New tools!

Finally Adobe Creative Suite 3 is released! The folks in the office can finally use a reliable copy of Flash Professional to develop the software for Flash Player 9. Conversion between Illustrator and Flash is good, but just good enough, not over-the-top like Arcade Fire.

Most things import easily, especially uneven gradients and radial gradients, which used to just splat itself on Flash as a bitmap, and now they would try to mimic the closest gradient fill possible. It's not perfect though, since Illustrator still does not have alpha values for its coloring system, and that means you will need to use the Opacity Mask trick in Illustrator to preview, and remove all of them before taking the objects to Flash.

Other features are good but not especially exciting. Live Color is a good addition but since I 'think' I know color so I probably wouldn't like Illustrator recommending me what color to use all the time. It's similar to but more focused on experimentation than the excellent Phantasm CS plugin I bought a couple months ago when I was working on the Trillian icons.

The new panel system is great. The panels don't flicker in Vista anymore, and everything loads nice and fast. There's a little bug concerning the saving of the panel position. I hope they will fix it soon.

If you apply the "every two versions" rule, this upgrade sounds about right to be a great deal when compared to Adobe Illustrator CS or 10. You'll gain a lot more features besides Live Color, new UI, Flash integration and Vista support; but also Live Trace and Live Paint from CS2, which makes great companion to the new Eraser tools in CS3.

I'm a long-time Illustrator user now since 2000, and I'm pretty satisfied. :)

By the way, last night I finally couldn't tolerate the icons and made this.