Just when you thought you just bought (or just finished paying for) Adobe Creative Suite 3, get ready to take out another mortgage for Adobe CS4, which will be publicly unveiled on September 23. AppleInsider conjectures the software will drop in October.

Adobe will be delivering several webcasts that day to showcase the new software to the public. You can register here to participate in the webcasts.

Improvements to Photoshop and Flash are expected to headline the event. Adobe did not release any details about how the software will be bundled, nor any pricing information. Full versions of Adobe CS3 can cost as much as $2,500 for new users, and $160 for those who want to upgrade.

Adobe released preview editions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth in late May.

[Via MacFreaks and cnet.]

Adobe Dreamweaver, for better or for worse, is probably the most mature integrated development environment for website building for the Mac. Professionals might be supplied with Dreamweaver through their company's site-license; beginners might get Dreamweaver on the recommendation of a friend.

Hard-core coders have their favorite text editors and IDEs. This review is not for them. To be clear, I use Coda and TextMate almost exclusively for web development. This review is for people who use Dreamweaver primarily as a WYSIWYG HTML editor (as much as that makes me cringe). But that's what Dreamweaver does best.

The public beta of Dreamweaver CS4 dropped on Tuesday, and I'm going to show you what's new and different about Dreamweaver CS4, and if it's worth the upgrade.

Weavin' your dreams, after the jump.

Adobe Labs today released public betas for the next generation of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Soundbooth apps, part of their Creative Suite product.

Once downloaded and launched, the betas will only be active for 48 hours -- unless you have a CS3 license. Creative Suite 3 customers will be able to extend the trial period (presumably until the final versions are released, though the deactivation date is not mentioned in the press release).

The Dreamweaver beta includes a much-anticipated (at least by me) change to the WebKit rendering engine for previewing and live editing.

Fireworks has been re-vamped to look and feel more like other Creative Suite apps, and now allows users to export design comps as interactive PDF documents.

The Soundbooth beta now includes multiple track support, and the new ability to match volume levels across multiple files. Plus, users can preview MP3 compression settings before saving them.

Soundbooth (719MB) requires Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later, running on an Intel processor. Fireworks (634MB) and Dreamweaver (262MB) have the same OS requirement, but can run on a G5 processor or better.

Thanks, Kent!

Realmac Software today has released the much-anticipated new version of RapidWeaver, their powerful WYSIWYG software that does a great job of filling the gap between iWeb and Dreamweaver. This new v3.6 ushers in a significant list of new features, such as:

• Themes Styles - no more digging in HTML and CSS to customize your theme (unless you really want to)
• 6 completely new themes
• Snippets - manage chunks of frequently used code instead of copy/pasting or constantly re-typing
• New Flash Slideshow - completely rewritten and can now pull images from a Flickr feed
• Improved blog, including tags and inline comment support
• Easy creation of Lists
• Detailed Publishing
• And much, much more

Also, due to RapidWeaver's "skyrocketing" popularity, RealMac Software introduced a redesigned website today that includes a full-featured add-ons section where users can browse themes, plug-ins and code snippets, which of course also means 3rd parties nowhave one central RapidWeaver community where the can highlight their products.

With everything involved, I can completely understand Realmac Software's decision to make v3.6 a paid upgrade - current users (including MacHeist owners) can purchase a v3.6 license for $25, while a full license costs $49. A demo is of course available, so head over to the shiny new Realmac Software site to see everything RapidWeaver has to offer.

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.

Earlier this week, Adobe release version 8.0.2 of Dreamweaver, the industrial-strength web editor. Changes to this version include:

• Improved Dreamweaver-generated code for server behaviors
• Improved server-side Flash behavior

You can read the full release notes here. Go and get it, Dreamweaver users!