Brian Dusablon

I develop a lot of elearning. Adobe has hopefully just made my job easier. I plan to upgrade to the newly released eLearning Suite as soon as I get my new laptop at work.

The eLearning Suite consists of:

• Captivate (massive upgrade from v3)
• Flash (with exclusive eLearning Interactions)
• Photoshop (I’d much rather have Fireworks)
• Dreamweaver (with eLearning Add-Ons)
• Acrobat Pro
• Presenter (this is replacing Articulate Presenter for me)
• Soundbooth (this will replace SoundForge)

I’m very disappointed that I’m forced to go with Photoshop instead of Fireworks. Photoshop is way more than I need for 98% of my graphics. I’m also much better at Fireworks for simple editing. I find it’s layout and workflow much simpler than Photoshop, and just as effective for the way I use it. What pisses me off most about all of this is that I will have to dump $600 to upgrade from CS3 Design Premium to the eLearning Suite. We picked up Design Premium last year, rather than Web Premium, primarily for InDesign, which again left me without a Fireworks upgrade. So I’m still using Fireworks 8, which is plenty effective, but does not integrate with CS4.

So, thanks to Adobe’s lovely pricing strategy, I now have to fork over an additional $149 to upgrade Fireworks. It’s like every year, to take advantage of new tools and features, I have to drop $500-$1000. I wish Adobe would have a loyalty factor in their pricing, so the more times you upgrade, the cheaper it becomes.

I do not have any hands-on with the eLearning Suite yet. I was supposed to beta test it, but I was unable to install the beta on my work laptop. Thanks IT.

I will probably install the demo on my home machine using Fusion – oh yeah, the elearning suite is Windows only. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Philip has more on the release here, with some interesting commentary about pricing, etc. In addition, Adobe has demos and a an overview (via Steve).

Lovely. I can’t wait.

(via DF)

Did you watch the Adobe CS4 Live Launch last week?

If not, check out tv.adobe.com

While nothing completely blew my socks off, the new lineup is pretty robust, and, reportedly, marks the first CS that has completely integrated Macromedia and Adobe technologies, so the look and feel of the programs is universal and they integrate and share files better. In addition, all the apps completely support AIR development now, which is also huge.

Time will tell whether or not I make the upgrade. I am a little gun-shy after jumping at the upgrade to CS3 from my old Studio MX. I use Fireworks a lot in my web design work. I much prefer it to Photoshop for web work. However, I was VERY underwhelmed by the CS3 package, and I moved entirely away from Dreamweaver once Panic launched Coda, which might just be the best piece of software ever written.

So, I’ll wait a while for the reviews to come in, and try another round of beta testing, before jumping on the upgrade bandwagon. I love Fireworks, but at a $599 price tag just for an upgrade to CS4 Web Premium ($399 for Standard), I could easily find an alternative that goes well with the $99 Coda. (See Aviary, Acorn, Pixelmator)

What’s your take?