18 replies to this topic

[Matthew Hampton]

I was pondering upgrading to CS3 - but with CS4 right around the corner I am balking until I hear about more details. Does anyone know of if there are any great advancements to CS4 with respect to cartography?

Has Adobe fixed any of the bugs that have been brought-up (like the "Mississippi" problem?). I have not found a lot of details and was wondering if anyone on the board has worked with it yet.

[rudy]

For a very high level set of hints to what's happening in the various applications in the CS4 suite, see Real World illustrator. I guess well have to wait a few weeks yet for all the details.

[BEAVER]

Last weekend I visited a friend of mine that did have CS4 beta. I didn't see anything that would make our jobs easier. Just cosmetic stuff and more integration between other applications. No 64bit available as beta. I think that Manifold 9.0 is going to be big one when it comes to cartography.

[Jimbo]

Last weekend I visited a friend of mine that did have CS4 beta. I didn't see anything that would make our jobs easier. Just cosmetic stuff and more integration between other applications. No 64bit available as beta. I think that Manifold 9.0 is going to be big one when it comes to cartography.

Just to point out the essential packages that we use: Illustrator, & Photoshop are not available in Beta. The only products that you can get from Adobe Labs are Dreamweaver, Soundbooth, & Fireworks.

Yea I can't wait myself for Manifold 9 because I lost my key codes, ($50 is better then $75), in that thunderstorm that wiped my entire system & forced me to get repairs.

[rudy]

So when is Manifold coming out?

[BEAVER]

So when is Manifold coming out?

Manifold 9.0 comes out sometime in fourth quarter and Illustrator CS4 beta was released to 6300 beta testers.

[natcase]

Practical Cartography Day at NACIS this year includes a preview of Illustrator CS4. Note that the preliminary program still up as of this posting also mentions a Photoshop CS4 preview, which has unfortunately canceled.

[Adam Wilbert]

The official "announcement" of CS4 is scheduled for Tuesday, September 23rd, at which time more details will be put out. You can sign up to view the web broadcast of the announcement at Adobe's Site.

[Andrew Patterson]

The official "announcement" of CS4 is scheduled for Tuesday, September 23rd, at which time more details will be put out. You can sign up to view the web broadcast of the announcement at Adobe's Site.

I've actually been in the beta for several months and I'd say there are least two new features that will be very relevant to cartography. Well, one is something that's been asked for by a lot of people for a long time (not just cartographers), and the other is an improvement on a certain aspect of the text engine that will probably make some labelers much happier.

I'd say more, but I'm not actually sure if I'm still under NDA for this thing. It seems silly to not be able to say anything -- especially since I believe it's gone gold -- but better safe than sorry

[frax]

typing CS4 looks almost like typing C64 - like the old commodore 64 (my third computer). Maybe it is time for Adobe to release a version for that computer, so that I don't have to use GEOS GeoPaint or KoalaPainter to make maps anymore...

[Hans van der Maarel]

Any indication what the stability of Illustrator CS4 is going to be like? I'm getting kinda tired of CS3 crashing when asked to perform seemingly trivial tasks...

[Claude]

Well here's a big enhancement: multiple artboards. It's about time that you could create more than one page in an Illy file. I'm excited about the possibility of having my main map and insets within the same document. But I am not excited about how big and crash-able the document will become.

[Matthew Hampton]

Here are a few reviews that came out today (CNET, Macworld, Digital Arts).

The "Select Same Appearance" for objects sounds like a nice improvement for "graphical sql."

[rudy]

I like the color separations preview the best.

See Mordy's posting on Illy CS4 for some details.

However, it doesn't look like it's worth an upgrade from CS3 . . . .

[Andrew Patterson]

Well here's a big enhancement: multiple artboards. It's about time that you could create more than one page in an Illy file. I'm excited about the possibility of having my main map and insets within the same document. But I am not excited about how big and crash-able the document will become.

That's the one I was thinking of when I said 'something people have been asking for forever'. The text engine was tweaked too so that text around sharp corners should be much more intelligent. I know that was done specifically for the cartographers because it came on the beta forums a couple of times.

The other things I can tick off the top of my head: tabbed UI (makes more sense on Windows than Mac from what I understand, but some Mac users may like it), ability to edit directly in the appearance tab, improved smart guides, better bleed stuff (over my head, but there was great interest in this).

One interesting change that's causing us headaches at Avenza is the removal of the Filter menu. Despite that, it feels like a good move to clean up the UI, since most 'filters' should either have been folded into Effects or something on the Object menu -- which is what they've basically done. There is still a place for 3rd-party plug-ins to show up, but I believe it's now located on Object > Third Party > Filters, or something like that. I don't have a build with any filters installed right now, so I can't say.

They tidied up a lot of things like clipping masks & gradients. Lots of other stuff, but oddly enough, I'm not a very good Illustartor user, so I can't speak to most of it. I just remember reading this stuff in the download notes. The main things that interested me were the UI changes & the multiple artboards -- since those required changes in MAPublisher, and thus created new & exciting headaches/opportunities