CS4: Soon Out the Door

Adobe will be announcing the introduction of CS4 tomorrow (Sept. 23rd.) What will this new iteration of the Creative Suite bring to consumers? Not much info has been given, so it's all down to speculation. Finding a sneak peek, however, I did get a bead on one particular feature: on photoshop, the dodge and burn tool has been dramatically refined, leaving images less washed out when using the tool.  The sneak peek talks about some other small things, with the keyword being "refine;" yep, seems the main enhancement, as given by the sneak peek preview, is a "refining of tools the suite already has."
But probably the most significant feature of this new suite is the amalgamation of all applications to one universal gui—translation: Dreamweaver and Flash will now look more like Photoshop, Illustrator, and so on.
A secondary overhaul, and this is actually a biggie, is full 64-bit support. Big frown for apple fans (me, included) because this includes you, out. "Life is over; pc users will have a one up on me, an adoring mac fan." Not neccessarily. Do your homework. The way that the two platforms utilize resources does not translate straight across. In fact, you with pc's who have 4gb of ram installed? Guess what--you're blocked from using more than 2.3gb at the OS level, where your mac counterparts utilize all of their maxed out 4gb ram. This is due to how the OS parses memory. Also, bigger doesn't always translate to better. 64-bit can actually mean it takes more juice to do essentially the same thing as 32-bit. Think of it as using larger batteries on a device just to make a light blink--the size of battery doesn't matter; it may be better to save your money and get the cheaper, more efficient, smaller batteries. Rough example, I know, but you get the gist. This isn't to say that 64-bit won't give you better rendering power, but on the mac side of things, CS3 with Leopard was already quite zippy.

That's it for now. Stay tuned tomorrow when CS4 opens its curtains. More coverage is on it's way.