Archive for the ‘Web & Graphic Design’ Category

Adobe Web Premium CS5 Review

July 27th, 2010 by David

Let me preface this review by saying that I’m a Flash developer & designer, and I’ve been using Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Illustrator for 10 years now. I also animate and photograph too, so I use just about everything in this package pretty thoroughly.

There are so many products in this suite that it wouldn’t make sense to talk about everything specifically, so I’ll just note some standout positives and negatives that I’ve encountered. I’m not going to comment on the differences between CS4 and CS5 because I skipped CS4 for a number of reasons, some of which were not entirely resolved in this upgrade either. Many in the industry feel like CS3 was the last “great release” by Adobe/Macromedia, so using CS3 as a benchmark works well for me. If you want an opinion on something specific just leave a comment and I’ll update the review.

Before getting into it, I would like to express a very specific concern and frustration that I have with this entire suite. Adobe is making a move to make all of its applications use a unique, proprietary Adobe interface, which although shiny and nice is neglecting a slew of standards and behaviors that people are used to on Windows or OSX. CS3 used windows and panels that were tied into the user’s operating system, so for example the scroll-bars in menus were the same ones you’d see in any other program. That means that they worked the same way, looked the same way, and felt the same way to click, roll your mouse wheel over, etc. CS4 and CS5 have moved away from this and in doing so caused a ton of headaches that you’ll soon learn about if you buy the suite.

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Posted in Articles, Flash Development, Web & Graphic Design, Web Development | 10 Comments »

Adobe UI and the Apocalypse

June 24th, 2010 by David

Today, in the first of what will surely be a highly successful and short-lived series of rants, I’d like to talk shop about our little friend monolithic over-lord Adobe.

Adobe, we depend on you and your software to make just about everything. From art to ads, porn to … more porn. UI designers are utterly dependent on Photoshop and Illustrator to work and work well so that we can make our own websites and games and software to build a prettier world.

So you’d think that a company that creates these tools would know a thing or two about good design itself. Or at least be in touch with its consumers. You’d hope so, right?

Then what happened?

I’m not going to pretend to be an omnipotent, stuffed-pants snooty designer, but I’d like to think I know a thing or two about usability in software. Mostly because I sit in front of a computer all day and all night and if something doesn’t work well then I’m the first person to suffer from it. And the direction the CS suite is going toward points to greater and greater suffering.

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Posted in Articles, Web & Graphic Design, Web Development | 2 Comments »