Adobe's latest Creative Suite improves product integration

Adobe's latest design suite release offers improved integration of its different products but is still lacking in some areas, according to an early review of the product.

Adobe's Creative Suite 2.0 (CS2), which was released on Monday, includes updated versions of photo editor Photoshop, graphic illustrator Illustrator, Web designer GoLive, layout designer InDesign and Web publisher Acrobat 7.0 Professional.

The suite has improved integration between its component applications through the addition of Adobe Bridge, an application that allows designers to synchronise colour settings throughout the suite and to preview images in any Creative Suite program, no matter what program they were created in. CS2 also includes an updated version of its version control application Version Cue.

The review, carried out by ZDNet UK's partner site CNET, discovered a couple of potential problems and pointed out that "you'll need a pretty powerful PC to run everything".

"Unfortunately, Adobe still hasn't fully integrated ImageReady CS2 within Photoshop CS2, an obstacle for some," the review warned. "We noticed a slight file incompatibility between InDesign CS files and InDesign CS2 files."

Overall, CS2 is likely to be useful to designers who need to work with several different applications.

Read the full version of our first look review here.