What Creative Suite 3 means for Rich Internet Applications
There was a whole lot of buzz yesterday about the announcement date for CS3 being March 27th. As JD noted, an announcement date doesn't equal a ship date, but I'm not entirely sure what it means to "announce" a product that everyone knows is coming. In any case, there's a lot of fanfare with this release and a couple of them are a pretty big deal for RIAs.
First, Adobe makes great tools, and for the first time, those tools are going to be released all at once and talk to each other like never before. Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, all of these design tools have been put through the rigors of the "integration process" and for the most part, come out ahead. There are some very cool designer-developer workflow things planned for CS3, some have been talked about, others are being kept a secret. From what I can tell, there will be some pleasant surprises for "devigners" everywhere.
Second, with CS3 comes a universal binary version for the new Intel Macs. The math on this is a bit fuzzy, but the chatter seems to indicate that people have been waiting for CS3 to upgrade to the new Macs, Larry Dignan has some good quotes on this. The fact that the biggest sites talking about the March 27th date are Mac-oriented seems to bear this out. So in theory, with a "complete experience" now available on the Mac, more people will be upgrading. If those people move from Mac to Windows, the cross platform story for all RIA solutions becomes more important. We won't know for a while if all these people waiting for CS3 are Mac folks who want to upgrade or Windows users who want to switch, but it's worth watching.
CS3 is without a doubt a huge deal for Adobe. These products are their bread and butter and this is the first time you can by Photoshop in the same bundle as Flash. Those tools continue to help shape the web and allow people to create great experiences. If the integration between products goes well, Adobe has a much easier job keeping their designers happy and can use that to shore up the developer side.