playing with the upgrade

[egypturnash]

CS4 tryout.

Illustrator:
Aggh, how do I get it out of this stupid Windowsy one giant grey window? I fucking hate when programs try to do that. I can multitask. And why does it want to put every goddamn new document in a tab? Tabs work in web browsers but they suck in other tools.

Why were all the sample files made with no color profiling? Way to set a good example, Adobe.

Also, this is running really slow on my machine.

New tools: Oh, joy, now we have Flash's shitty paintbrush to go with Flash's shitty eraser. Huzzah!

All the docs seem to be viewed with the web browser. Which is a definite improvement from the horrible 'help viewer' apps Adobe kept trying to write. But on the other hand half of it lives out on the web which is going to be reeeeeally helpful when you've got the net turned off to eliminate distractions, or when it's down!

What the fuck is going on with resizing document windows? It seems to do it entirely itself instead of using a normal system window - which then results in it drawing the window widgets off the bottom of my screen when I let go, because I'm just getting a preview rectangle of the document area instead of the whole window. GOOD JOB GUYS, IT'S ALWAYS A GOOD IDEA TO ROLL YOUR OWN FUNCTIONALITY FOR CORE OS-PROVIDED FEATURES.

Also, still slow. I'm getting shitty, shitty response just scrawling with the pencil tool with music playing in the background.

Going down the new/improved features... Okay, having the transform handles based on a clipping mask rather than all the paths in it is nice. These little 'hyperlinks' in the appearance palette, however, are weird. Yay, now we have to maintain TWO copies of every control. I don't see this presenting any problems for the future, not at all.

Transparency in gradients, finally. The new control is really badly laid out in the gradient panel. I'm not sure about the new gradient handle tool; I can see it being useful but I also feel like it's In The Way when trying to edit one. The apple key seems to hide it but...

I'm still getting crappy response on the pencil tool. All jiggly and badly-smoothed. Ultimately this is going to be unusable no matter what; performance on my G4 is crap.

When I do have to switch to CS4 due to hardware upgrade, I'm going to reeeally detest the way the Pathfinder palette has swapped the meaning of holding 'alt' when pressing a button. I like it when the paths I'm doing boolean ops to remain editable, but I guess everyone else wants to bake it permanently by default. Feh. I can't find a prefs switch for this, either.

Aha, but there is an 'open documents in tabs' box to uncheck. Yay.

Okay, yeah, I'm sticking with AICS2. Yes, 2. G4 performance has just been abysmal ever since the version with a 'Doesn't Crash On Intel Machines!' bullet point on the box. There's no "must have" features here and a bunch of little curses for me. And drawing response as erratically ugly as Flash.

Other CS4 apps? Whatever. I don't really use Photoshop for more than a scanner driver anyway. It still insists on installing Bridge along with the suite, which I've never had a desire for - does anyone actually use that?

*uninstall all*

Comments

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

See, I like the tab idea, so that wouldn't bug me. The gradient transparency and the new transform handle location, those are awesome. The rest of this, though... *sigh* Something that's always bothered me is when any program decides to totally override a window manager's way of things. If the option is there, that's one thing, but I'm always annoyed as hell at any app which tells me that my OS sucks by providing its own interface.

If I'm running Windows (I am, but you already know I harbour zero resentment toward anyone else's system of choice, even if plenty toward my own, *grin*) give me a large box with document windows and make the window resizeable on all sides and corners and don't fucking try to 'skin' it. I picked my colour scheme for a reason, motherfuckers. If I'm running some other OS, match that system's way of things. Porting software isn't about forcing everyone else to conform, it's about giving them options, and that's doubly important when the software costs more than it would to buy a computer with that other system.

Thing is, I always come back to the same lament. I'd ditch Adobe's software in a second if any of the other options felt up to snuff.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the ability to actually control the squish of a radial fill is nice. I know how to manipulate it in older versions but it's a huge pain. But geeze, the whole thing's just sitting there in its own window routines that're a cheesy knock-off of the custom widgets for Apple's pro apps. And it wants to act like a Windows MDI program by default - AND to tab the document window, which is just crazy to me; that's two broken solutions to the fundamental problem of 'working in multiple documents'. At once. Madness.

It's okay to have all custom widgets if you're doing something really different; stuff like Sketchbook or Artrage can get away with it because they're moving towards a keyless, tablet UI. But something that presents normal windows should blend into the system. (Apple's Pro apps bug me for doing this, too.)

