poking at updates dubiously
Mar. 21st, 2009 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashPlaying with CS4 because the free transform tool in CS3 is broken for perspective distorts on meshes, which is how I do ultra-quick perspective (the '3D transform' tools suck, because their interface is seperate from the main edit window, and besides it's completely accurate perspective instead of cartoony eyeballed perspective.). Let's go down the "What's New" list in the help and see what sucks!
ENRICHED WORKSPACE TOOLS
Multiple artboards in your documents Okay, kinda nice. Maybe. Dunno. Does weird confusing things when bringing in old files with crop marks.
Tabbed document windows and Document Arrangement panel Eeeeewwwww.
Application bar and workspace switcher EEEEWWW. If I want Windows I know where to find it.
Practical smart guides I am finding the measurement pop-ups really. fucking. annoying.
Quick, easy, and obvious key object alignment Okay, this sounds useful.
NEW DRAWING AND COLOR TOOLS
Blob Brush tool for merging paths Works JUST like the brush in Flash - almost totally uneditable once you've laid it down. Eeeew.
Expanded Gradients panel and tool Meh. Really visually noisy. Nice to be able to finally do elliptical fills without tons of insane hacky gyrations, though. Luckily you can hide the noisy new on-object gradient UI - alt-apple-G.
Transparency in gradients About fucking time. I will find it moderately useful, and more importantly I will never have to explain the opacity mask-based workarounds for gradient transparency to a newbie ever again.
Separations Preview panel I guess this is useful if you do heavy prepress stuff and need to be sure you don't have five paths drawn in a spot color instead of a cmyk mix or something.
IMPROVED ACCESS TO CORE FUNCTIONALITY
Clipping masks with clear simplified appearance and access Kind of a nice tweak. I am going to get stuck in "Isolation mode" by accident and curse a ton at some point, though.
In-panel Appearance editing Cute but meh. Why do we need a whole second set of controls to have bugs in?
Enriched Graphic Styles panel Whatever, I honestly almost never use styles.
ENHANCED INTEGRATION AT EXPORT
Support for Flex extensions I have no idea what this is for. Skinning Flash apps? Whatever.
Multiple artboard export support 'We want multiple pages!' cried ex-Freehanders for years. 'No', said Adobe, until CS4, when they did this and said 'This is like multiple pages only better'. I have no idea if it will be or not; I have never felt a need for a multi-page AI file. Also why is this its own bullet point instead of more text beneath 'Multiple artboards in your documents'?
NOT MENTIONED IN THE WHAT'S NEW
We made the UI uglier again! Seriously, why do I keep trying to resize an art window against the bottom of my screen and have it render with the bottom widgets halfway off-screen? And can I get rid of these damn collapse buttons on everything? And why is the gradient panel soooo huuuuuge? Overall eeeewwww.
We changed the default actions of the Pathfinder! What it does when pressing a button with the alt key down or not has been swapped. No pref to change it back. Gonna hate this. Ew.
You don't need help! The old annoying Adobe help app is gone. Yay? No; hitting help brings me to a page on Adobe's site that is not actually the Illustrator manual; I had to click around a bit and finally find a fucking PDF of what belongs in a help file formatted for the OS that I stored next to the application so I can check the help when I'm offline.
Color Guide panel ...gets a big "whatever" from me. It is a clever bit of programming but I grew a color sense back in 2003 or thereabouts. And it is ignorant of global swatch magic to boot.
Also, no matter how many times I change it, AI refuses to open up a fresh document showing the phase of the moon in the bottom bar instead of useless info like the Version Cue status.
So. 16 things they felt worth bullet-pointing, plus the stuff they didn't mention.
Eww: 6
Meh: 9
Yay(?): 2
Also back around CS 2/3 they started ignoring whatever window size you'd saved the profile documents with and opening them fullscreen. BENEATH the palettes. Which means that every time I do a new document I have a hit of annoyance as I snarl, hit tab, and resize the window and move it out from under the toolbar. This has not been fixed.
Also it crashes when I quit! Huzzah!
So my reason for using CS3 was completely and entirely "older versions barf on my new Mac" and my reason for using CS4 is nothing more than "they fixed a bug they introduced in CS3". Hey. Wait a second. I'm still using 13.0.0 and it seems there is a 13.0.2 update; maybe it'll fix that bug. If I can get it to recognize my copy of AICS3. Which I cannot because I changed its name from "Adobe®™ Illustrator®™ CS3®™" or whatever the default was and moved it into a subdirectory for graphics tools. Rargh. Luckily work has an installation that took the defaults so I can email myself the path. Foo.
Every time I upgrade Illustrator it's like this. I always end up wanting to do a survey of the competing vector apps out there and see if anything can do the certain esoteric set of features I rely on, without being a huge shambling beast whose release cycle is now driven by Marketing.
