If you haven’t heard, Adobe announced the imminent relase of Creative Suite 3. Since I spend most of my time in Adobe Illustrator, obviously it’s the software package I am looking forward to most. To be honest I really haven’t dug into the fine details of all the new features in Illustrator CS3, and most of what I know I got from Mordy Golding’s video podcast on the new Illustrator CS3 features over at his Real World Illustrator blog. But there are a few I know about, and boy are they sounding cool. One, in particular, has been a recent pet peeve of mine that has finally been addressed.
The new color selection system looks awesome (and a bit daunting), and there are lots of cool new things coming our way. But man am I jonesing for the zooming anchor points! With all these new highfalutin’, high-resolution monitors out nowadays, man do those anchor point get small. Some days I think I spend half my time just trying to click on the one I want - without having to zoom in just to do so.
Well, Adobe has come to my rescue and Illustrator CS3 will have zooming/pop-up anchor points when you mouse over them! Yay!
I guess I am also pretty stoked about the customizable template library (ahem - “Document Profiles”), the improved screen redraw, and the “isolation mode” they stole from Flash. Oh, wait, they own Flash now. Isolation mode, for those unfamiliar, is a feature where grouped objects are set off from the rest of the artwork in a mystical transparent layer via double-clicking the grouped objects. You cna then edit as you wish, in isloation, without having to lock down other objects, layers etc. Man, this one might be better than the zooming anchor points…
I am also really curious as to the performance increases, especially on Intel machines, since they are now natively supporrting Intel chips, and from what I understand (I could be wrong) all the CS3 apps got rebuilt from the ground up, as opposed to earlier versions for OS X that we kind of duct-taped upgrades from the OS 9 versions. To be honest, CS1 runs pretty good on Intel machines with enough RAM. These new versions must just be incredible.
Wow, I just looked at the calendar - if the rumors are correct (or has this been confirmed?) CS3 will be available on April 20, 2007. Just checked Amazon’s listing for the Creative Suite CS3 Design Premium package, they are saying it releases & ships April 20. Only ten days away from the time of this post. Very, very awesome.
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Tags: Adobe, Adobe Illustrator, art, Creative Suite, illustrator, Mac, Mac OS X, OS X, software
CS3 sounding cool
I am looking for the measure tool plugin for Illustrator CS2. Can you help? Is it possible for you to email an attachment of this plugin as freeware if you have it? Thank you for your time.
Best regards,
Jay