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.

For example, in Flash CS5, if you try to scroll down the Properties panel with your mouse wheel, you’ll find that not only does the panel scroll, but all of the possible fields inside it (like transformations, filters, etc.) are also mouse-wheel sensitive and will change values if you happen to have your cursor over them while you are mouse-wheel-scrolling. Certain buttons you’d expect to click are also mouse-wheel sensitive which makes no sense to me from a UI design standpoint. And other conveniences, such as opening a font-listing and typing the font name to get more specific results no longer works.

In terms of UI you never want to force people to have to learn new ways of doing extremely common tasks, especially when they are using the product for work. It’s OK for websites and games where interactivity is part of the creative experience, but in a situation in which consistency means efficiency it’s very important to maintain standards. Adding additional features is peachy as long as you don’t take away what has become ingrained in the user’s workflow.

And now that that’s out of the way, here we go :)

Photoshop CS5:

The most important thing that Photoshop does now is that it provides native 64-bit support. Which means your heaps of RAM and fancy new computer will be better utilized by the program. In some benchmarks I’ve seen, the program runs roughly 1.5-2x faster than CS4 on a 64-bit system, and I can verify subjectively that it does feel snappier. Amidst all the upgrades in interface, filters, and new features, the most essential thing for designers and photographers is that the program runs better and can handle larger files. So that is a nice thing to see.

There has been a big deal made about Photoshop’s new Content-Aware filters, and I’ve played with these a bit without being terribly impressed. Content-aware fill will certainly help in many situations but it is not the magic touch it’s been made out to be. In my experimental case of removing a crowd next to a wall it looked very similar to an amateur Patch tool job. Removing elements from a sky were much cleaner… so it really is a case by case basis.

I’ve been really impressed with the upgraded Quick Selection tool. I’ve always been a big proponent of using the pen tool to mask out objects, but I was really sold with the accuracy of Quick Selection. You draw (with whatever “brush” size you want) around the edges of your object and Photoshop figures out a selection accordingly. You can tweak the selection after it’s been made in multiple ways including an upgraded Refine Edge menu which does a really good job on hair and complex selections. For better or for worse, Photoshop actually “learns” what kind of object you’re trying to cut out and applies changes to multiple parts of the selection as you refine your cut-out. I’ve had this both hurt and help but I’d say overall it’s been a useful feature.

The new, highly-touted Corel Painter rip-off brushes seem like a nice idea but end up as more of a gimmick. Unless of course I’m wrong, but I played with these for a little while and wasn’t all that impressed. There aren’t many different brushes to choose from and they are not very customizable, so unless there’s a tool or resource out there to get more of them (and see natural features such as bleeding, drips, etc.) then I think this feature can be declared “in progress”.

There’s also a slew of small features that are nice to have, like Puppet Warp, rule of thirds automatic guides for cropping, lens distortion correction, etc., but you could live without them.

I am very disappointed with Adobe’s decision to keep all of the Layer Adjustment options in one contextual panel, for several reasons. First, the icons are horribly ugly and do not properly indicate what function they serve. Whoever they hired to make the primary toolbar icons was not the same person to design this panel. Icons are supposed to be quicker for the eye to pick up on than reading a listing of options, but these are confusing and mushy and do the opposite. Second, as in other places in this application and others, Adobe is overly relying on contextual panels for important features and this is negatively impacting the workflow. When you click an icon or choose a layer adjustment to modify, you have to work within a tiny space to tweak, say, Hue/Saturation, Levels, or Curves. There is no longer a pop-up, so you are limited to the size of the Adjustments panel… which is also not adjustable. You may also lose this panel (as people do with their messy layouts), and there is no feature to bring it forward when you are trying to work with a specific adjustment. Adobe, please bring back pop-ups!

… and whoever decided that canvas flicking was a worthwhile default feature should be slapped. When negotiating a large file that may reduce your computer’s response time it is far too easy to accidentally activate flicking. Just because it’s on the iPhone doesn’t mean it should be in production software.

Illustrator CS5

I’m going to keep this section short because I am not a die-hard Illustrator user. I have specific purposes for the program, and those involve making shapes, vectorizing images, and bringing them into Photoshop or Flash. I have not explored the new features so I don’t feel like I’d informed enough to give my opinion on them. However, I can say that integration with Flash has improved and that is something nice to see.