Thinking I should stick with CS3 until I finish chapter 1 of Absinthe anyway. I should be at the drawing board finishing out the pencils, not bitching about Adobe.
ENRICHED WORKSPACE TOOLS
Multiple artboards in your documents Okay, kinda nice. Maybe. Dunno. Does weird confusing things when bringing in old files with crop marks.
Tabbed document windows and Document Arrangement panel Eeeeewwwww.
Application bar and workspace switcher EEEEWWW. If I want Windows I know where to find it.
Practical smart guides I am finding the measurement pop-ups really. fucking. annoying.
Quick, easy, and obvious key object alignment Okay, this sounds useful.
NEW DRAWING AND COLOR TOOLS
Blob Brush tool for merging paths Works JUST like the brush in Flash - almost totally uneditable once you've laid it down. Eeeew.
Expanded Gradients panel and tool Meh. Really visually noisy. Nice to be able to finally do elliptical fills without tons of insane hacky gyrations, though. Luckily you can hide the noisy new on-object gradient UI - alt-apple-G.
Transparency in gradients About fucking time. I will find it moderately useful, and more importantly I will never have to explain the opacity mask-based workarounds for gradient transparency to a newbie ever again.
Separations Preview panel I guess this is useful if you do heavy prepress stuff and need to be sure you don't have five paths drawn in a spot color instead of a cmyk mix or something.
IMPROVED ACCESS TO CORE FUNCTIONALITY
Clipping masks with clear simplified appearance and access Kind of a nice tweak. I am going to get stuck in "Isolation mode" by accident and curse a ton at some point, though.
In-panel Appearance editing Cute but meh. Why do we need a whole second set of controls to have bugs in?
Enriched Graphic Styles panel Whatever, I honestly almost never use styles.
ENHANCED INTEGRATION AT EXPORT
Support for Flex extensions I have no idea what this is for. Skinning Flash apps? Whatever.
Multiple artboard export support 'We want multiple pages!' cried ex-Freehanders for years. 'No', said Adobe, until CS4, when they did this and said 'This is like multiple pages only better'. I have no idea if it will be or not; I have never felt a need for a multi-page AI file. Also why is this its own bullet point instead of more text beneath 'Multiple artboards in your documents'?
NOT MENTIONED IN THE WHAT'S NEW
We made the UI uglier again! Seriously, why do I keep trying to resize an art window against the bottom of my screen and have it render with the bottom widgets halfway off-screen? And can I get rid of these damn collapse buttons on everything? And why is the gradient panel soooo huuuuuge? Overall eeeewwww.
We changed the default actions of the Pathfinder! What it does when pressing a button with the alt key down or not has been swapped. No pref to change it back. Gonna hate this. Ew.
You don't need help! The old annoying Adobe help app is gone. Yay? No; hitting help brings me to a page on Adobe's site that is not actually the Illustrator manual; I had to click around a bit and finally find a fucking PDF of what belongs in a help file formatted for the OS that I stored next to the application so I can check the help when I'm offline.
Color Guide panel ...gets a big "whatever" from me. It is a clever bit of programming but I grew a color sense back in 2003 or thereabouts. And it is ignorant of global swatch magic to boot.
Also, no matter how many times I change it, AI refuses to open up a fresh document showing the phase of the moon in the bottom bar instead of useless info like the Version Cue status.
So. 16 things they felt worth bullet-pointing, plus the stuff they didn't mention.
Eww: 6
Meh: 9
Yay(?): 2
Also back around CS 2/3 they started ignoring whatever window size you'd saved the profile documents with and opening them fullscreen. BENEATH the palettes. Which means that every time I do a new document I have a hit of annoyance as I snarl, hit tab, and resize the window and move it out from under the toolbar. This has not been fixed.
Also it crashes when I quit! Huzzah!
So my reason for using CS3 was completely and entirely "older versions barf on my new Mac" and my reason for using CS4 is nothing more than "they fixed a bug they introduced in CS3". Hey. Wait a second. I'm still using 13.0.0 and it seems there is a 13.0.2 update; maybe it'll fix that bug. If I can get it to recognize my copy of AICS3. Which I cannot because I changed its name from "Adobe®™ Illustrator®™ CS3®™" or whatever the default was and moved it into a subdirectory for graphics tools. Rargh. Luckily work has an installation that took the defaults so I can email myself the path. Foo.
Every time I upgrade Illustrator it's like this. I always end up wanting to do a survey of the competing vector apps out there and see if anything can do the certain esoteric set of features I rely on, without being a huge shambling beast whose release cycle is now driven by Marketing.
Thinking I should stick with CS3 until I finish chapter 1 of Absinthe anyway. I should be at the drawing board finishing out the pencils, not bitching about Adobe.