#FF00AA

I couldn’t find a single page listing all the improvements, so here it goes, app by app (that I care about).

Photoshop: Everybody already knew about content-aware fill, but puppet warp looks extra-fun. (Like everything that uses the new content-aware algorithms, it’s not gonna be enough, by itself, for professional work on photos, but it’s going to be a huge time-saver for everyone.) And I can’t wait to see if the new magical selection is finally the real thing — just like CS4’s new selection tools were supposed to be, and CS3’s (or CS2’s? not sure) Extract filter before it. Someday they’ll give us something that really just works.

Illustrator: Looks like they’re taking a few hints from Flash to simplify vector drawing and compositing, which is great. (“Draw inside” was an amazing revolution when Macromedia introduced it in Flash, like, twenty years ago.) But the most important thing here will be “Align to Pixel Grid”… if it’s also in Photoshop’s vector layers — and I’d bet that will not be the case until CS6.

InDesign: Nothing major, but multiple page sizes in a single document is going to be useful for a project I’m currently thinking about. And I’m quite curious (conceptually, not for practical purposes, of course) about the ability to export to Flash.

Flash: No, of course I don’t care. I’m just curious. Ooh, elaborate text controls with flowing text boxes — I would have been so excited about that, five years ago.

Dreamweaver: Come on, it’s called intellectual curiosity! Besides, if the WordPress / Joomla / Drupal integration really works as you would want it to (there isn’t enough of a description to confirm that), it could be a selling point all by itself.

For that matter, BrowserLab could also be a selling point. It makes a lot of sense for Adobe to offer its own service for previewing your site in different browsers, and it looks like they did it rather well — love the “onion skin” view. (Even though, as sites are more and more interactive, those quick and easy solutions are less and less appropriate for real-world development; nothing can replace testing locally on virtual machines.)

CS Live: Not sure what’s new or not in this list, but what exactly is “Adobe Story”? With a name like this, it should be an editor for movie scripts, but the description doesn’t make it sound like one. Oh, and CS Review sounds like it could be a contender to replace Version Cue as this year’s iteration of the framework that Adobe embeds into all its apps and that you’d pay to be allowed to disable.

But none of that will run on my iMac, of course. And that’s even the suite’s strongest selling point, as I believe it’s the version that’s supposed to have finally been rewritten from scratch in Cocoa and should be stable on Intel machines.