Saturday, May 28, 2005

Buy a new Suite from Adobe

Creative Suite 2. I have seen the demo!

I took a trip to London to see the Adobe sales team in demo mode. I take my hat off to these hard working ‘product evangelists’ (must be the best job title around a the moment!). Many of these speakers, who were there to persuade us to the latest upgrade, did their best to get some enthusiasm from the audience. Jokes and questions were just met with stoney silence.

Still, this attendee was impressed with the enhancements to the range of software that now comprises the whole suite.

furthermore...

A very impressive addition to InDesign, is the 'object styles'. Similar to 'paragraph' and 'character' styles, except, attributes for any kind of object. These styles do not appear to get used in the XML output. Certainly the changes to GoLive are worth playing with. Adobe seem to have tightened up the CSS support although I fear that many users will create bloated code, by over-use of the 'drag and drop' functionality. We were given a good look at the 'Adobe Bridge' software that links the applications together. Photoshop no longer has its own 'file browser'. An impressive set of presentations was given by publishing representatives during the 'New Thinking - Publishing' session. It seems that more and more magazine and book publishers are moving to InDesign. BBC Worldwide, Conde Naste, Dorling Kindersley, Penguin Books, and we gained insights into the way the transition worked for the 'Geographic Magazine' (this is the journal of the Royal Geographic Society). Now I need to go and check my cash flow before I place an order .......