Adobe Bridge & Flash CS3 - Initial Impressions

I received my Flash CS3 Upgrade (Windows version) in the mail yesterday. Unfortunately, I had dinner plans, so I only had time to install and play around with it a little bit. I'll post more detailed comments later. I'm especially interested to see how the Flash/Flex workflow goes...

In addition to the install DVD, you get a CS3 Video Workshop disk, which has training videos (i.e. commercials) for a number of other CS3 products. Adobe is really trying to push people to updgrade the rest of the CS3 software, but I've decided to hold off on upgrading DreamWeaver and FireWorks at least until the demos come out. Regardless, it's cool to get some extra content, and I look forward to watching the videos.

The Flash install was smooth, but took a long time, and significantly more disk space, than Flash 8 -- about 1.2 gigs. I think this is because it also installs Bridge, and some other demos and goodies. Installation took about 15 minutes, which felt like a long time. However, the performance of the application itself seemed acceptable on my aging windows machine (a 3 ghz P4). It's a relief to know that I probably won't need to buy a new computer to run Flash.

My initial impression about Flash 9 was that it looked the same as 8, but cleaner and less cluttered. It's definitely nice to have that sense of familiarity with the application persist. However, I was disappointed that the new features weren't made more self-evident somehow. Clicking the "New Features" link in the start window simply takes you to this page on Adobe's site. I would have liked some more details, and maybe a tutorial. Of course the benefit of linking into the site is that Adobe can update the page with that sort of thing in the future.

I have not delved into writing any AS3 yet, but configuring a project for it in the "Publish Settings..." dialog was easy. There is a new option in that dialog to "Export SWC" (but no context-sensitive help to tell you what an SWC is, so I'm sure this will perplex some people).

Bridge was neat. It's basically a souped-up version of one of those programs that comes with a digital camera, only it looks more professional, and has that Adobe polish. The ability to tag assets and filter them by tag, is fantastic. So for example, I can tag all our wedding photos with my mother-in-law in them, and then just filter those out to print and send to her. It's kind of like having an iTunes for all your images. Now all I need is an assistant to spend hours and hours organizing all my photos! :)