Catch a Glimpse of Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 With New Betas
Adobe is offering fans a sneak preview at the company’s coming Creative Suite 4, with select applications now available as pre-release betas. Continuing a trend that started with the Photoshop betas released just prior to CS3, Adobe is offering free public betas of CS4 applications like Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Soundbooth.
You can grab the new betas from the Adobe Labs website and, provided you have CS3, the betas will work until the release of CS4. For those who don’t own the CS3 apps, there’s a limited 48-hour trial period.
Adobe still hasn’t set a release date for the next version of its Creative Suite, nor has it made any announcement regarding possible betas for other popular CS apps like Photoshop and Illustrator.
The Dreamweaver CS4 beta brings several welcome new features for web developers, including a new tool dubbed Code Navigator, which allows you to make code changes to multiple parts of a document with a single edit.
Also new in Dreamweaver CS4 is Live View, which uses the Webkit rendering engine — the foundation for Apple’s Safari browser — to offer previews of your documents without leaving the application.
Other nice new features include Javascript code hinting — complete with support for popular frameworks like jQuery, Prototype, and Spry — and Subversion integration for file management, versioning, rollback, and more.
The Fireworks CS4 beta brings the application in line with the rest of Creative Suite, borrowing its new user interface design from other CS apps. The beta also adds a host of new export options including web standards-compliant, CSS-based layouts. For those looking to share design comps, Fireworks also offers the ability to create interactive and secure PDF files.
Perhaps the most significant changes are present in Soundbooth, Adobe’s entry level audio editing app which debuted last year. The CS3 version of Soundbooth was easy to use, but lacked some basic features like multitrack editing.
The Soundbooth CS4 beta addresses that shortcoming and adds a number of other new features designed to elevate the app from hobbyist toy to a more serious audio editor. Aside from multitrack support, the Soundbooth beta can synchronize volume levels across tracks, control MP3 compression settings and more.
The new features bring Soundbooth more closely in line with its chief competitor, Apple’s Garageband. However, at least for now, Garageband still has a few features you won’t find in Soundbooth — like better panning options and cross-fading controls.
There’s still no word on when CS4 will arrive, but the new betas offer a tantalizing glimpse of what’s to come. Although I haven’t had a chance to test them extensively, the betas didn’t seem unstable. Of course they are pre-release quality applications, so the usual warnings apply.
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