Simon Meek

So, the next version of the Adobe Creative Suite (4) will be “unveiled” on September the 23rd. Having seen the new Fireworks beta earlier in the year, I’m feeling distinctly like not bothering this time around. In the past, I’ve tended to skip alternate versions of Photoshop or the Creative Suite, on the basis that it’s not that important to my work to be bang up to date. For the last couple of revisions though, I have upgraded each time (mostly because I had to write a book about Photoshop CS3).

Here are my predictions:

1) Integration. Everything will work better together. Seamless drag and drop between applications. Except when you really want it to.

2) A must-have new feature in Photoshop that will make your digital photography workflow immeasurably better.

3) You still won’t be able to mix and match application bundles, and the UK pricing will be outrageous in comparison to the dollar price.

4) Spiffy new packaging. No longer using “Aquo” as the default cross-media demo project, which has almost become a sub-brand of Adobe.

5) John Nack will rave about it like a corporate puppet while appearing to maintain a reasonable “everyman” image.

Or maybe I’m jaded and old. We wait with baited breath Adobe.

This week sees the launch of The Wonderland Project’s first album, The History of Science and How to Mend a Broken Heart.

It’s been a long time in the making, but it’s finally ready. I picked up the CDs yesterday from the pressers (SQUEAL) and it’s going out this week.

For more on the album, including how to get a copy, head on over to the The Wonderland Project website!

A List Apart are running their annual survey for those of us working in the web industry, which, if we all take it, might provide some decent insight into those working in the industry.

Go to it:

http://alistapart.com/articles/survey2008

After a somewhat involved phone call with Scott (a design journalist), I find myself quoted on the Design Council website. The Design Council exist, among other things, to promote design to UK businesses.

It’s a piece about finding and working with designers, and my quote concerns the premise that there’s a tipping point at which a business realises that design is something that can actually help their business achieve its goals, rather than something that “creatives” do to torment them and empty their bank accounts. I’d go so far as to say that only once a business understands this are they ever likely to get anything useful from a designer.

Read the whole “How to agree budgets and costs” article on the Design Council site.

There’s a great interview with the legendary photographer Don McCullin over at BBC Radio 3. You can read it here, and If you’re in the UK, you’ll be able to listen to the original too:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/mccullin_transcript.shtml

It’s well worth a read; the man comes across as humble, and troubled by the images in his head after years of exposure to the horrifying scenes he photographed.

Here’s an interesting post regarding the new Adobe CS4 interface from John Nack at Adobe. For those that don’t know, John’s the Senior Product Manager for Photoshop.

The post relates to the issues about the new interface that I was discussing in the Fireworks CS4 beta review, published a couple of days ago. Essentially John’s bigging up the new “full screen” approach of Fireworks CS4, as regards Photoshop. He calls it the “app pane”. It’s always interesting to hear what John has to say, since he always seems like a very reasonable guy.

Every time I read the specs of a new version of Fireworks, I think, “that’s it, Photoshop is dead for web design, look at what this thing can do”. Then I use it, and I find the little things so unbearable, I never get around to trying out the big stuff. Indeed, in a recent ELATED newsletter, I was forced to backtrack from singing the praises of Fireworks CS3, and admit that I’d never moved to it from Photoshop, as I’d promised I would only a couple of months before.

So, will history repeat itself with this new beta version of Fireworks CS4, as released by Adobe Labs only a couple of days ago? Again, I’m looking at the features - improved styles, CSS and Flex export among others - and I’m thinking “if this works it’ll transform the way I do things”. We’ve been here before, and I’ve learned that without some fundamental reform of the way Fireworks interacts with users, I’m not shifting, however many bells and whistles it has.

You may wish to download the beta, which you can do at http://labs.adobe.com

Bugbears

Here’s a list of my Fireworks pet hates, some of which which I freely admit are derived from my long-standing use of Photoshop:

1) Interface: In CS3, only a mother could love it

2) Text handling: Terrible

3) Clipping masks: Non-existent

4) Layers palette: Barely functional. How hard can it be to disable a mask by Shift-clicking on it, and otherwise standardise interface functionality between Fireworks and Photoshop?

The new interface.

One much-needed tweak has taken place. Fireworks sports a nice new shiny coat of paint in the form of a new interface:

Fireworks CS4 Beta Interface

It looks nice enough, but after you play with it for a bit, you realise that really, everything’s still much as it was - the interface tweak is really only skin-deep. Palettes are roughly where you expect them, and the basic way Fireworks approaches user interaction hasn’t changed much.

For me, the Fireworks UI (User Interface) has always felt clunky, and the way you have to approach things hasn’t really changed. Obviously, for seasoned users this is great, as there’s no interruption in workflow, but I can’t help feeling that there needs to be a change in basic task-managment to push Fireworks forward and drive take-up amongst web designers, who mostly still use Photoshop.

A plus point is that the interface is faster than CS3, where I often found myself waiting for the interface to catch up, which is really pretty unforgivable in what purports to be a pro app.

