If you've been waiting to order 'the Mac of your dreams,' perhaps a new 0% financing offer from Apple will be just what you need. Through June 30th, Apple Store customers who qualify for financing can purchase a Mac interest-free for 24 months. Oh, and Adobe Creative Suite 3 apparently goes well with Macs, so Apple's even allowing customers to lump a CS3 purchase (in addition to a Mac to begin with) into the no-interest financing deal.

[Update: Woops, sorry guys. Turns out this is an offer targeted at business customers. This link should take you to more information at Apple's site, but commenters are right: there's a slight detail that Apple left out of the email to the tune of a minimum purchase amount of $5,000. I honestly don't know why I'm receiving emails from Apple that are aimed at business customers, but look on the bright side: most people's dream Mac probably costs nearly $5,000 anyway, right? Toss on Creative Suite 3 and you're basically there.

But seriously: sorry about the mixup everyone.]

Today is the big day, ladies and gents - Adobe has officially unveiled a plethora of new Creative Suite 3 packages and products, all of which are available for preorder now. With this new suite, the acquisition of Macromedia in April of 2005 has come to fruition, with all products now under the Adobe umbrella and incorporated into various new CS3 product bundles.

To aid in the selection of a new CS3 package, Adobe has created a thorough product matrix that makes even the many versions of Vista cry. To further help navigate all the new products and features, Adobe has of course revamped their Creative Suite product pages and has also posted some introductory videos to help bide the time until this afternoon's live webcast event that we mentioned earlier. The webcast begins at 3:30EST today, but don't fret if you're all booked up for the day - it will be recorded and available for streaming for the ultimate in 'pajamas-at-3-am' viewing experiences.

Preorder pricing for Creative Suite 3 packages begins at $999 for a new suite (Web Standard), and $240 for upgrades (Design Standard). The Design suites are scheduled to begin shipping in April 2007, while Production Premium is slated for Q3 2007.

When the complete Adobe Creative Suite 3 package is revealed on March 27, Adobe will announce not one, but two distinct versions of Photoshop, including a standard Photoshop CS3 and the new Photoshop CS3 Extended. Photoshop CS3 Extended includes the same tools as Photoshop CS3, but it also contains a brand new set of features for the integration of 3D and motion graphics, and image measurement and analysis functions. This marks the first occasion in which more than one version of Photoshop will be made available, with the new version targeted at individuals in the fields of video, architecture, engineering, medicine, and science.

With the new PS CS3 Extended, video editors and artists can perform 3D model visualization and texture editing functions, as well as the ability to paint and clone over multiple video frames. Final animations can be exported as QuickTime, MPEG-4, and Flash video, among others formats. Additionally, users in the scientific, medical, and architectural fields will be able to extract quantitative and qualitative data from images with special measurement and analysis tools, with support for specialized image formats.

Kevin Connor, senior director of product management for Adobe digital imaging says: "At one point in time, we considered separate versions, but we found a lot of overlap in the features that these people needed.... Rather than create a new application, Extended is a superset of features that can specifically benefit people in those markets." An official list of features for Photoshop CS3 Extended, in addition to pricing information will be unveiled on March 27, and the complete CS3 suite will launch later in the spring.

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".