The Road To Creative Suite


While it may seem perfectly obvious that Adobe would package certain products together as a suite, that concept has not always been so apparent. In fact, the entire and heretofore individualized process of engineering, marketing, and developing the various Adobe applications made it very unlikely that the applications could be integrated into a suite of products.

Development Cycles

One of the biggest hurdles to achieving a creative suite was getting all the products on the same development cycle. In the past, each product team released its newest version of the product without coordinating with the others.

This meant that it was difficult for the engineers on one team to develop a feature in their product that might rely on an asset in a different product. For instance, if the InDesign team wanted its product to be able to read the layers in a placed Photoshop file, the team would engineer this feature to the current version of Photoshop. But a few months later, the Photoshop team might come out with a new feature such as Layer Comps.

Because InDesign was released before the new version of Photoshop, the InDesign development team might have to wait for the next InDesign revision to add the new features. In this way, the Adobe products were always playing a game of leapfrog with each others' features.

Even with today's Creative Suite and the release of five full, new applications, Acrobat is on its own development cycle. For instance, when the first version of Creative Suite was released, Acrobat 6.0 Professional was included as part of the Premium Edition. Later, Acrobat 7.0 Professional replaced Acrobat 6.0. The Premium version of Creative Suite sold from that point on included Acrobat 7.0 Professional.

Communications and Codes

Another problem along the road to a creative suite was the fact that the engineering and product teams are in different cities. Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat are housed in San Jose, California, while InDesign is in Seattle, Washington. The majority of the GoLive team is in Hamburg, Germany. There's a team of engineers in India working on certain areas of the suite, and another in Minnesota. Even in an age of email, video conferencing, and Internet communications, it isn't easy to get all the teams to work in tandem.

There are some benefits, though, to having people all over the world. When the engineers in California go home for the night, they can throw the project over to the team in India. When that team goes home, it can send the project back to the folks in California.

In addition, all of the products have been developed over the years very independently of each other. This means that the code for a feature such as the Pen tool in Illustrator is not the same as the code for the Pen tools in Photoshop and InDesign. (Sandee always has the image of the engineer from Photoshop going over to the Illustrator team, asking to borrow a "cup of code." This causes her friends who work at Adobe to snicker and shake their heads in disbelief.)

Shared Components

Although dissimilar codes make it difficult for Adobe applications to share code, Adobe has special teams working on what are called shared components. These are applications such as Bridge and Version Cue, which can be used by all the Creative Suite applications.

Adobe also has engineering groups that work on special core technologies. The type engines in InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop all use the same core technology for text composition. Core technologies also help ensure that the applications in Creative Suite work well together. For more information, see "The Core Technologies That Bind," in Chapter 7, "Managing and Customizing the Interface."

Suite Philosophy

Undoubtedly you've heard the phrase that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Nowhere is that more true than in Creative Suite 2. By coordinating the products into a single suite, Adobe has been able to make the applications work better than ever. For instance, the smart objects in Photoshop rely on Illustrator knowing how to launch when you need to edit the smart object. (We'll cover smart objects in Chapter 9, "Smart Objects and Intelligent Layouts.")

Adobe has also made the applications in the suite look and feel as similar as possible. Thus, if you understand how to work with layers in Illustrator, you'll instantly feel comfortable working with the layers in InDesign. If you know what the icon for New Swatch means in Photoshop, you'll know exactly what to click in Illustrator or InDesign.

Suite versus Collection

Adobe Creative Suite isn't the first opportunity to purchase a range of Adobe applications in one box, but it is the one that provides the most incentives and reward to do so. Before Creative Suite, Adobe sold "collections" of its products, such as the Adobe Design Collection, comprising InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat.

While the thought was nice, the execution had flaws. No special features tied the applications together. The release cycles all differed. So it was rare when the versions were in sync with each other. However, the economics made it reasonable to buy a collection to save money.




Real World(c) Adobe Creative Suite 2
Real World Adobe Creative Suite 2
ISBN: 0321334124
EAN: 2147483647
Year: N/A
Pages: 192

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