Elsa Wenzel CNET

Published: 23 Sep 2008

With Creative Suite 4, Adobe aims to make Flash easier for newcomers to learn and less of a hassle for veterans to use. Flash CS4 offers a fundamentally different approach to animation with object-based tweening.

In addition, the workspace is more elegant and options expand to work with the latest video formats and web applications. And as with each new release, added design tools enable creative types to create more complicated-looking animation more quickly.

The cost hasn't changed since Flash CS3: £489 (ex. VAT) or £139 (ex. VAT) to upgrade. It's a better deal when included within any of the bundled CS4 suites — except for Design Standard, which excludes Flash.

Adobe has reinvented the building blocks of Flash animation, so you can get started in two steps. No longer must you create a symbol, then manually apply and adjust keyframes and tweens; Adobe defines selected items as a symbol for you. It should be easier to control and tweak animation now that it applies to an object rather than to a Timeline keyframe. Right-click on an object, select Create Motion Tween, and the time span is created automatically.

Workspace adjustments include a vertical Properties panel. Also found across Adobe Creative Suite 4, a drop-down menu makes it easier to switch among workspaces, while tabs let you hop among open documents. And panels are simpler to resize, open and close. By default, the Timeline now lines up along the bottom of the Stage. Designers should like hot-text editing, also found in Photoshop and After Effects.

The new XFL file format is supposed to help print designers or motion artists using InDesign or After Effects to dip their toes in Flash, as exported XFL content can be used in any of these programs. With this XML-based format, you can extract assets from work done in Flash. Adobe aims to phase in XFL gradually, rather than forcing saved content by default in this convention.

Content is supposed to render more quickly than in CS3, although we found this hard to measure with the rough-draft code.

The Adobe Media Encoder enables Flash developers to create H.264 content for web videos that stream quickly even on a narrow pipeline. Dropping video within Flash content is possible using several steps. You can save an MPEG4, say, rather than an FLV file, encoded as tkH.264, without needing to re-encode the video.

The capability to author Adobe AIR content lets you create web-based applications, including those with transparent backgrounds, on your desktop.

New design tools include 3D Translation and 3D Rotation, Bones and Deco. With Bones, you can create inverse kinematics animation, ideal for, say, rotating the arm of a crane or Rube Goldberg contraption to set off a reaction among related mechanical parts. The Deco tool helps you create repetitive patterns, such as blinking stars in the sky, geometric wallpaper patterns or intricate designs of vines, without messing around with ActionScript.

A library of motion presets can get you started on more sophisticated animation that could be tricky to build from scratch.

We've been toying with beta rough-draft versions of buy cialis doctor online Adobe CS4 applications for several weeks. We'll update these first impressions with rated reviews once we check out the final code.

If the gold code proves to be stable, Flash CS4 looks far more attractive than CS3, largely for its less taxing approach to animation, and newcomers might want to skip CS3 altogether. That said, first-timers still might need to pay for a how-to book or a class to learn the application in depth.

Elsa Wenzel CNET

Published: 24 Sep 2008

Some veteran users of Adobe Creative Suite may find that version 4 offers few extraordinary updates to justify the high cost. However, designers and editors who lean on Dreamweaver for complex dynamic web sites will find plenty of tweaks for editing code more easily within its WSIWYG interface.

The look and feel of this application now matches those of other Creative Suite applications. You can jump among customisable workspaces from a pull-down menu, and we find the collapsible panels more elegant to place and resize.

Dreamweaver's new Code Navigator shows the CSS rules underlying layout elements. Just hover over a footer, for instance, and double-click on the text, and the navigator can take you to the code for formatting text styles. A new CSS mode in the Properties panel provides quick access to code.

Dreamweaver's new Live View shows stuff that's otherwise tricky to spot with JavaScript running in a browser, such as image rollovers. For instance, you can freeze a view of the rollover state while you're working with code in Dreamweaver.

There's more cooperation among the Creative Suite overall. For instance, you can drag and drop SWF files into Dreamweaver pages. With Photoshop Smart Objects, you can drop PSD files into web pages without losing track of source files.

To run Dreamweaver CS4 on a Windows computer, you'll need XP SP2 or Vista with a 1GHz or greater processor and 1GB or more of disk space available. buy cialis brand Mac users must have a PowerPC G5 or Intel-based machine running at least OS X version 10.4.11, with at least 512 MB of RAM and 1.8GB of free disk space. You'll also need a DVD drive and a 1,280 by 800 display with a 16-bit video card.

The £335 (ex. VAT) cost of Dreamweaver hasn't changed since CS3. Users of earlier versions can pay the £139 (ex. VAT) upgrade fee. We'll report back with a rated review once we check out the final code, which is due later in the autumn.

