Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that it’s time for a new version of Adobe Creative Suite. And I can tell you that I am incredibly excited by CS5 – it is by far the biggest release of the suite, and packed with over 250 major features, spread across 13 products. If you missed the launch event, you can still see it on the Adobe web site.

For the products that I deal with the most, namely Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash and Photoshop, this release really changes the game. As you probably know, I have been involved with every version of Dreamweaver since version 2 (yes, I know that makes me really old). And every time we release a new version, there is always talk of “the best version ever”. This time around is no different – but I mean it… really, I do! And judging from the comments on Twitter during the launch event, the community seems to be blown away as well. (more…)

Over the past several days, the excitement surrounding our “announcement” that CS5 is coming has really been amazing. The Twittersphere has been a-buzz with people asking when CS5 will be released, what’s new in their favorite product, what’s it going to cost and a multitude of other questions, hopes, suggestions and general comments. My favorite question making the rounds right now is whether or not the videos of Content Aware Fill, which the Photoshop team has posted on Facebook, is in fact real. Well, I can definitely confirm that it IS real – and I even got to sneak it to a few people at SxSW. If you are on Twitter, have a look at the #CS5 hashtag to follow the conversation. If you are a Facebook’er, check out our many fan pages to join in the discussion around your favorite product. (more…)

As much as we would like it to go away, the sad reality of web design today is that there is still a significant number of people out there who surf the web with Internet Explorer 6. And, in many cases, it’s not their fault – they just can’t help themselves! No, really, they can’t – because they work in corporate environments where their IT department has their machines locked down. For those of us who have had the dubious pleasure of experiencing a large corporate IT department, you know how slow they can be in upgrading anything. I’ve heard anecdotes as recently as a few months ago or departments just now beginning their move from Windows 2000. Sad, but true.

As a web designer, the need to support Internet Explorer also means that you have to make a ton of other trade-offs. One of which, I myself had (un)happily accepted as a fact of life, the inability to leverage PNGs for transparency. Now, before we go any further, I realize that there are several Javascript approaches to achieving transparency, but none of the ones that I have tried have “worked” in every circumstance. That’s why I was so pleasantly surprised that a solution had been under my nose for many, many years and I simply hadn’t known about it. (more…)