Flash CS5

There is so much to say with Flash that I’m worried I’ll frighten people with the length of my review. I will be as concise as possible :)

Motion Editor & Simplified Tweening

I will be straight-forward with this and say that I hate this tool, as well as the new Tweening engine. Not only is it buggy (in many cases I’ve had animations occur at different times from when the keyframes said they would) but it’s a huge step backwards from its closest resemblance, After Effects. You can tell that the idea behind the motion editor and the new tweening engine was to bring Flash closer to Adobe’s other animation software, but this is not the way to do it. You can only tween one layer at a time and the options are not presented in a logical way. If Adobe was serious about improving animation in Flash all they’d have to do is look to their After Effects teams to bring over the same interface.

3D Transformations

Allowing for 3D transformations in Flash is a great idea but the execution is flawed for several reasons. First, using any 3D transformation bumps up your file size 23k. This means that people doing banner or file-size sensitive work are basically out of luck. Second, there are inconsistencies between how 3D works on the timeline and how it works in Actionscript. On the timeline there is only one perspective (i.e. vanishing point, level of distortion, etc.), but in Actionscript you can have as many as you want. It’s a strange limitation. Third, editing 3D objects forces you to view them in a flat perspective, so it’s a little difficult to tell how your changes will translate once the object is skewed. Fourth, (and this is nit-picking), the inheritance structure of how 3D works in Actionscript objects is weird and not as efficient as it could have been.

TLF Text

Again, the idea of having text with a lot of adjustable features was a nice idea but there’s been an outcry of irritation from developers about its execution from a technical standpoint. Also, using any TLF text adds about 45k to your file size so banner people are once again left in the dust.

Improved Font Embedding

You no longer have to embed specific fonts for each dynamic and input text field. Adobe’s moved all of that to a single embed pop-up that allows you to manage all font embeds from a single place. Thank heavens.

Deco Tool

I’m not even allowed to use this because I prefer Object-Level Undo. Any feature that locks you out because of your Undo preferences is already in trouble. But for the sake of this review I changed my preferences, drew a line, and flowers came out. So if you’re looking for a modern replacement for KidPix tools you are in luck.

IK Bones Tool

I was incredibly excited about the IK Bones/Joint tool when I was watching conferences about CS4. However, once it actually came out, animators were disappointed and frustrated to find that it was rather limited. One of the biggest issues it has is that you can’t swap out symbols as you’re animating… so if you wanted to animate an arm with a hand that grabs an object you would be unable to swap the hand symbols from open to “grabbing” so without a bunch of hacky techniques. But for simple purposes, such as strings, chains, squishy objects, trees, etc., you may find the IK Bones tool to be helpful.

UI Changes

Flash suffers from similar UI issues as Photoshop, to a degree that is perhaps even more annoying. With its push toward contextual panels, Adobe moved all important object properties into one panel. This is the updated Properties panel, which CS3 users would remember being horizontal and succinct. Properties is now vertical, and is the only place where you can access Character or Paragraph options, as well as 3D Position, Color Effect, Display (blending modes), and Filters. As I mentioned earlier, the decision to force the user to use contextual panels for important object attributes is a huge mistake. The order and sizes of these options is not customizable and you will often find yourself collapsing and expanding boxes just to reach the ones pushed off-screen. The filters pane is generally squished to about an inch and is not expandable without collapsing some other panel like Character. Again this would have been acceptable if you could open alternate Character or Filter panels but Adobe has not given us that option.

Application Bugs

I have run into very annoying bugs in CS5, most of which involve the new tweening engine and 3D. They involve animation not occurring when keyframes indicate it should and frames not properly rendering their contents. Hopefully this will be fixed soon by Adobe.

Upgraded Actionscript Panel

Although no Flash Builder, FDT or Flash Develop, the IDE Actionscript panel is steadily improving. I was pleasantly surprised to see it automatically import classes and its code completion is smarter than ever.

New AS3 Features

Actionscript is growing and new features are always welcome. High five.

Flash Builder CS5

This tool has a high learning curve and has UI issues typical of an open source project led by programmers (icons are small and the interface is very complex), but it is a fantastic piece of software and will make your life much easier if you work on large AS projects. Debugging in Flash Builder is a dream, and if you’ve never experienced real-time error checking or refactoring you’re missing out. Once you learn to develop outside the IDE and adjust to more of a flex workflow there really is no looking back.

Dreamweaver CS5

Progress made in Dreamweaver has been a steady evolution and perhaps makes the best use of Adobe’s UI upgrades. The new version of Dreamweaver is stable, has updated all of its code libraries (now supporting HTML 5) and now offers code completion and real-time error checking, which I find to be very helpful. The fact that Dreamweaver uses SWFObject now instead of AC_RunActiveContent is a pleasant change, even if it’s “SWFObject_Modified”. Close enough for government work.

