Posts Tagged ‘Adobe CS4’

Adobe’s Share My Screen feature

Friday, March 6th, 2009

Slowly but surely, I’m working Adobe CS4 into my workflow. I think I’ve mentioned before that for CS3 users, I don’t necessarily view CS4 as a “must have” upgrade. Certainly there are lots of useful new features, but if your finances are tight, I wouldn’t break the bank to get it.

That said, there are some new things in CS4 that designers will find valuable. One such feature is Share My Screen. This works in conjunction with Adobe’s ConnectNow feature which you can read all about here.

In a nutshell, you can go into a CS4 application, such as InDesign, and choose File | Share My Screen. This connects you to the ConnectNow site and provides you with a URL to give to other people so, via their browser, they can see what’s on your screen.

I did a quick test on my own, sharing my main monitor while watching what was happening in a browser window on my second monitor. (And I was happily surprised to see the ConnectNow app was aware I had two monitors and asked me which one I wanted to share.)

The whole thing was pretty slick. Whatever I was doing on my main monitor was showing up in the browser window.

There are actually a number of services for screen sharing, so it’s not like Adobe has come up with an original idea. But for us designers who spend most of our time in Adobe products, being able to launch this feature straight from the CS4 apps is convenient (and free, at least at this moment).

And while I didn’t confirm this myself, from what I read on one of Adobe’s blogs, the URL that ConnectNow provides to you to give to other people is always the same based on your Adobe account name. (And Adobe accounts are free.)

I probably don’t need to tell you how you could use this feature, but what the heck… you’re here now, right?

There have been times where I’ve been creating a simple website for a client and it gets to be a mild pain making changes, then uploading them for the client to see in a browser. Or zipping the files to e-mail so they could see the complete site offline. Far easier to share out your screen and collaborate with client live if time is tight.

Or maybe you’re wanting input from a number of people at once. There’s nothing worse than getting conflicting feedback from everyone involved and having to somehow incorporate everyone’s vision into the design. Perhaps it would be easier to get everyone together online and let them agree on changes while you incorporate them right there on the spot as they’re watching. If everyone thinks blue would be a better color than green, you could change it and they could all decide for themselves right on the spot.

Heck, even sharing out your screen with another designer can be useful if you’re trying to show them something that would take far too long to explain in an e-mail.

Again, it’s not that there’s anything new going on here with screen sharing. It’s just nice that the feature is so easy to use within the programs I’m already using every day.

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Adobe CS4: Should you upgrade?

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

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.

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