Adobe Creative Suite 2: initial thoughts

May 5, 2005 · Comments

While Eric is playing with Tiger, I’m enjoying my first look at Adobe Creative Suite 2.

Initial impressions:

* Installation was fast and easy. Activation took 10 seconds, if that much.
* On first glance, aside from the fancy edges on the palettes, not that much appears to have changed. Almost everything is exactly where you’d expect to find it if you’re already comfortable in CS applications. This is not a disappointment. It meant that I was able to take the annual report I’m currently working on, open it in InDesign CS2 and take advantage of the new features without losing productivity.
* I love the new Adobe Bridge. I can see that I’ll be in it more than the Finder.
* The new Version Cue is *fast* and so far, does a much better job. Thank goodness Adobe got rid of the default “web” folder that showed up in every project. You can shove GoLive down our throat as much as you want, doesn’t mean I’m going to use it.
* I use [Font Agent Pro](http://www.insidersoftware.com) and auto-activation of fonts seems much faster from InDesign CS2 than it was from InDesign CS.
* The new font menu in InDesign CS2 is great. You get the fonts listed as always, but now you see a little sample of the font. Helpful if you want to find a quick sans-serif font without going to the Glyph panel. Interesting approach to WYSIWYG menus. Illustrator still has the menus as in CS, where the font name itself is in the font. Consistent would be nice.
* Speak of which, too bad that Illustrator and Photoshop still don’t dock palettes to the side of the monitor the way InDesign does.
* I was also hoping to find a “rubber band” option for the pen tool in Illustrator CS2. Photoshop has it…when you’re using the pen tool you can see a preview of where the bezier path will go. Makes tracing much easier. I guess Adobe thought it wasn’t necessary thanks to the new Live Trace feature.
* I highly recommend going through the videos on the 4th CD to learn the ins and outs of the new features. I love [Total Training](http://www.totaltraining.com). I wish I could afford to purchase the whole package. As a matter of fact, I picked the extra hour of video training as my registration benefit. You can never learn too much.

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