When I get around to upgrading to an Intel Mac and have to drop CS2 (since I am told it breaks with Leopard and/or Intel, I'm not sure which) I'm going to be taking a serious look at alternative vector programs again, because Adobe just keeps making these little UI choices that drive me nuts. There is even a part of me that wants to whip out XCode and start making my own.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Also I have this horrible suspicion that the faux-MDI default of the whole CS4 suite is, in part, due to Macs becoming more and more popular, and people who're used to how Windows behaves whining that Macs don't work that way. *sigh* So now all Adobe's apps want to pretend to be on Windows.

[jonaswins.livejournal.com]

Tabs? What the hell? X) I'm assuming that's part of the 'multiple artboards' feature I read about, which doesn't really seem necessary to me.

But transparency in gradients = total yay. :D I was surprised they hadn't implemented it earlier.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Nope, completely different feature. Flash had it first and now it seems all Adobe's tools have to have it: open a couple documents and you get one window. With tabs on the top. Like a web browser. Argh.

[jeliza]

Bridge is, sadly, essential to my personal and dayjob workflow (photography studio; lots and lots of files). (sigh) They also haven't bothered to debug it since its introduction, so now that camera resolutions have gone up it is crashy crashy crashy. I think they're not fixing it so we'll buy Lightroom.

Photoshop I still love, but in general, Adobe's QA and support suck so hard I'll jump ship in a minute if I find a decent alternative

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I just wanna know why they insist it has to come along with the rest of the suite; if you don't have a ton of files and have a decent way of ordering your directories, it's nothing more than a way for them to try to get you to hunt for stock imagery via their service. Which I guess explains why it's not a selectable option. Me, every time they force it on me, I open it up and poke at it to try and see if my needs have magically changed to fit this seemingly-esssential tool, then delete it.

'Lots of files' for me is the 80 or so AI files I generated over the course of a year's work on the Tarot deck.

[jeliza]

What's even more ironic is the stock service has been discontinued. It is the "replacement" for the in-application Image Browser of previous photoshops, at least in theory, and it does facilitate cross-application usage if you are integrating between, say, InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator a lot.

A typical 1-hour shoot for us generates 2-300 shots, a wedding can be up to 3000. So, yes, Bridge becomes essential. :(

CS4 has some great features -- but not enough to make it worth the price.

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

I use the Bridge all the time. I really like having it open so I don't have to remember what my files look like, which version I was thinking about, etc. Also it allows me to more easily move things off the desktop to the right folders. I suppose there might be some other programs out there that do the same sort of thing, but I really like it.

As for CS4, sounds like something I'll be avoiding as well. Thanks for the report. Your words mean a lot in this case.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

If you've got an Intel machine CS4 might be usable. For my aging G4, it glitches a lot when I do freehand tablet work. It's got a few nice little tweaks but nothing that feels like an awesome new must-have tool for me; I've refined my working method around Ai for most of a decade.

I feel like Bridge is this weird counterpart to iPhoto, which I also don't use. All these programs for filing art files visually. They just don't really click with me. I just make my AI documents in the folders I want them in.

(Interestingly, though, I let iTunes completely manage my music directories. That, I don't care about to the point of needing a mental map of the filesystem; my art files, on the other hand, need to be in a very particular way I've evolved over the years.)

[magpie-dragon.livejournal.com]

I just had a photo teacher completely swear by bridge for everything...atleast in CS3 you could rate things in folders and it was just nifty. I fail to see the nifty in any of that vaugeness (she also failed to point out anything else about it other than that it was cool just try it). I have never known anyone else who even used it.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I suspect it fits a certain style of working. Which I emphatically don't seem to have...

[doctorpinkerton.livejournal.com]

Well, this isn't QUITE the same as stubbornly using 12 year old software, but still, welcome to my world!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I think I am on my way towards that, given that if I was setting up a Flash animation studio I'd give serious thought to standardizing on Flash 5!

[doctorpinkerton.livejournal.com]

Whoa... really? 5 had pretty lousy sound support, right?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

No, 3 had shitty sound support. 4 added 'streaming' sounds, which are mostly synched to your frames; 5 did a complete UI revamp that was really lovely and usable, and 6 did another total UI revamp that sucked ass. The UI has remained pretty much the same ever since, with the occasional tweak into further annoyance...

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

I would really like a version of Flash with the usable interface from 5 and the feature set and high-performance AS3 scripting engine from 9. Then I'd like for Scaleform GFx to support AS3 so it's performance doesn't drag.

(Better solution: escape the user interface developer role I somehow got stuck in...)