Fireworks CS5

I admittedly don’t use fireworks. It is meant to be a time-saving step between Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver, which automates the process of making roll-overs and simple interactivity and provides some basic design tools. Personally, I find software made to automate common tasks a bit too limited in what it lets you do, so I prefer to bite the bullet and do things the hard way. Just as Freehand disappeared and some of its features made their way into Illustrator, I look at Fireworks as a redundant tool and can very realistically see it scrapped for parts.

Bridge CS5

I have trouble understanding why Adobe cannot get Bridge to work right. The idea behind the Bridge is incredibly useful and I would love to use it if the UI was not so terribly ugly and confused. Bridge works with all types of media, including images, vectors, and RAW photos. The RAW support is great. The vector support is great. Type support would be a nice addition, but it’s fine without it. However, navigating through your PC is virtually impossible using the bridge Folder View. Windows 7 has moved towards a very meta-y structure, with the new libraries feature as a big part of how you organize your files. The fact that you can’t save a library as a favorite in Bridge is very frustrating.

Also, I have been baffled by why Adobe hasn’t made icons scale to your “zoom” setting or just ignore it completely. If you set thumbnails to appear at the maximum size (which takes up the entire screen) and you scroll through a folder containing sub-folders or files that won’t generate thumbnails, their icons will still be tiny and yet occupy a box that takes up the entire screen. And you have to click on that tiny icon to do anything… the empty space around it is completely wasted. So either make the space useful or get rid of it, guys!

Media Encoder CS5

This is definitely a step up from previous incarnations of Flash Video Encoder. It doesn’t have a huge variety of output formats and only encodes video, but at least Adobe has provided options similar to Sorenson Squeeze. You get FLV / F4V / MP4 with On2 VP6 encoding for your FLV’s. Quality and file size seem to be decent from what I’ve seen. Plus it looks like Steam, so you can imagine you’re going to play Half Life once the progress bar completes.

On the downside, there are (once again) interface issues, the most annoying of which involve video resizing. When “Resize Video” is checked, make sure the frame width and height match the original video before you try a proportional resize. For whatever reason, it uses whatever previous numbers you had in there instead of the actual proportions of the video. Also be careful about pressing ENTER when working in a pop-up dialogue, because Adobe’s changed the behavior from what you may expect.

Adobe Media Player

For a media player that’s catered specifically to professionals, I am frustrated (but not surprised) that this thing fails to provide you with any useful information about the video you’re viewing. Meta data is not difficult to acquire or display and I may just be speaking for myself but finding FLV video dimensions and information is a ridiculously obnoxious chore for no particular reason and very few if any FLV players provide you with it. From a developer perspective, finding information about a particular FLV is the single most important reason to even use an FLV player (besides making sure the video works at all). So this only does 50% of the job I need it to.

As a media viewer, Media Player works just fine and the Adobe product video hub isn’t a bad idea. If you open the program without trying to view a video you are given a recent showcase of product and industry related videos to watch via Adobe TV. You can sort by product and by category and there’s a pretty decent collection of videos to choose from.

Conclusion

Anyway, I complain a lot but this is still the best software on the market for graphic designers, programmers, and photographers. I do hope that Adobe continues to fix the issues with their suites and considers giving their developers more time to iron everything out. I still prefer Macromedia’s approach to interfaces and time will tell if Adobe learns their lesson or will eventually screw everything up.

So the bottom line:

Should you upgrade from CS4 to CS5? Definitely, since you wasted your money on CS4 anyway. The 64-bit support and fixing numerous CS4 issues make it a worthy purchase.

Should you upgrade from CS3 to CS5? This depends on whether or not the features in CS5 are things you need. 64-bit support for large Photoshop files is very helpful but I still vouch for CS3 interfaces. Dreamweaver is an easy sell because of new error-checking and HTML 5 support, but Flash and Photoshop are on conditional bases. If you’re a programmer, Flash Builder and new AS3 features make the upgrade a must.

Should you upgrade from CS2 to CS5? Why are you still using CS2? Yes, upgrade.

I hope this review was helpful! Let me know if you have any specific questions.

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.

Creative Suite CS3 was a wonderful collection of software. CS4 was Adobe’s Windows Vista. People avoided it like the plague. Instead of adding features that users wanted, Adobe rushed out a buggy release that included broken tools and a new interface built on proprietary UI. It was slow, irritating to use, and seen by many as simply something shiny to try and sell a new release. With such negative push-back, you’d think that Adobe would have focused its efforts on streamlining the interface and making the overall experience more elegant and functional.

