Ali Hanyaloglu at the Adobe Blogs has announced version 8 of Acrobat, their software for all things PDF, with a nice surprise: it's Universal. It's being bundled with the also recently announced new Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 Premium, a retail upgrade (don't you love how they like to charge for .X upgrades when 1/8th of the suite is Universal?) which also now includes Dreamweaver 8. GoLive, fortunately, will be spun off into a separate product (yea that's right: I said 'fortunately'), but who knows how long Adobe will grace users with a choice in web design apps, especially since Premium Creative Suite buyers are already getting one major suite in their bundle.

Check out the new Acrobat 8.0 page, as well as the Creative Suite 2.3 press release, for details on what's new in this $159 upgrade (admittedly, a deal for Dreamweaver 8 alone). CS 2.3 is expected to ship before the end of 2006, but remember: the rest of the suite isn't Universal yet, and they won't be offering Universal upgrades to CS2. If you aren't dying for Acrobat 8 or Dreamweaver 8, I'd recommend waiting until the first half of 2007 to upgrade, especially if an Intel Mac is in your future.

Remember that post we had yesterday (ok, fine: I wrote it) that Adobe was giving pink slips to GoLive and Freehand? As it turns out, that might not exactly have been true. Macworld reported last night that a true-blue Adobe rep laid it out on the table: "Adobe plans to continue to support GoLive and Freehand and develop these products based on our customer's needs."

However, another quote doesn't cast any good vibes on the future of these products in the long run: "Clearly Dreamweaver and Illustrator are market leading when it comes to web design/development and vector graphics/illustration... Customers should expect Adobe to concentrate our development efforts around these two products with regards to future innovation and Creative Suite integration".

Take from that what you wish, but it sounds like the GoLive-haters from my previous post and the Freehand-lovers will still have some hatin' and lovin' to do, at least for a little while longer.

The Mac Observer is reporting that Adobe announced at Adobe Live that the company is giving the axe to GoLive and Freehand for CS3, due out spring of 2007. Before the Adobe-Macromedia merger, GoLive was Adobe's Dreamweaver (and a far superior product, might I add), and Freehand was Macromedia's Illustrator (here's hoping Adobe means every word of their comment that "Dreamweaver will get a new interface"). I'm sure that since this decision was made some time ago, Adobe has had extra development hands to spend on making an Intel-native Creative Suite other projects.

If this announcement disappoints you, just remember something John Gruber said in his translation of Adobe's PR announcement and FAQs of the merger: "Competition is overrated - it only benefits customers".