Creative Suite 2

[Cristen Gillespie]

I just bought CS2 for the Mac. Since I was nearly Adobe-bereft on the Mac, I figured this was a good time to save a bit and bought the Premium Suite. I've since read that you don't really lose all your individual licenses when you upgrade to the Suite if you later want to go back. Only the licenses to the apps you bought for the first time with the Suite are invalid for upgrading individually. So getting the Suite for Windows will make more sense now than my misunderstanding last round.

Anyway, I've only read the "introduction" -- can hardly call it a manual, and they don't<G>, and seen the movie and read up a bit on Version Cue in Help (ugly interface, but readable). I know that there will be things that don't work as expected, things that don't work as promised, and things that just plain don't work. And if it's operator error, I'm sure to rant about the lack of "intuitive" features. LOL

But at a cursory level, I'm pretty jazzed by the promise of the Suite. I think this is going to make a big difference in managing my large personal projects--family album and sister's dissertation. I thought Version Cue was mainly for multi-users, and it probably is, but at the lower level, it really holds a lot of promise for organization in single-user projects.

Since Macromedia refused to allow for an upgrade path from its academic software, I never upgraded Dreamweaver. Now that I see GoLive defaults to CSS, I'm glad I didn't bother. It might even be fun to make some of the family album into a browser-based (local) site for the family, complete with little iMovies and such. They all know how to use the web, even my sister who still doesn't know how to turn on the computer<G> None of them know Acrobat, so becoming fully interactive with it probably isn't as good for them as it is for me.

I don't think the Creative Suite is probably designed for photographers, unless they are publishing their memoirs and managing full websites, nor for artists who primarily use AI and/or PS to create art and don't need layout, pdf or web services. But for designers, it does look like the Creative Suite is at least on the right track, even if not yet perfect. It really looks like it's going to make it easier to keep files organized, easily view them, and to use each program for its strength without losing half of what you just created as soon as you switch to another program.

I thought I was against bringing out the Suite tout ensemble. But I am beginning to see why they are doing this and what the advantage to us will be as they get better about preserving cross-compatibility between the apps.