CS4 First Look

October 29th, 2008 | Posted in Blog

For the next few weeks, leading up to Adobe MAX 2008 in November, I’m going to take a look at some of the new features in Adobe Creative Suite 4. I had planned to get an earlier start, but I had a few unexpected install glitches. After installing CS4 on my year-old laptop, I discovered that my video card doesn’t quite have the horsepower necessary for some of Photoshop’s new OpenGL-enhanced features. Photoshop also seemed very sluggish, but a laptop computer is not exactly the best place to be running high-end graphics software either, so that was to be expected. I tried the suite on my work computer with better results, but for some reason, an odd graphics glitch initially prevented my shapes, movieclips, and text from displaying in an ActionScript 3.0 document. ActionScript 2.0 documents were unaffected. Although I’m not entirely sure what caused the issue, the apparent configuration or software conflict was eliminated after I did a reinstall of the OS and CS4, and now Flash is displaying properly and feels quite peppy.

So now that my new toys are working, I’ll begin posting a short note about a new feature or two every few days. With a closer look, perhaps I can determine if CS4 really is a worthwhile upgrade. More later!