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[Deborah Ellington <deborah AT invincigirl.com>]

> I haven't upgraded from Dreamweaver 4.0 or Photoshop 6.0 - they still
> serve my purposes - but for folks who do have more recent products, what
> do you think?
>  
The latest version of Dreamweaver has much better support for CSS (in a 
WYSIWYG sense) and also has relaxed a bit on the dependence on doing all 
file management through the Site Manager. (You know how sometimes you 
just want to edit a particular html file without getting all the DW 
alertbox chatter about how your page isn't being saved properly through 
the Site Manager?)

As for Photoshop 6.0 versus later versions, the newer bells and whistles 
I'm aware of make very little difference in my day-to-day work. I went 
to Adobe's Creative Suite tour and a big new feature of Photoshop is the 
ability to lay out a bunch of print photos on a scanner and have 
Photoshop instantly scan, rotate, and crop the whole lot into individual 
photo files. It sounds really cool, sure, but as a power user of 
Photoshop I am way more frequently importing digital files from a 
camera, or scanning film negatives. It's really not all that frequent 
that I'm scanning actual prints. I can't even remember what the other 
highlights were supposed to be. The file browser is pretty cool, 
actually, I think that was new to Photoshop 7.0. It lets you see 
thumbnails and other details about a folder of images without having to 
open the files individually. You can also assign keywords and other data 
to categorize images. It seems like it would be very useful for those 
who end up accumulating large libraries of pictures.

I'm pretty eager to see how Adobe and Macromedia will combine their 
strengths, streamline toolboxes and shortcut keys to be consistent 
across applications, that sort of thing. I have had many occasions to 
create artwork in Illustrator (preferring it over Freehand) and then 
export for use in Flash, and it can be a bit squirrelly. It will be nice 
to see if some of the overlaps or gaps between the different 
applications can be integrated in new ways.

Deborah Ellington