The Tech Bench

Adobe CS5 is out. While the latest release of Adobe’s Creative Suite has drawn a lot of attention on what it won’t be doing well, we thought we’d put together a list of our top 5 favorite new features.

Photoshop CS5 – Content-Aware Fill

Adding objects to pictures that weren’t there before is Photoshop’s main claim to fame. The new Content-Aware Fill works the other way by helping to fill the void when an object or person is removed from a photo.

Dreamweaver CS5 – Integrated CMS Support

Dreamweaver now includes more tools for working with Content Management Systems like WordPress, Drupal and others. CMS are used to create most blogs and many newer sites use these technologies. You can now preview, edit and test these sites from within Dreamweaver.

Dreamweaver CS5 – Adobe BrowserLab

BrowserLab has been in beta for a while and is very useful for web designers. BrowserLab allows you to test your website across different web browsers from within one application. You can do side by side testing and help iron out the way your site looks across different (IE6 anyone?) web platforms.

Illustrator CS5 – Perspective Drawing

I cannot draw to save my life. Opening Illustrator is a rare and usually stressful occurrence. The new perspective drawing tool helps align 2d objects onto a 3d frame. This effect can help transform stock text and graphics into 3d layouts without the need to manually distort and stretch objects into the proper perspective.

64 Bit Support

CS5 is only available for Intel based Macs which is a doubled edge sword of course. The benefit is this is the first 64 bit Adobe Suite for the Mac written in Cocoa. This allows the software to take further advantage of the Macs hardware capabilities and speed up the overall performance.

So is CS5 worth upgrading to? If you’re a design professional who works with these tools everyday, then yes. The added speed and new Photoshop features alone are probably worth the price of admission. If you’re a casual web designer, the new tools are more convenience than anything else and you could probably do with it.

Click here to learn more about CS5 and to see if it’s right for you.

Since the release of the first iPhone, one of the features that has been missing is Flash support.

The mobile Safari browser is great, but so many of the online videos and interactive web content is written in Adobe Flash that the lack of a Flash player for the iPhone takes away from the otherwise amazing mobile web experience.

So far, Apple has been vocal in why we don’t need Flash for the iPhone. Their stance is that Flash is a resource hog and that video and interactive web content can be better delivered with other standards like Java (I mostly agree.)

Flash section of Travelocity on the HTC Hero

Adobe, of course, believes in the Flash standard and has demoed the first Android device with Flash built-in, the HTC Hero smartphone.

The demo shows Flash video, a Flash game and interactive Flash web content. The usability looks great and the ability to double-tap to bring the content full screen is nice. The speed is a little on the slow side.

According to Adobe, this version of Flash (built into the phone’s ROM) will play about 80% of the Flash content out there flawlessly.

If Adobe can get Flash to run well on other mobile devices, Apple may come around to supporting the standard in the iPhone.

With Adobe continuing to put resources into making Flash mobile friendly, combined with the increasing performance of smartphones, I’d say there’s a good chance Flash will come to the iPhone.

[ Adobe Press Release ] [ HTC Hero Flash Demo ]