Publishing, Today.
When Adobe first released its monolithic Creative Suite 5, we were at the SA preview where the abilities of the still-in-preview new apps where very ably demonstrated by knowledgeable (if at time somewhat overzealous and PR-ey) content-creation experts in a variety of fields. And these demos wowed us, although playing with the software hands-on later in fact impressed us even more. Anyway, we did a comprehensive round up of the most impressive bits for our uses here in our second digital edition, and I’m not going to go back into all the things that led us to conclude that CS 5 was a digital publishing game changer now – you’re welcome to refresh your memory by reading the original feature.
Instead we’re going to focus on the new additions in CS 5.5, which Adobe SA very kindly sent a copy around for us to fully evaluate. And as far as we can tell, there’s quite literally only one negative, and it’s an issue which has plagued Adobe for some time but which they quite honestly couldn’t care less about – and with fair reason.
Let me get this out of the way right now. It is, of course, price. You see normally I’d expect an incremental update such as this one to be a free upgrade for CS5 users, especially considering the hefty sum you’d have shelled out for the full package already! Adobe do offer an upgrade special, which retails at around R5500, which at least is a fifth the full price of CS5.5 Master Collection, ringing the bell at just over R26 000 as a new standalone purchase.
Of course, it’s a suite designed for publishing professionals, not cash-strapped home-based “Grandma’s Digital Publishing” operations. Professionals who make a darned good living out of doing what they do. And this suite enables them to continue doing it faster, better, and more jaw-droppingly gorgeous than ever before. So it really has to (and normally is) be considered an investment in future revenue-generating rather than an outright cost.
But the question still remains, are the 5.5 updates worth the extra money, or should you as many publishers do just stick to your “old” CS5 package and wait until 6 arrives? After all many of the apps (PhotoShop for instance) haven’t changed at all, not even their version numbers are different! So let’s see just what 5.5 offers then to justify the outlay…
At first it might not seem all that sensible really, because the additions don’t make for a particularly long list, and most of them in our fast-changing world of technology look at first glance like stuff which should have been included in the first place. This is a fair enough and pretty valid statement, but considering the incredible pace of the explosion of mobile devices and tablets as the content-consumption platforms of choice all of a sudden, you do have to concede that when 5 came out the tech and tools for these platforms were still in their infancy. And Adobe, being proper enterprise-class software, wasn’t about to include potentially unstable emerging trends into their premium app suite without it being proven that these were a necessity moving forward.
Now however it’s just a given that content needs to be developed to work properly through a wide variety of channels. Android and iOS-based smartphones and tablets being the most critical of course. Without these content outlets today, you’re simply a dinosaur publisher just waiting to be turned into sticky sweet crude oil. Period. So naturally enough, that’s where a lot of the 5.5 updates have been focussed.
DreamWeaver in particular has been massively facelifted, and now includes native support for CSS3 as well as HTML5. The Live View mode and Multi Screen Preview panels have also been enhanced, with the latter allowing you to test across multiple platforms all at once including Android, an invaluable feature given that you can new develop native Android and iOS apps in the environment.
Further helping you to get properly impressive visuals on these mobile devices are comprehensive upgrades to Flash in CS 5.5. It begins with content scaling, so your Flash-based visuals can be viewed on a wide variety of different-resolution displays without breaking. It sounds like a simple touch yes, but it’s a critical one as the lack of content scaling has been an issue plaguing Flash-based mobile application developers since these myriad devices became such an integral pillar of our content-consuming ways. Rasterising Symbols for better performance on mobile devices is another process which has been streamlined in the new Flash, while code snippets have been added to easily capitalise on essential new hardware capabilities like multi-touch displays, accelerometers and geolocational services through mobile and AIR apps.
If you’re developing Web real estate and mobile is a key part of your strategy, which of course it absolutely has to be right now if you hope to remain relevant, these updates are just about worth the extra outlay by themselves. You can develop and test across all the important platforms all in the same environment, and make your content really pop not just on one or another of these platforms but all of them without breaking how it might display on another.
Adobe’s page-layout industry standard InDesign also has new mobile tricks up its sleeve for CS5.5, most notably enhanced native capacity for designing and publishing mobile content and e-book publishing standards. Again content scaling has been applied in InDesign to keep embedded graphics and other visual elements the right size regardless of what device the reader is accessing the content from.
Images and video aren’t exactly my forte, but I can tell you that the one new addition to PhotoShop which is absolutely brilliant are the three iPad apps Lava, Eazel and Nav, which allow you to push content out to the tablet and actually allow touch screen manipulation of the content in this virtual PhotoShop Extended environment. This is just the type of classy thing iPads have been waiting for to really demonstrate just how engaging a device they can actually be.
After Effects meanwhile gains a built-in stabiliser function for shaky-cam footage called the Warp Stabiliser. It’s just more forward-thinking stuff here, with Adobe recognising that more and more of the world’s most-watched content is not the big-budget, slick and professionally-produced broadcasts but the stuff that someone near a protest area grabs off his 3.2-Mpixel cellphone camera, and it’s exactly this kind of footage that Warp Stabiliser is particularly adept at cleaning up and making useable.
Finally, when it comes time for putting all your clips together, Premiere Pro can now be used using the same keyboard shortcuts pros migrating from Final Cut and Media Composer will be familiar with, the Media Encoder engine has gone 64-bit to increase performance, and there’s tighter integration with Adobe Audition, which is now also available in Mac versions of the CS suite.
Those, then, are the bells, whistles, and tweaks in a nutshell, and for what at first looked just like a nip and tuck kind of point release, when you add them all up quickly like this you realise that there’s a lot. A lot of under-the-skin work has been done to transform Adobe CS5 into a Web savvy, forward-thinking and completely cutting-edge software package which isn’t simply the industry norm by inertia, but by being the best.
Each new module has been well thought out and executed and obviously young publishers with a bright vision of the future have been involved in the development process here, which is nice. Sure, the less forgiving may still be maintaining that really, as a global giant Adobe should have been so cutting edge in the first place with CS5, or at least should have provided the CS5.5 package for free to owners of the older version.
That’s perhaps another argument entirely then, because the long and short of it is, is the update worth the R5500 upgrade price? If you have any interest or requirement to be publishing in the multi-windowed content environment we’re working in today, CS5.5 is going to be worth every cent. If you aren’t at least planning on exploring this online marketplace, well frankly you really shouldn’t be in publishing anymore, but in a retirement home somewhere. And it’s just that simple.
-Russell Bennett
