As the dust settles after Monday’s much anticipated online launch of Adobe’s latest version of it’s creative suite, CS5, it’s left us here wondering just what all the fuss has been about. The live webcast itself was a pretty bizarre event, which thanks in part to leaks  like this YouTube video, created quite a buzz on Twitter. The actual presentation however was more teasing than illuminating, with 5 minutes segments being given by a series of increasingly off the wall Adobe ‘evangelists’, who were nearly in a frenzy over CS5′s “wicked-cool capabilities”.
They did of course unveil a few cool new features, like the much discussed Photoshop Content-Aware FIll, which if it is as effective as the examples seen so far promises to make editing photos a real breeze.

There’s also some new tools for helping people develop IPhone apps in Flash, a feature that was pre-empted by Apple’s announcement a couple of weeks ago that they were banning the use of Flash for developing it’s apps, which could lead to an outright war between the two companies that designer’s across the world rely on most.
We’re less impressed with the features so far announced for Illustrator CS5, variable width strokes seem like a bit of a gimmick. Of more interest is that they’ve added functionality for reordering art boards, making Illustrator a much more viable program for layout design.

Fireworks CS5 however might be the answer to our prayers, with Adobe promising 900+ bug fixes on the notoriously patchy CS4. We can only hope they’ve also put some effort into integrating it properly into the rest of the Creative Suite.
So will we at Soak be switching over to CS5? Well not immediately, as it’s always best to wait a few months while any issues are ironed out and it’s going to be expensive, $1,400 for the Creative Suite. But we’re definitely anticipating designers and developers putting CS5 through it’s paces in the weeks ahead and looking forward to pushing the boundaries of what we can do when we decide to upgrade.

Remember creatives, CS5 is still just a tool, albeit a really, really powerful one.

Tags: Adobe, CS5, design