The Adobe Creative Suite 5 launch was yesterday. Not the actual launch of the product but just a sneaky peek into the new features on offer. You can watch the Adobe Ambassadors video here:

http://cs5launch.adobe.com/?promoid=FDKBR

And I’ll also summarise some things that made me go “ooooOOOOOOoooo!”

ILLUSTRATOR CS5

Illustrator has some nice new features such as Variable Width Stroke. You can control the width of a stroke at any point along a path and when using dashed stroke you can align dashes to corners. Currently I’d create a custom brush and use that to create a thick to thin stroke, although this gives me very little control of the precise position of the width of stroke, so I like the sound of this new feature.

The new Bristle Brush allows you to choose from new real world style brushes, you can alter variables such as size, density, thickness and length and simulate life like blending – in vector! Brill!

An exciting addition is the Perspective Grids. You can dynamically move, scale, duplicate and transform objects whilst retaining the perspective! Cool.

FLASH CATALYST

A new software addition is Flash Catalyst. You can open any Illustrator/inDesign design  in FC where it can be transformed into interactive components without having to write any code. This will save loads of time when creating simple cd menus or interactive presentations as I won’t have to bother a developer to help and I can also leave my almost nonexistent code head at home! Super!

PHOTOSHOP CS5

There’s a new Mixer Brush which allows you to choose from various bristle styles and paint in a more real world natural way. I use Corel Painter a lot because of the extra brush features such as the blender brush. With this new Photoshop feature I imagine it’s closing the gap between the two.

Content Aware Fill – delete part of an image and intelligent cloning fills in the gap with what it predicts would be there! In the Adobe video sample it shows a horse in a fenced field. The horse was deleted and a fence, grass and trees fluidly filled in the gap! How? Magic!

Puppet Warp – create a wire mesh on a selected area which allows you to select points and rotate your object around those points. This pixel bending tool lets you create a more natural warp.

FLASH CS5

Now as we have developed numerous flash games and applications throughout the years, news that the new flash would allow us to export for cross platforms including iPhone was exciting, time saving news. However Apple has apparently decided to alter its iPhone developer licensing agreement to exclude Adobe applications! PAH!

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/04/09/fallout-from-apples-exclusion-of-flash-to-iphone-export-continues/