Lori Grunin CNET

Published: 25 Sep 2008

At last, Illustrator can handle multipage projects. That critical feature, which has been Illustrator's weak spot for generations, finally provides a reason for users of older versions to update to Illustrator CS4. True, there are some other very nice capabilities introduced in the latest iteration as well, but the simple ability to create the front and the back of a document in a single file should thrill legions of designers who've repeatedly thought about switching to CorelDraw in disgust.

Granted, the implementation is a bit odd; not bad, as far as I can tell, just odd. With CS3, Adobe introduced a crop tool that allowed you to define sections that could be individually printed or processed by Acrobat. With CS4, the company extends those crop areas to act as separate Artboards, and each Artboard is sort of treated like a page. The benefit of this architecture is that the Artboards can be any size, so you can mix a variety of page sizes and types within a single document. Each Artboard is numbered like a page, and if you delete an Artboard, Illustrator will renumber to maintain the sequence. You can create a document with a predefined number of Artboards, or create buy cialis 10mg them on the fly by simply creating a crop area.

If you actually use Illustrator for illustration, rather than page layout, you'll really like the Blob brush, which allows for more natural stroke blending. Rather than preserving each stroke as an individual path, it combines the strokes — or the erasures — in a single path. If gradients are your thing, the new interactive gradient widget makes creating and editing them a more streamlined process; plus it now supports transparency and elliptical gradients. It does bear saying that CorelDraw has also had these capabilities for several versions, though.

There are also a variety of subtle enhancements to program operation, including the ability to apply graphic styles additively. A few changes to the panels include a modification of the Appearance panel's operation — it's now an attribute editor, allowing you to toggle visibility or adjust parameters like opacity, blend mode, and fill colour — and the addition of a basic Separations preview panel for pre-preflighting colour. Adobe has improved (some might say 'fixed') Isolation mode, where you drill down into objects to selectively edit, to keep from enraging you if you deleted the only object in the isolation set. Live preview on clipping masks makes working with them a bit easier, and the Smart Guides now have little readouts that display basics like object dimensions.

Finally, there's beefed-up integration with Kuler, Adobe's social network for colour palettes, and improvement in Live Color operation. Illustrator can pull palettes directly from the Kuler site into the swatches panel as a colour group.

Althoough it looks like Illustrator CS4 will be a must-have upgrade, don't feel bad if you've got some lingering annoyance that it should have had these must-have features a couple versions ago.

Wow, even Google is jumping on the Web site bandwagon! Google Sites is a new service that allows you to create your very own Web site. Plus, if you have your own domain, it lets you put your site on there too. Let's check it out, shall we?!

To get started with Google Sites, head on over to http://sites.google.com. branded cialis drugstore If you have a Google account, you’ll be asked to log in. (If you don't have an account, you'll need to create one before you can start using Google Sites).

When you're ready, click on Create Site.

You’ll then be taken to a form, so go ahead and enter in the information required. At this point, you can choose a title for your site as well. Also, just for your information, the URL is where you will access your site. If you’re hosting it on Google’s domain, it’ll look something like this: http://sites.google.com/site/namegoeshere.

When you’re all done, click on Create Site again.

You’ll then be taken to the site creator. To create a new page, click on Create New Page. To edit your site, click on Edit Page.

I know it's a little hard to see, but the page editor looks something like this:

Lastly, to save your site, click on Save. And you’re done. Happy Google Web site making!

Have you ever been searching for something with a search engine and you just get too many results to handle? For example, today, I searched for "how to password protect a flash drive" and I got 401,000 results. I know one of those Web sites probably has what I'm looking for, but opening each one individually takes way too long!

So, because of that, I started looking for a better way to search. After awhile, I found a really cool add on for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. It's called the ChunkIt Toolbar and here's how it works.

First, install ChunkIt and you'll see the toolbar come up after you restart your Web browser. The toolbar will be at the top of your screen.

After it's installed, type what you're looking for into the ChunkIt search box. Then just click on the Chunk button.

Now, here's the best part! The ChunkIt Toolbar will perform your search with your favorite search engine. It will provide you with the regular search results on the right, but on the left, it will show you "chunks" of the actual information from the search results. Here's a sample picture of what it looks like:

The words are kind of small in the picture, but you can see what I mean. The actual content from the search results appear on the left hand side. All you need to do is browse through the results until you find what you're looking for. When you click on the "chunk" you want, you'll be taken to it on the actual Web page it came from.

I think this add on is really cool and I know I'll use it daily. If you ever find yourself buried brand cialis cheap order in search results, the ChunkIt Toolbar can help you too!

You can download the ChunkIt Toolbar for Internet Explorer right here. Or, if you're a Firefox user, download it here. Either way, enjoy!