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash. Each of these applications is sporting new dockable / detachable panels, and toolbars that can collapse, expand, and be reduced to iconic representations. This is all very nice for space saving, because we all love screen real-estate (it's cheaper than real real-estate, but harder to find). It is a smart move on Adobe's part to make these three applications similar in terms of UI as they form pretty much the standard core of working applications for most web designers, developers, multimedia professionals and students, and the similarities will aid usability.
Flash sports a number of new features, among them:
- Upgraded drawing tools, particularly the Pen tool, which is now functioning more like the Pen tool from Illustrator
- Alignment and distribution controls that are consistent across applications
- Support for ActionScript 3.0 for the first time
- Changes to the Actions panel, bringing it more into line with Dreamweaver's code editor
- The ability to capture a motion tween as XML, allowing it to be dropped directly into ActionScript code for later re-use
- New, more stable ActionScript 3.0 Debugger
- The ability to export sub-animations (animations embedded inside movie clips on the main timeline) when exporting to a video format
- Component skinning vastly improved - states can now be accessed and modified directly on the Stage
- Improved Video import
- Advanced Photoshop and Illustrator import functionality
The new features are, by and large, focused on the production of web/interactive content, and many of users out there who are engaged in full-scale animation production using Flash may wonder, what is the advantage of this new version. The animation process will no doubt be helped along by the better integration with graphics applications, the new pen tool and also the ability to export embedded movie clips to video, but aside from these new/improved features it is hard to see many animation studios rushing to upgrade to CS3.
On the other hand web content producers should be over the moon at the raft of new features that will make the delivery of media-rich and or data driven content a much fuller and more seamless experience than before.The most obvious new feature of Flash CS3 is its new interface. As mentioned before, the new look is overall a very positive experience that takes the already flexible and quite useful 'docking-and-panels' type of UI thing that Flash already had going, and extends it a little to make it even more space efficient and customizable. The toolbars can be reduced down in size quite a bit and I particularly like the fact that the Tools bar can be squeezed into a single column width block, which saves a bunch of horizontal space without really changing its utility at all.
The expanding/collapsing 'dock' is another prominent aspect of the new interface, and by and large it is also a positive experience, however I have found that having the Actions or Output panel accessible via the dock is a bad idea - those panels are best used nestled in with the stage or timeline (or on another screen if you have one), as the constant need to hide/show them can get tedious.
The configuration of the panels and dock is highly customizable and as before, Flash CS3 provides a way to save a 'Workspace' so that the UI can be changed to suit the requirements of many different types of project easily.
Still on the look and feel, one aspect of the UI that I wish were absent is the small fade-ins and out the whole interface does when the user switches to and from the application in the operating system. This seems a rather unnecessary piece of visual candy that can be frustrating. On my previous computer (A PowerBook G4 that otherwise ran the software perfectly well) this fade-in time was often a couple of seconds, which gets in the way terribly when you're trying to think fast. It would be nice if this feature was absent or at least controllable via preferences (although it should be noted that on my MacBook Pro this isn't really a problem anymore, but it's still kind of annoying).
Second on the list of noticeable new features, and probably the most important, is the integration between Flash, Illustrator and Photoshop. Adobe has graciously provided two excellent import tools for bringing Photoshop and Illustrator files onto the stage or into the library. Features include maintaining positioning, layering (including layer names) and even adjusting the stage size to the imported documents size if you wish.The best thing about the two importers is that they appear to work in a remarkably similar way, presenting an identical dialogue and sharing features like providing specific import options for different types of layers (image, text etc...), and the option to convert layers to keyframes. The Illustrator importer isn't 100% perfect but it's way better than the alternatives used in the past and it also has the good grace to provide an 'Incompatibility Report' when features from Illustrator cannot be imported.
For the programatically inclined (me!), Flash CS3 supports ActionScript 3.0, the first time this has happened in a release of Flash. ActionScript 3.0 is a stronger 'typed', more efficient language than ActionScript 2.0, largely thanks to the new ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2). This means that web applications can now expect to be a little further reaching in terms of functionality, and less prone to error. Another boon for the developer are the changes made to the Actions panel. More and more meaningful error messages at compile-time make for more robust code, and the Compilation Errors panel also supports the ability to double-click directly to the offending line of code.
