bit-tech Shopping: Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Design Premium

Rating: 8

Time with product: 1

Strengths: good value for bundled apps vs. buying each separately

Weaknesses: Acrobat's upgrade cycle isn't in sync with the rest of Creative Suite. There is a serious bug with saving Photoshop files to network servers under OS X 10.5.3

Summary: Photoshop, Illustrator & InDesign are the holy trinity for designers. Acrobat and Dreamweaver are essential, too. It's great that Flash is now part of the suite.CS 3 includes Acrobat 8 Pro. Adobe just announced CS 3.3 which will include Acrobat 9 Pro and FireWorks CS 3, and even though I just bought CS 3 two weeks before the date of the announcement, I'll have to pay to upgrade. (Other companies allow free upgrades if you purchased the software a few weeks before a new version is announced.) Acrobat is on a different upgrade schedule than the rest of the CS 3 programs, so a similar thing happened with CS 2/Acrobat 7 and CS 2.3/Acrobat 8.

Rating: 10

Time with product: 2

Strengths: Universal runs VERY VERY fast on Intel Macs, new acrobat is very user friendly, photoshop interface cleaned up or reorganized.

Weaknesses: price, dreamweaver included instead of golive, activation system

Summary: This was one of the few required updates of CS in the past few versions as it was the first universal binary version of CS. CS2 would run very slow on my macbook pro, programs would launch very slow and menu response was sluggish. CS3 however is amazingly fast on my Macbook.

Rating: 10

Time with product: 1

Strengths: Awesome

Weaknesses: none

Summary: Amazing product. Shipped and arrived way before they claimed it would. I bought CS2 from Software Media as well! Adobe has outdone itself again, staying ahead of the competition and going above and beyond making it faster and easier to complete projects every day.