I’m going to inaugurate my first blog post on the interwebs with a small note about yesterday’s massive software release.

First, there was Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010.

While I haven’t seriously worked on my programming in quite some time, I’m happy to see that MS added significant improvements (and a new logo!). As a web designer, I hope this brings ASP.NET even closer in line with web standards and assists engineers in creating sites that produce clean, valid code.

However, Adobe Creative Suite 5 is what I’m more excited about.

The events surrounding CS5’s launch seemed rather subdued compared to what I remember from the past. Tons of info seemed to circle the web prior to CS4’s arrival, but this time Adobe mostly stayed silent. Sure, I saw some videos about the Puppet Warp and paint mixing functions a while back, but maybe they didn’t want to build up too much expectation like MS did with Vista.

As of this article’s posting, here’s the largest “what’s new” list that I’ve found.

Things I’m excited about:

  1. Flash can output animations to Canvas elements.

    In other words, you don’t need to have the Flash plugin anymore to view animations. Oshi-

  2. CS Live’s BrowserLab and NetAverages

    More accurate usage data!

  3. Complex selections made easier in Photoshop

    Can’t wait to try this out.

  4. Content-Aware Fill

    The video of this feature is too small to really inspect the results, but based on what I’ve seen so far… Holy. Crap.

    Content-Aware Fill is waaay too subdued of a name. If it were me, I’d call it the “REALITY GENERATOR” or something at least as awesome as that. Looking forward to it, Adobe!

    On the other hand, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s job of “enhancing” their missile armaments just got a whole lot easier… :(

  5. Rule of Thirds Overlay

    This is a nice little addition since it applies to web design too, not just photographers.

  6. Dreamweaver

    Looks like Adobe’s trying to simplify my workflow. The code hinting and support for popular third party frameworks is neat and much appreciated.

    I really like some of the functions that Microsoft’s Expression Suite 3 has, like SuperPreview. It’s a shame that Adobe followed suit only to make their version an online service instead of integrating it completely. I’d like to keep the ability to test browsers offline.

My Dreamweaver-specific wish list:

  1. Fix the stupid bug where you create a new Managed Site and then assign a site root. Most of the time, the site root gets shifted up by one folder level, just above where you wanted it to go. Seriously, it needs to disappear already…
  2. Better default CSS font stacks! Typography on the web has been rather poor, and as a community, we should do what we can to make it better. I’d love the ability to define custom font stacks and have typographical profiles. I’d also like to have a viewer that previews the font stacks in a similar fashion to MyFonts.com, displaying the font size, weight, and variant (bold, oblique, italic…) at once.

Adobe gets bonus points if they implemented this already in CS5. :D

Anyway, I look forward to putting CS5 through its paces soon.

I hope it’s awesome, because even in the darkest of hours… deadlines must be met!