The Actions panel is also sporting an interface that is closer in appearance and functionality to the Code window in Dreamweaver, with the ability to show/hide blocks of code, and some extra toolbar buttons for adding and removing comment blocks and such. One of my favourite features as far as coding goes is the appearance of a 'Target' selection box when editing an ActionScript class file. The ability to select a compilation target means that it is no longer necessary to switch back to the Flash Document that is loading your class in order to test your changes. It is simply a matter of choosing the target document and publishing away. Oh the speed of it all...
One thing that might be nice to see here is extending Flash's XML awareness. More and more people are using XML to control various aspects of their Flash based projects nowadays, it would be great to see some simple things like syntax highlighting, pretty printing and checking for well formed tags included directly into Flash when opening an XML file, but this is a minor concern as there are many applications around that can provide that functionality very cheaply, if not for free.
Another new feature is the ability to copy, import or export a motion tween as a chunk of XML that can be used elsewhere in the code, saved out to XML and imported later, or dropped into an AS3 class. Motion can also be copied as ActionScript, which essentially does the same thing but wraps the XML data in some extra code that makes it animate. This is a really interesting feature and whilst I'm yet to have found an overwhelming need for this kind of facility, it does certainly seem to have a fair amount of potential.
Adobe have also dramatically changed the way components are skinned, making it as simple as double-clicking on a component instance on the Stage to edit it's various states. This is a massive bonus compared to the old way of skinning components and should mean that creating nice looking applications no longer requires re-inventing the wheel. Fully functional custom-designed scrollbar anyone? I know I've skinned that little guy more than a couple of times with all kinds of confusing drama, but now it is dead easy.
It would be easy to say the Web Premium package is essentially updated and refreshed versions of Adobe's standard set of products with the added bonus that for the first time they have been able to include applications like Flash and Dreamweaver as a result of the Macromedia acquisition. In many ways that is what we have got here, but there is at least some effort on Adobe's part to create a suite of products that is not only a complimentary set of tools for designing and developing web content, but also a set of tools that seam together well.
This brings us to an interesting point to end the review; How well have Adobe done at incorporating the newly acquired applications in its stable with its old ones, and where exactly are Adobe heading with this product line?
Most of the recent changes to Flash revolve around producing interactive web based content (with many of the new features having to do with ActionScript, import/export of artwork, capturing motion as XML etc...) and not a lot has been done to re-enforce Flash's reputation as a powerful animation tool. As we head further and further into rich media and user-generated content presented on the internet, should we assume that Flash will begin to be biased towards facilitating this sort of content?
In my opinion that is exactly what we will see, with perhaps minor changes and bug fixes in terms of Flash's capabilities as an animation tool, but none of the more advanced feature requests floating around the web, such as After Effects style curves for fine control over tweened animations, and hierarchical linking of objects.
Whatever way it pans out, integration between applications will be the key to future success and, whilst nice Illustrator and Photoshop importers are an excellent addition to Flash, it is hard to shake the idea that, particularly in the case of Illustrator, this is something of a workaround.
What would be great, and hopefully something that is in the minds of those at Adobe, is a transparent relationship between Illustrator and Flash files - that is, opening a Illustrator file in Flash (as in 'File->Open', rather than 'File->Import') should yield all artwork in it's right place, layers preserved and all features supported. Similarly, the Flash drawing tools would ideally be identical to the Illustrator ones so that, in that case of projects with more modest requirements, design tasks could be completed entirely in Flash, or tweaks made to artwork produced in Illustrator with tools that are up to the job.
This transparent integration is something that is sorely missing from this release, and would undoubtedly be the most attractive feature to those engaged in web design, development or any other sort of emergent new-media type production as it would speed up the project workflow considerably when build time arrives.
Overall the Adobe® Creative Suite® 3 Web Premium package is a good step towards providing a seamless and efficient method of producing Web projects from design to delivery, but we may have to wait for a future version before we see the kind of tight and transparent integration that we thought was possible when Adobe brought Macromedia under its umbrella.
Whilst this release is not the be all and end all web development suites, the most exciting thing going on here is that it definitely has the potential to be that very thing, and by the looks of it Adobe are most certainly working towards that goal.