This week Adobe gave a preview of the new Creative Suite 4 (CS4) which is due in October. One question I often get is whether a direct market designer should upgrade. They want to know whether the new features are worth the expense.
The “direct market” part is important since we traditionally don’t need lots of fancy features. It’s kind of like Word. For many years Word has been more than capable of handling your word processing needs. So the task for Microsoft is convincing you with each new version that there’s some new feature worth upgrading for.
To a degree, that’s Adobe’s dilemma as well. To their credit, each new CS4 product has at least one really neat new feature. But whether it’s enough to drop some serious money on is another matter.
It wasn’t very long ago at all that CS3 came out. And it suffered a bit from not initially playing nice in some areas with both Leopard and Vista operating systems.
This time, that shouldn’t be an issue… CS4 should work great with both operating systems right out of the box. But you really need to look at the list of new features for your favorite applications to see if an upgrade is worthwhile on release day.
This year, more than any other, I’ve been struck by how much I need to retain my ability to work with older versions of the Adobe titles. For example, I have one client who needs my files to be available in CS2 format. I create them in CS3, but I then have to save them as an INX file, reopen them in CS2 and save them as CS2 files. (Yes, I know… the client should be able to open the INX files in CS2, but it hasn’t worked like it’s supposed to.)
Thankfully, when I upgraded from CS2 to CS3, I was allowed to keep CS2 on my computer. And I expect that when I upgrade to CS4, I’m going to want to retain CS3. Also, you never know when some smaller print shops will get around to upgrading. So giving them files that include features their version of the software can’t handle is going to be a pain.
I say all this just as a caution not to jump into the CS4 pool immediately. It’s always tempting to get these new applications and start playing with the new features. But these days I tend to think it’s better to sit back and see what the “early adopters” have to say and decide objectively whether the new features are ones you’ll actually use as a direct market designer.
Personally, I see lots of great new features in Photoshop and InDesign (my two main tools), but I’m not seeing a lot that is going to significantly change the way I work. I’ll eventually upgrade, but I highly doubt I’ll be a “Day One” user.