So many of us have heard that Adobe has announced Sept. 23rd as the product launch date for CS4. I personally have been using DW CS4 since the private beta came out a few months ago and while I love it I still wonder if it is worth the expense of the upgrade to CS4.

Do we really need to spend the cash each time the Creative Suite is updated by Adobe? I’m not totally convinced that we do. Some releases of the software have been amazing (I think CS2 – CS3 was a huge jump) but some are not that great.

Now the suite we buy at work is used by both myself (web guy) and our print designer so the improvements are gauged by the two of us. The reality for me is that there are some cool improvements in DW CS4 but I think that I could be completely happy with Coda 1.5 as a coding tool.  Coda is only $99 USD so it’s a whole lot cheaper than CS4.

Ultimately I think that we have to be intelligent with our funds both for our workplace and as freelancers. I will evaluate all of the Creative Suite and see if the improvements are worth the upgrade cost. What are you going to do?

3 responses to “Upgrade to CS4?”

  1. mitzs Avatar
    mitzs

    So far I am happy with CS3 so I don’t see any reason to go for the newest when what I have is just fine with me.

  2. Tony Eckersley Avatar

    I have also been using DW CS4 for a few weeks now and while I enjoy some of the new features, such as not forcing you to create CSS in the ‘line-by-line’ approach, and some of the other CSS tools there to help you – but I am not sure what else they can offer to warrant a full upgrade from a tool I am fully happy using now… and the same applies to the rest of the suite – I am very curious to see what’s new.

    I do a lot of print and web and in our studio (of 3 designers) and we saw the reason to upgrade to CS3 (bridge being a surprising improvement to help sway the funding as well as a rebuilt Illustrator) from CS2, like you say. I can already see my studio passing on this iteration of the creative suite to keep funds down as typically we tend not to use all the ‘new’ features anyway because we are so used to doing it the ‘old’ way – if that makes sense…

    But we’ll see. I am pretty excited about seeing what’s new though.

  3. curtismchale Avatar

    Oh don’t get me wrong, I am excited to try it, I’m just not convinced that it is a ‘needed’ update for me at work or at home.