One interesting question regarding the new interface elements is whether the other Adobe apps will follow suit. Adobe seem to to be creating an interface which is neither mac nor Windows, but rather their own, unique approach. Tools in the title bar? What are they playing at? In the end I think this is relatively unimportant so long as the apps work well, both individually and as a suite. I do think that whatever they come up with for CS4 should be the end of it for a couple of revisions, and that Adobe should then instead concentrate on features and fixes.

Text handling

One of my greatest bugbears with CS3 is that when you paste in text from another app, it retains the formatting of the original app, rather than using the style of the text area you’re pasting into. In practice this means that if you do a layout using dummy text and then want to paste new text into text areas, you have to reformat the whole lot. Maddening.

In the CS4 beta, things are slightly improved. If pasting from a text editor (in my case TextEdit on the mac), the Fireworks text formatting is honoured. The same from Word. If pasting from Photoshop, you retain the formatting from the Photoshop document. Good enough! That’s one thing to cross off the list.

Font rendering is still pretty iffy. Take the following grab, for example:

Fireworks CS4 Beta (Top) vs Photoshop CS3 (Bottom) text rendering

This is a mixed text area, containing two different type treatments. The top text is Arial Bold at 20px, and the lower text is Arial Regular at 12px. As you can see the rendering is, at best, poor. By comparison, Photoshop renders the text much more nicely.

One of the more interesting features of Fireworks is its ability to style text using the Styles palette. Essentially you get a text element looking the way you want it, and then you can create a style based on that which you can apply to any other text element. It’s great, but slightly hobbled by not being able to apply separate styles to different areas of type in the same text area. That means all your headings in a layout have to be separate from the body text, for instance. I regret to say that CS4 is as irritating as ever in this respect.

Lastly, you still can’t type the name of the font you want when in the font list to jump to that font. This is simply broken in CS3, and still is in CS4.

Clipping masks

I use clipping masks all the time in Photoshop. The basic idea is that you can mask off multiple layers using a single layer, simply by option-clicking between the two layers in the Layers palette. I use it all the time, for example by masking multiple blended photos to fit a header area. Fireworks CS3 doesn’t support this, at all, and neither does CS4 by the look of it. Instead we still have the laborious process of using the masking shape on each layer that we want to mask, to produce, what is in effect, something like Photoshop’s vector mask system. Want to make the mask 2px wider in Fireworks? Bad luck; you’ll be making the change on every single layer.

The Layers palette

Here I freely admit that Photoshop has affected my thinking. I am, after all, the co-author of the Photoshop CS3 Layers Bible, but the layers palette in Fireworks is simply broken in many ways. In CS3, for instance, if you shift-click to select multiple layers, it selects a random set of layers for you rather than the ones you wanted.

I know, I know, in FW it’s not a layer, it’s an object, but it’s in the layers palette, so for me, as a Photoshop user, it’s a layer. In CS4, the shift-click behaviour simply selects.. nothing. Actually, clicking on a “layer” other than the currently selected one does nothing either. So right now, you simply don’t appear to be able to use the layers palette to select an object/layer/thing. You have to hope they’ll fix this in the final version, so we’ll maybe give them the benefit of the doubt.

Generally I simply want the Layers palette in FW to be a bit more functional. Too much to ask?

After the storm

Right, that’s my major hitlist done. How did we do? Well, we sort of have a new interface, but it behaves in the same way as the old one, and we can now paste in text from text editors and have it take on the format of the current text in Fireworks. Everything else is as broken as ever, and in some cases more so.

Let’s give them some benefit of doubt. It is a beta, and as such is subject to change before it comes out for real, but I can’t help feeling that a lot of things that matter to me won’t change at all between now and the final release.

In the next article, I’ll be looking at some of the fun new features, starting with the HTML/CSS export functions..

Scott and I have created a new service, based on our activities as The Wonderland Project. Wonderland Sound & Music will provide bespoke musical compositions to the design industry, specifically targeting those making “experience” websites.

Here’s the blurb:

“Wonderland Sound & Music can create bespoke compositions of music, sonic idents or soundscapes for a range of applications and environments, including websites, exhibition installations and multimedia presentations.”

Go to: Wonderland Sound & Music

Watching the Nets

Originally uploaded by simonmeek

This was a photo taken in the old town of Cochin, India. It shows the Chinese fishing nets that are one of the defining sights of the city. This whole area is alive with people just hanging out and buying and selling fish.

So, a very interesting trip, for many reasons. It was great just to go and meet the people building the Glasnost software and put faces to names, and to see some of the actual code. The developers at Digital Mesh are a refreshing change from the brand you tend to get in the UK. It may seem harsh, but in my experience developers here tend towards the surly prima donna end of the market, whereas the Digital Mesh crew are helpful, engaged and genuinely want to do great work.

I did get to sit down and check out the Flex code in the production environment, which gave me a much better idea about what can be done from a design perspective using stylesheets, and what’s likely to take a lot of coding time. This is very helpful in planning changes to the software, and gives me a much better understanding of why it can take awhile to lose 2px of padding on every button.

Away from work, the hotel was great, with wifi in the rooms, and the food everywhere we went was fantastic - a real education in what indian food can be. We even got to go on a boat trip into the backwaters of Kerala on a day off!

So, a great experience, and a special mention to Ravi and Roshan for looking after us so well.