As Robert reported earlier this month, Adobe officially announced Creative Suite 4 via a streaming webcast earlier this morning. Adobe CS4, which is scheduled to ship sometime in October, is being touted as "Adobe's biggest software release to date."

While I was watching the webcast for our sister site, Download Squad, what struck me was the focus on performance improvements and cross-product integration. I've been dabbling with some of the CS4 betas since the beginning of the summer, and I agree that the Macromedia products are now much more tightly integrated (at least on the Fireworks and Dreamweaver side, I haven't used the Flash CS4 beta) with the rest of the Adobe suite.

On the performance side, the GPU acceleration rumors for Photoshop CS4 that Mat mentioned back in May are a reality. What was really striking, to me, was that despite the all the hub-bub about the lack of 64-bit support for the Mac version of Photoshop CS4, the demonstrations for the webcast were all performed on a Mac (I'm assuming it was a Mac Pro, it was attached to an external monitor on stage and also displayed on stage/screen). Showing off some of advantages of GPU acceleration, the representative from Adobe worked on a 2 GB 400 megapixel file, showing how easy it was to zoom in and out, and roate the image without any lag or slowdown.

So, 32-bit or not, Mac design shops that have powrful systems should benefit tremendously from the speed improvements to Photoshop.

The pricing for some of the Adobe CS4 bundle suites has increased nominally both for upgrades and new purchases. Web Premium CS3 was $1599 US, whereas Web Premium CS4 will be $1699 US. Design and Production Premium prices remain the same ($1799 US for Design Premium, $1699 for Production Premium), but the price of Design Standard is now $1399 US, up $200 from Design Standard CS3. Upgrade prices on suites appear to be about the same as CS3, although Web Premium is $100 more than it was 18 months ago.

For anyone who purchased Design Premium CS3 before May of 2008, you will be happy to know that Fireworks is now included in this suite (it was included in suites sold after May of 2008 or if you paid the $160 to upgrade to Acrobat 9). Fireworks never should have been omitted from Design Premium in the first place, so this is a nice addition.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 will be shipping sometime in October. One note for PPC Mac users -- Adobe After Effects CS4 will only support Intel systems. Premeire Pro CS4, like CS3, is also Intel-only.

While I'm not a hard-core professional illustrator or cartoonist, I do use vector design tools almost every day. Designing logos, playing with type, and creating quick layouts are things every vector design tool should do well.

Adobe Illustrator CS3, of course, is the 800-pound gorilla in this field, and it's my tool of choice. But there are plenty of people who don't need the extensive functionality that Illustrator provides. Plus, Illustrator is something of a resource hog (right now, it's using 176MB of real memory and 1.21GB of virtual memory on my system).

Today, I'm going to review four leaner, lower-cost (or free) options from four high-powered indie Mac developers: DrawBerry, EazyDraw, Lineform, and VectorDesigner. Unlike Illustrator, all of these use Mac OS X's built-in Core Image foundation, which makes them very easy to compare to each other.

It's high noon for vector apps, after the jump.

Rumors of Freehand's demise have been raised and squashed before, but now it's official. Gruber points to this notice that Adobe has canned further development Freehand in favor of Illustrator. Adobe is offering some discounts on Illustrator for registered owners of Freehand, as well as some tutorials aimed at helping folks move over, but they will not be offering any further updates to Freehand. Apparently in an effort to capitalize on annoyance of longtime Freehand users, Freeverse is offering a discount on their competing vector graphics package Lineform. Just enter code "freehand" to get $30 off the regular price of $79.95 until June 1st. This looks like a great deal on Lineform; even if it's not quite as powerful as Illustrator, it's still a substantial vector graphics application for about $50.

[via The Apple Blog]

We've mentioned Lineform a couple of times, but the newly released version 1.3 of Freeverse's Illustrator alternative vector illustration program adds a significant new feature: PDF import and editing. You can now directly import a PDF into Lineform, resize it, and mark it up with the standard Lineform drawing tools. Other new features include improved SVG support and 256000% (!) maximum zoom.

Lineform remains $79.95 and a demo is available.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Everyone knows about GIMP, the open source graphics editor that competes with Photoshop for editing bitmap images, or images with "pixels in a bitmap." But what if you need a free program that can work with vector-based images, such as those that Adobe Illustrator builds?  Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor that runs in the X11 environment compatible with Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Inkscape can import many and work with many of the common graphics formats, such as JPEG, PNG and TIFF, and can export as PNG and many of the common vector-based graphics formats.

GIMP and Inkscape combined can offer many of the same capabilities of their much more expensive cousins Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. If you're looking to build a graphic design machine on the cheap, you should at least check out these open source programs. They may just suit your needs.

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".

We're sure you've heard the news by now: No universal version of the Adobe pro apps until 2007. The good news is that Adobe is currently taking your suggestions for the upcoming Creative Suite 3. You've got the ear of one of the world's software giants, so speak up.

[Via creativebits]