Too bad they tried to fix a dozen pieces of software in about a year and ignored many of the pleas of their beta testers.

Anyway, let’s begin the bitching. Here’s Flash CS5.

Click on a text field and this is what you get. Try to find where you'd edit your filters.

Poorly mimicking After Effects - But wait a minute, Adobe owns AE... why not use the same interface?

This pane is the single most important window in the interface. It tells you everything you need to know about any object you click on. That seems like a nice feature… have a context-sensitive menu that will reduce the clutter on your screen and only show you what you want.

What if your monitor is much wider than it is tall (like most monitors as we trend toward HDTV proportions) and this menu can only be displayed vertically? Then you’re stuck in a world of constant collapsing menus and scrolling. It seems like the scroll wheel has been given a significant amount of attention in the Flash UI because not only is it required to navigate through the tiny scrolling boxes (that you cannot resize), but every single numeric field has also been mouse-wheel enabled. Which means that if you’re scrolling through a tiny box filled with mouse-wheel enabled fields, chances are you’re going to change just about every value before you actually make it down to the bottom of the list.

There’s also no way to break the individual panels out of the properties pane and many of them can only be accessed from within it. So if you wanted to edit Filters, for example, you have no choice but to click each individual object, collapse all of its other properties, then scroll to the bottom of the pane and hope that your filters box isn’t only 30 pixels tall.

Let’s talk about contextual panels for a moment here.

The beautiful Adjustment Layers panel.

Adjustment Layers Panel when a layer is clicked.

Adobe seems obsessed with the idea of making every panel as contextual as possible. Encapsulate all functionality into the smallest space possible to avoid clutter and “clean up” the interface. There are a few simple and major things wrong with that idea.

First, reducing the square footage that your tools take up is comparable to shoving everything in a drawer as opposed to using a peg-board. With a drawer, everything is nice and hidden for when your mother or interior design students come over, but if you actually need to use something, you are going to be digging around for a while. No matter how well you organize your drawer, it will still take a minimum of several steps to grab any tool you may need.

Compare this to a peg board. At first glance, the board may appear chaotic, random, and complicated. But its layout has purpose. Everything was placed where it was needed, as needed, with no waste and complete flexibility. Muscle memory is able to select a tool in the dark without much effort at all. It may not be the most compact and clean solution, but it is unquestionably the quickest.

In a professional environment what would you prefer?

Flash Font Embedding Panel. No resizing allowed?

Swatch selection. No zooming options. You have to guess what those bitmap blobs and gradients are.

To make things worse, Adobe is now forcing users to do sensitive settings manipulations within these tiny contextual boxes. For precision work you want to be given as much control as possible, and shrinking the tools does just the opposite. Plus with no pop-up adjustment dialogs, information you want is no longer being presented on the surface where you’ll always see it. You have to select what you want, then dig through all of your menus to find where it appeared.

But at least Adobe animated the interface.

Yes sir, not only are we given excessively contextually sensitive menus, scrolling boxes that we can’t read and values that change accidentally at will, but Adobe spent untold man-hours making an interface completely detached from the OS. One that is clunky and shiny and lacks the years of ergonomics and good design practices that Apple and Microsoft have built their companies on. But doing so has allowed them to animate the collapsing and expanding boxes that you now have to click on all day. And has given them “flick functionality” for flicking your Photoshop canvas to and fro when you least want to. It’s just like an iPod except this time there’s no reason at all to want to flick anything. And when you hit zoom in and out you can toggle a nicely tweened zoom animation to make resizing less painfully slow.

One can see why these choices were made at a certain level. A new interface will look shinier and tempt customers to buy the latest and greatest version of the software. Slick animations and “ultra modern features” like the flick will keep the software feeling modern. But that’s not what professionals want and that’s not what professionals need in software that determines their livelihood. All of this contextual convenience would be lapped up if the ability to view panels regardless of context still existed as an option. Allowing for multiple ways of reaching an objective is the heart of creativity, is it not? Simple users will use simple options. Advanced users need to be able to spread their wings. Up-front simplicity is only a sin if the software does not cater to those who are capable of a complex interface. The CS suite will undoubtedly gain a larger feature set over time but if the interface remains clunky these features will be too painful to use properly.

Adobe, take a cue from the people who actually use your software. There’s an entire planet of designers and developers who know a thing or two about what they need and how to achieve it. Opening an ear could keep you from eventually becoming irrelevant.