You’ve probably already heard the news that Adobe announced Creative Suite 4 tv.adobe.com on September 23rd, the latest versions of its ubiquitous design apps. As usual, there’s plenty of excitement surrounding this announcement, as every Adobe release brings cool new features, better cross-product integration, and (hopefully) speed improvements that make for an easy transition to your usual work flow.

There wasn’t much chance that Adobe could beat the buzz surrounding last year’s CS3 announcement, since that was the first version of the suite to include applications purchased from Macromedia, like Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash. And, realistically, CS4 isn’t the type of update every designer and her mom will run out and buy right away, but for you antsy early adopters, let’s have a look at some of the features that will get you ready to hit the preorder button…

Photoshop’s Content-Aware Scaling: This is one of those features that looks super cool and will be a blast to play with, even if you only need it professionally once in a blue moon. Content-Aware Scaling means Photoshop can “see” which objects in your image are most important, and when you squash or stretch the image, it will scale those important objects proportionately. Imagine it like this: You’re scaling a panoramic image to fit a more vertical orientation. The background squashes as you’d expect, but the people in the shot scale in correct proportion instead of getting squashed too.

A screenshot from Adobe of content-aware scaling in action

Dreamweaver’s coder-centric tools: Dreamweaver has long been loved by front-end Web designers, and hated by many back-end programmers, but recent versions have worked to combat this. CS4 introduces excellent code-hinting for JavaScript and Ajax frameworks (not just Spry!), a built-in browser for testing, and integration with technology like Subversion.

Flash’s keyframe-free, symbol-free tweening: Sick of manually creating keyframes and symbols for every motion tween? Flash handles the dirty work automatically, saving you a ton of time and saving you from those danged dashed lines on the timeline when you forget to convert to symbol… or am I the only one who always does that?

InDesign’s Live Preflight: If catching all those linking and font errors at the end of a long design process is frustrating, Live Preflight may be one of your favorite new InDesign features (of which there are quite a few, actually!). With Live Preflight turned on, you’ll be warned of production issues while you work, not at the supposed end of your project. Sounds pretty basic, and not terribly unlike the (new and improved) Links panel, but what makes this powerful is that you can create custom preflight profiles that catch just what you need to know about, and none of the rest. Time will tell if there’s enough in the Live Preflight feature to cover all of your usual preflight tasks, but it looks promising,

After Effects and Premiere’s metadata: For you videophiles, you won’t see tons of crazy new effects—the CS4 update is far more utilitarian, and most would agree that that’s a good thing. One of many productivity enhancements is the ability to add metadata text to your work. This makes entire projects as well as clips and layers totally searchable. You can use quick nicknames or even use Speech Search to turn dialog into searchable text.

Above are just five of the big new things you’ll find in Adobe CS4 products; that said, CS4 is not a must-buy for every Adobe product user. But, if you’re like me, the allure of a shiny new interface, some cool-to-have goodies, and some workflow improvements might just be enough to make the switch.

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