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Beta Preview: the new-look Creative Suite 3

Tuesday 27 Mar 2007 - 05:12

As new versions have introduced waves of features, Adobe’s applications have become awash with palettes, windows and other desktop clutter – often blocking each other and, more importantly, your work.

Creative Suite 3 introduces a streamlined interface that doesn’t move too far away the Creative Suite 2 front end – though it’s noticeably different from the old Macromedia UI – but takes on some of smoothly snapping palettes from the Production Studio’s video tools.

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Palettes sit down the left and right sides of each application in columns. Palettes within this columns snap to each other, so if you enlarge one, the others shrink to fit (and vice-versa).
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If you need more space for your work, the columns can be shrunk to a small palette of icons by clicking on the double arrow in its top-right – from where you can expand each icon into its own palette if you want to access its contents without the whole column getting in the way of your work.
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Each application include more ways to hide and reveal different parts of their interface for different tasks. You can also heavily customize the arrangement of palettes -- hiding, removing and moving them from column to column and out onto their own if wish. Each arrangement can be save as its own Workspace, which you can switch between in the Windows menu.
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The flexibility and tidiness of the interface overhaul is something that will benefit almost all users, adapting to suit resolutions from laptop to HD screens in both widescreen and traditional aspect ratios. However, on high-resolution screens such as the 1,920-x-1,200-resolution 23-inch Cinema HD Display we tested <a href=

Creative Suite 3, it’s too easy to click on the wrong button on the top right of every palette -- where the hide, remove and submenu pop-out buttons are clustered tightly together with mere pixels between them.

We know creatives have finely-honed mousing precision but sometimes it feels like you need Zen guidance to click the right button.

Neil Bennett

For more information see the Kodak Web site.

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