Review: Adobe Bridge offers easy access to all files, and there are significant ehancements in Photoshop, GoLive and Illustrator.When Adobe Systems Inc. released the first version of its Creative Suite a year and a half ago, it was really all about the bundle. As far as features in the suite or new capabilities in the component applications were concerned, there wasn't a whole lot there.
But Adobe Creative Suite 2, which was released in April, finally succeeds in making the bundle into a suite. Creative Suite 2 has significant new integration and cross-suite features, as well as significant upgrades in the suite applications, including those that were released at the same time as Creative Suite 2 and those, such as Acrobat 7.0, that were released earlier.
Probably the biggest new feature in the suite is Adobe Bridge, a centralized organization application that provides digital asset management capabilities for files created in the suite. eWEEK Labs also found that the applications in the suite now work much better together, and PDF has become even more of a lingua franca for Creative Suite applications.
Adobe Creative Suite 2, priced at $1,199 with upgrade pricing available, is a considerable bargain over purchasing the individual applications separately. We tested Creative Suite 2 Premium Edition, which includes Acrobat 7.0, GoLive CS2, InCopy CS2, InDesign CS2, Illustrator CS2 and Photoshop CS2. Creative Suite 2 also includes the new Bridge application, Adobe Reader, the Version Cue CS2 collaboration server and a new Stock Photos service for finding and purchasing images. A Standard Edition, which costs $899 and doesn't include Acrobat and GoLive, is also available.
Creative Suite 2, which runs nearly identically on Mac OS X and Windows systems, is definitely a worthwhile upgrade for current users and is worth consideration by businesses looking for a powerful integrated media authoring suite. However, Windows users with older systems with less than 50MB of memory might want to upgrade to a newer system first. In tests, Creative Suite 2 refused to install on an older Windows system that had run the first version of the suite with no problems.
Read the full review on eWEEK.com: Adobe Bundle Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts
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