Today, Adobe announced their follow up to their Creative Suite series, which is un-creatively titled Creative Suite 3, or CS3. The CS series encompases the Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects apps which are geared towards the image editing, design, and animation fields. A little over a year ago, Adobe bought Macromedia’s Flash, which is the standard for delivering internet content. Not only that, but Flash has proven to be a very cost effective tool in the animation field and is widely used in such shows as “Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends”, “Little Einstiens”, most recently with Nick’s “El Tigre”, and a ton of other shows. It came as no huge surprise that Adobe would purchase Flash from Macromedia to further strengthen their hold on the design and animation fields.

CS3 includes a new version of Flash…wait for it…version CS3. Yeah. There was Flash 5, then Flash MX, Flash MX 2004, Flash 8, and now Flash CS3. What an amazing lineage. Hah. Personally, I use Flash professionally on a daily basis, and my co-workers and I have been wondering what the eventual changes will be in this new version. In fact, Adobe representatives stopped by our studio and discussed with us what changes we would like to see, what works for us and what doesn’t. To Adobe’s credit, they were very receptive to our thoughts where Macromedia blew us off in the past.

So what can we expect in the new version? According to Adobe’s site, a tight integration with Photoshop and Illustrator as well as a streamlined interface uniting the products is in place. ActionScript (which is completely foreign to me) is now bumped up to version 3.0 and promises beefier coding. Illustrator-like drawing tools are now being implemented as well as enhanced Quicktime support.

Sounds great doesn’t it? But what does it really mean? Clearly, having the ability to import a PSD or AI document into Flash and still retain its layering is a great boon. In the past Flash has been dismal when attempting to import an Illustrator file. Most of the times, the color interpratations were off and gradients are interpreted incorrectly. If you’ve never had to do this before, this often leads to more headaches than you could realize. Exporting bitmaps has generally been poor as well. Hopefully, Photoshop will lend some of its image editing smarts in this lacking area for Flash.

Better drawing tools would be much appreciated. Anyone who draws directly in Flash with the current brush tool on a tablet can testify that its hardly a great experience. Flash has a tendency to do what it wants with your line. More responsiveness on Flash’s part in this area would be greatly appreciated, but the idea that Illustrator-like tools for object creation is a bit scary. Since I don’t work in Illustrator much, I often get disorientated when I’m in that environment. Myself and many professionals find working with Flash’s line tools simple to use. In most cases, you just push and pull a line as you see fit, and fine tune with the sub-select tool. Shoe-horning Illustrator’s tools into what is already a very comfortable situation in Flash may be a huge turn-off for some…myself included. Additionally, the idea that Flash’s interface is now sporting Abobe’s may also be very frustrating. Macromedia adopted many of Adobe’s interface ideas, but hopefully not all of the keyboard shortcuts wont be changed too much. For example, I can forsee getting used to hitting “Alt +T” as opposed to “Q” to pull up the transform box.

Finally, the tighter integration of Quicktime is absolutely huge. In the past, Flash performs dismal when rendering quicktime movies. In fact, it doesn’t even create Quicktime video files. When “Quicktime” is selected from the publish menus, Flash makes a special .SWF that is explicitly handled in Quicktime. Its like a SWF masquerading as a Quicktime file. The issue here is that clients may often not have the most current version of both Quicktime AND Flash Player installed and thus can’t watch it. I’ve had a million headaches over this one. In broadcast, a FLA is rendered as a bitmap or PNG sequence to be imported into After Effects where much stronger compositing tools and a full array of codecs can be applied to prep it to air on TV. Hopefully, this new support for Quicktime will solve all of these issues.

So that’s it. I’m looking forward to the actual release and having some time with it. I think this is a good step in the right direction for Flash which will only bolster its strong points and reinforce its many weakpoints. However out of all of this I’ve only got one major question left to ask Adobe:

Can you PLEASE allow the brush tool to draw inside of a flipped symbol!??