Here is a quick tip for early adaptors of Adobe CS3. If you want to install both CS2 and CS3 on the same Mac, make sure you install Adobe CS2 first. If Adobe CS3 is already installed, the CS2 installer will gray out Acrobat, Illustrator and InDesign, thinking those applications are already installed.
The simple, but frustrating solution is to uninstall CS3 and reinstall CS2 first.
Adobe’s pen tool works pretty much the same across Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Yet, as important as this ubiquitous tool is, many people get confused with how to handle certain tasks, and the differences between the various pen symbols.
Adobe Pen Tool Cheatsheet.pdf
Creativetechs’ resident Adobe Certified Expert, Jason Hoppe, has put together a quick Adobe Pen Tool cheat-sheet to help keep some of the basic techniques straight. Download the PDF, and pass it along to a friend.
As a long-time FreeHand user, I’ve made my peace with that program’s departure. But my serenity is put to the test each time we must pull up old Freehand documents from past jobs. Happily, Illustrator CS3 will now directly open FreeHand MX and FreeHand 10 documents (previously, Illustrator CS2 could only open FreeHand 9 files or older). This slight consolation in CS3 might help other long-time Freehand designers finally move on.
We’ve been getting a lot of calls and questions this last week about Creativetechs’ “official” recommendation to wait until June 2007 before upgrading to Adobe CS3. This recommendation was part of our presentation on March 28, 2007: Getting Ready for Leopard, CS3 and New Macs!
Now that Adobe CS3 has actually started arriving at many design studios, we’ve begun relaxing our initial cautious recommendations. As with all major new software releases, we’ve seen a number of odd bugs and issues that need to be addressed. However we underestimated the pressure in many studios to upgrade to CS3. Especially in studios struggling with the stability of InDesign CS2 or Illustrator CS2 on new Intel Macs.
Last Wednesday morning, a Seattle construction crew cut through a water main one block from the Creativetechs office. About the same time our office phone lines and DSL went dead, killing our main Internet access.
Yet, throughout this day’s drama, our office email kept flowing and we had full access to the Internet. Why? Because we had taken our own advice and already had a second, inexpensive backup Internet connection in place. Read that tip here: Keep your Internet up using two providers.
