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Web Design & Productivity

Review: Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium

5/29/2007

By Kevin Schmitt

It's the moment that a whole bunch of Web designers and producers (especially those with Intel Macs) have been waiting many a moon for: Adobe's CS3 Design and Web suites are finally shipping. Today, we're going to be checking out the Web Premium bundle, which features former Macromedia products finally brought together with traditional Adobe stalwarts in an all-star lineup of Web production bliss. That's the idea, anyway--out in the field, the Web Premium suite is a blend of fantastic features and worthwhile upgrades mixed with a sizable amount of disappointment.

What's in the Box

Nestled inside the dreamy sea foam and magenta CS3 Web Premium packaging are the following applications:

So, if the Web Premium bundle were a meal, the preceding apps would be the meat. There are also some ancillary applications that ship with the suite, which we'll extend the bad metaphor with by deeming them the potatoes:

While there are some decent features present in the potatoes, the main thrust of this piece will center around some of the meatier fare, specifically those that used to make up Macromedia's Studio line: Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Contribute. In effect, this piece will be a review of the nonexistent Macromedia Studio 9. As for Photoshop and Illustrator, you can find reviews of those individual products in our review of the Creative Suite 3 Design Premium Edition by clicking here.

For whatever it's worth, please note that for the purposes of this review, both Photoshop CS3 Extended and Illustrator CS3 offer very solid new features and are generally excellent additions to the CS3 Web Premium bundle. Therefore, their presence will be factored into the final grade. They'll be kind of like a midterm that way. Also, before we get into things too deeply, it bears mentioning as a blanket statement that all CS3 products mentioned in this review will run natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs as Universal Binary applications. If you're an Intel Mac person, you may not even be interested in reading any further, as I have just provided all the reason you need to justify the upgrade right there. It's disappointing that there weren't Universal updates for existing Adobe products before now, but that's another conversation entirely. Windows users, you haven't been left out, as the CS3 product line is designed to support both Windows XP and Windows Vista. And finally, with so much to cover in these very mature products, I'm only going to spell out noteworthy new or updated features; otherwise, you'll likely still be reading this piece when the CS4 line comes out. With all that out of the way, and without further ado (of which there has been plenty already), let's break down some of the individual products.



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