Yep… just as I’m beginning to feel like I have mastered all the new stuff in CS3, Adobe has come along with CS4. I learned a long time ago not to be a big ol’ whiny butt about shelling out big bucks for an Adobe upgrade. Having the latest and greatest is part of what makes this career exciting and you can’t have that without buying new computers and software. Upgrading at every opportunity isn’t for everybody—I usually fall into the every-other-version category of upgraders myself—but when it comes to the Creative Suite and Mac OSX upgrades, I’m the born sucker Adobe and Apple thrives on.
My adventure with CS4 began with a frustrating trip to the Adobe website. The new online store is unnecessarily flashy (pun intended) and it steadfastly refused my attempts to login while stubbornly insisting that my account already existed. A phone call to Adobe’s support line, which is obviously outsourced these days, revealed that their latest site upgrade has resulted in a few glitches in their user databases and my account needed some behind the scenes rejiggering. Two hours later, I gladly parted with an absurd amount of money and headed anxiously for the download page.
...where I discovered no less than nine downloads which would require a combined 23 hours to download. Now all experienced Mac owners know that downloads almost always take less time than the “time remaining” indicator displays, but 23 hours?! I decided to postpone my new software bliss and made a trip to the office on Saturday to queue up the mass of downloads.
Monday morning I went to work early in anticipation of experiencing geek nirvana. Unfortunately, the download had failed sometime over the weekend and I was back to square one. This time, I chose to download only the essential application installer and Tuesday morning I was able to successfully install CS4. So far I like what I see. There was a lot of hand wringing over the new windowing system in Photoshop, but I’ve found it to be very useful and give it a bigs thumbs up.
I’ll add more to this post as I find time to experiment, so check back!
Update
So far my experiences with CS4 have been in the “oh cool” category, not the “oh-my-freaking-god-how-did-I-ever-live-without-this!!!” category. Overall CS4 seems to be a huge collection of little tweaks… things like auto guides that REALLY work in Indesign, type setting controls in Illustrator that seem finished instead of half ass, documents opening in tabbed windows, the save for web dialog box in Photoshop… you have to use it to understand the glory of how this little irritating beast has been polished. Good stuff…