Photoshop CS4 and Dreamweaver CS4 - Wow

intellix · 13 Nov 2008 at 22:53

Hey guys, has anyone else tried these two 'new' versions of Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Had a crack at them today and firstly im blown away by how much better Photoshop is with the integrated 3d abilities. Before when it came to making graphics I would never have attempted to learn 3d modeling and integrating them into Photoshop for graphic design but with CS4 I think all my images are going to have some sort of 3d element.

Dreamweaver seems to be able to render CSS code now. From first learning CSS a year or so ago it was quite annoying to find that Dreamweaver rendered pages with it so bad :S

Any comments? The whole interface is so much better now as well.

gord · 14 Nov 2008 at 09:54

I havnt tried it and doubt my work would pay for the upgrade at this time.

The 3d abilities in PS though, are they the same as the illustrator ones from CS3?

Participant · 14 Nov 2008 at 10:39

Flash CS4 also has the 3D functionality built-in. It's bullseye as far as I'm concerned across the board for CS4.

PMWD · 14 Nov 2008 at 13:03

I went to one of their conferences yesterday and it all looked pretty good. Tbh it's hard to get excited about Dreamweaver, there's loads of shortcut coding in there as you'd expect but probably wouldn't use if you really know what you're doing, but yeah Flash has really gone up a gear, I'm gonna get some good books for AS 3.0 as it's a medium that's being adopted in some very interesting places.

The Device Central program I haven't seen before, and although anyone who has ever dev'd for mobile phones will tell you, you can get different results purely based on minor software revisions, I think it'd be be very useful to be able to see how sites and programs react on different devices. I liked that in Dreamweaver, where you can just click an option to show the stylesheet created for an alternative device or printer etc in action.

I like the way each program is capable of much closer collaboration, that should make life a hell of a lot easier when moving artwork into different mediums.

intellix · 14 Nov 2008 at 23:40

One of the features I was pretty excited about with Dreamweaver was the Live View, which apparently should let you see how the website would render... It does an ok job but it doesnt really reflect what you'd see in any browser as it wasnt the same as what was displayed in either IE7 or FF, so whats the point in that?

I'm not quite sure of the reason it was implemented the way it was but surely shouldnt there be a liveview for different browsing engines such as IE7, FF and Safari? would be nice!

Made some fantastic logos in Photoshop... I just wish that the pen tool in Illustrator was the same as it is in Photoshop

Which pen tool do you guys prefer? to me... the pen tool in photoshop lets you precisely pen where you want to whereas the one in illustrator seems to be based more on a guess of where you want lines to appear, any thoughts?

Draeger · 15 Nov 2008 at 11:09

Does anyone using CS4 know if embedding Flash within Dreamweaver is now done differently compared to previous incarnations of CS?.

They were apparently going to move over to using Swfobject as the new standardised way to embed Flash instead of the rather messy and ineffective way DW does it at the moment.

Wondering if they have changed the way DW does this or if they have simply said "Yeah - swfobject is what we recommend to use". :cool:

Draeger · 18 Nov 2008 at 19:25

Well, I took the plunge and downloaded CS4 to try it.

Decided I was going to install it on a spare system I have that the missus uses. It meets the hardware requirements easily.

But.....I just tried installing CS4 and after it ran through it's system check, it informed me that I needed SP1 installed on Vista before it would consider installing CS4.

So I sat and updated for what seemed like ages and eventually Vista proudly informed me that I was up to date and there were no updates available.

But it's not downloaded and installed SP1!!!!. :confused:

I seem to recall this happening before with my laptop. I've no idea how to "force" it to download and install SP1 so I can eventually try CS4.

/toddles off to the "Windows & Other Software" section of the forums.......

Oh aye, and also - to those who have downloaded CS4 Trial and had a go, did you install it on a system that CS3 was already installed on?.

mr.sly · 18 Nov 2008 at 19:42

Sometimes it won't download SP1 if there's going to be a driver conflict. But if you've used SP1 on the laptop before it should be okay. You can grab it from one of these links...

Service Pack 1 x86

Service Pack 1 x64

suarve · 18 Nov 2008 at 19:47

Draeger said:
Does anyone using CS4 know if embedding Flash within Dreamweaver is now done differently compared to previous incarnations of CS?.

They were apparently going to move over to using Swfobject as the new standardised way to embed Flash instead of the rather messy and ineffective way DW does it at the moment.

Wondering if they have changed the way DW does this or if they have simply said "Yeah - swfobject is what we recommend to use".

Why use DW to embed flash? You can copy the generic code the HTML preview of your flash project (which obv uses swjobject).

Draeger · 18 Nov 2008 at 19:57

mr.sly said:
Sometimes it won't download SP1 if there's going to be a driver conflict. But if you've used SP1 on the laptop before it should be okay. You can grab it from one of these links...

Service Pack 1 x86

Service Pack 1 x64

Thanks for the links m8, appreciate it.

suarve said:
Why use DW to embed flash? You can copy the generic code the HTML preview of your flash project (which obv uses swjobject).

I know, yeah.

What I'm wondering is if Adobe have changed the way DW's incarnation in CS4 embeds Flash via its split or design view from the GUI?.

Is it still doing it the old ( and very clunky ) DW CS3 way or have they altered the coding of the program so it embeds it differently?.

I know its easier just to use a generator like the AIR based one but was just curious if DW now does it differently from within the program itself. :cool:

intellix · 19 Nov 2008 at 21:05

Draeger said:
Does anyone using CS4 know if embedding Flash within Dreamweaver is now done differently compared to previous incarnations of CS?.

They were apparently going to move over to using Swfobject as the new standardised way to embed Flash instead of the rather messy and ineffective way DW does it at the moment.

Wondering if they have changed the way DW does this or if they have simply said "Yeah - swfobject is what we recommend to use".

27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="605" height="280" id="FlashID" title="test">
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="banner.swf" width="605" height="280">
</object>
<script type="text/javascript">

Part of the code, if that is what you were wondering... from CS4 dreamweaver

Draeger · 21 Nov 2008 at 13:24

intellix said:
<object classid="clsid27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="605" height="280" id="FlashID" title="test">
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="banner.swf" width="605" height="280">
</object>
<script type="text/javascript">

Part of the code, if that is what you were wondering... from CS4 dreamweaver

I assume that was generated by simply "Right Clicking" withing DW and selecting "Insert Flash"?.

Looks like it's still doing it the old way.

Here's the code that the SWFObject 2.1 AIR generator conjures up :-

Code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>
		<script type="text/javascript">
			var flashvars = {};
			var params = {};
			var attributes = {};
			attributes.id = "flash1";
			swfobject.embedSWF("welcome.swf", "myAlternativeContent", "400", "400", "9.0.0", "expressInstall.swf", flashvars, params, attributes);
		</script>
	</head>
	<body>
		<div id="myAlternativeContent">
			<a href="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer">
				<img src="http://www.adobe.com/images/shared/download_buttons/get_flash_player.gif" alt="Get Adobe Flash player" />
			</a>
		</div>

Much better way of doing it and as always with SWFObject, it allows you to have areas of Flash content be search engineable ( is that a word??!!! ) by Google. :cool:

The AIR generator is simplicity in itself to use. I've not got any additional Flashvars in there, but it's very customisable by using more vars if required. :cool: