Points & Paths

According to various sources, none of them Adobe, Adobe Illustrator CS5 will ship in late April as part of the Adobe Creative Suite. According to a report on the CS5 web site, an advert for a digital printing conference in April reads “Adobe will unveil a brand new application as part of its signature suite of services. Be among the first to see why this is sure to surprise even the most ‘in the know’ Adobe fans”.

Traditionally, Adobe follows an 18-month release cycle for its products which puts April in their sites for a major release. This cycle has remained pretty consistent since I began using Illustrator about 10 years ago. So CS5 in April and CS6 in October 2011

As for new features, details remain very slim. There will be the usual interface tweaks to make all of the applications look and feel the same for consistency and familiarity. At a software demo last October, Adobe demonstrated better integration between Dreamweaver and Illustrator through a process called FXG which stands for Flash XML Graphics. Apparently, vector objects remain as vector objects within Dreamweaver rather than becoming rasterized. This could certainly make editing the original graphics a lot easier. More info on the demo can be found at the CS5 site.

Beyond those details, I can only speculate about new features. There were mutterings in the past about bringing the graphing and charting tools into the 21st century but, clearly, that’s not something that would get designers – or shareholders – excited. I’d certainly like to see a performance update to the 3D effects as they’re achingly slow to use. Also maybe a thoughtful way to combine all of the various color features? I’m looking at you Live Color, Color panel, Color Guide, and Swatches panel!

Well, that’s all of the gossip and rumor mongering I’m qualified to offer at this point. Perhaps someone out there can provide more insight in the comments or let everyone know what killer feature they’d like to see in CS5.