Adobe Creative Cloud releases always get me a bit excited, because, like every other web professional, I look forward to tools that make what I do more efficient and, ultimately, easier. Because skills in applications like Photoshop are simply so integral to this business, familiarity with Adobe’s technology isn’t really optional, it’s a must-have. As a rule, Adobe gets it right, although I have been a bit disappointed in some of their priorities over the past two or three years. In any case, the 2015 Creative Cloud release leaves me with a lot of excitement, and a lot of disappointment.
Adobe’s Releases Still Merit Using Caution
Some releases are bigger than others, but you should always treat new versions of software differently than periodic updates. When I’m in the middle of big projects, I almost never update mission-critical applications on my primary machine. My work computer is a MacBook Pro, but I also use my Creative Cloud account on the family computer, a desktop Mac. Since that’s the realm of my Lightroom adventures and not as critical to daily life, I will often update applications there and play around with them before I run the updates on the work machine. I always advise this, and I’m very glad that I did in this case.
There are a lot changes in this release, and I’m not going to detail all, or even most, of them in this post, only the ones to which I have the strongest reaction.
Adobe’s Focus on Responsive Design
I do a lot of responsive design and development. As such, one of the lesser-known applications that I felt had so much potential from Adobe over the last two years was Edge Reflow. The process of designing a clickable prototype and being able to demo the responsive flow between breakpoints to a client in the browser was fantastic, and it quickly won me over as a go-to tool. Like the rest of the Edge suite, it remained somewhat experimental…annoyingly obvious in the fact that clients still can’t view a Reflow document in a shared folder like they can documents created in the other major desktop applications…but still extremely valuable to my workflow. With the 2015 release, we’ve seen a lot of Reflow’s features moved over into Dreamweaver.
Now, Dreamweaver has a bad reputation in many circles, and rightfully so in a lot of ways, because the design functions can spit out some spaghetti code that will give developers nightmares. Still, Adobe has done a lot with this application lately, and, because I’ve been using it for a specific workflow for a client over the last couple of months, I’m more attuned to what they’re doing with their flagship code editor. The first thing that I noticed was that the responsive design capabilities from Edge Reflow, specifically the visual design and preview of responsive breakpoints, have moved over to Dreamweaver. They’ve also introduced tight integration with Twitter Bootstrap components into Dreamweaver. I use Bootstrap a fair amount of the time, so this is nice to see, mostly because I think that individuals who use the design functionality in Dreamweaver will have (at least slightly) more standards-compliant code on their hands (perhaps when I pick these Dreamweaver-designed projects up in the future, I won’t have as many nightmares).
One of the decent things about Dreamweaver was always its ability to handle most languages thoroughly, unlike Adobe’s other offerings in the code editor space, which are focused on front-end languages. I need an editor that can handle PHP well, and Dreamweaver will generally do okay in this regard, at least with the basics like syntax and error highlighting. There’s an annoying feature in the new release, though, that prompts you to set up a test server when you open a PHP file. I honestly can’t imagine a workflow where this feature would be handy…at least it doesn’t fit mine at all, and there’s no accounting for version control. This nag was quickly turned off for me.
There’s some other nice additions to Dreamweaver…built-in lint validation and Emmet, among them, so it’s worth taking a peak at the editor everyone loves to hate.
Photoshop: My Biggest Disappointment
Let me start with the positive first, and that would be Artboards. Photoshop now allows you to place multiple comps for various devices in a single PSD, with preset dimensions for various mobile devices. This is a nice meld between Illustrator and Photoshop, and I’m very impressed with this feature so far. It’s going to be extremely useful in my responsive design workflow. Also, if you’re a user of Edge Inspect at all, the ability to view your responsive design in real-time on your phone or tablet at the design phase will be very attractive. Integration of Photoshop with the Preview app (I’ve used it on iOS only) has been flawless for me so far.
But then, the disappointment. And this time, it’s big.
A huge percentage of the time when I’m working in Photoshop, I’m optimizing images for projects. I’d almost go so far as to say that 85% of the time I’m in the application, I’m using it to expediently optimize images for the web. Adobe has always provided extensive tools to this end with the Save for Web functionality, and that functionality is the feature that even web developers who almost never touch Photoshop know how to use. In this release, Adobe has moved this functionality to a submenu, and labeled it “Legacy.” It’s still there, but you have to dig for it.
The technology that’s replaced it something called Generator, which you can read about here. It’s spiffy, don’t get me wrong, but it’s hopelessly inadequate when compared to Save for Web. The level of control that Save for Web provides…2-up and 4-up previews, download times via different connections, color table filtering, in-browser previewing…none of this exists within Generator. Adobe claims (in a bit of a touchy comment chain that I held with them on their blog) that this change is intended to make life easier for designers and developers, but I can’t fathom how that’s the case. This smacks of those occasions when Apple dumbs down software interfaces to make them more palatable to the average end-user. If I wanted to use end-user software, I could use Apple Photos. Photoshop is a professional application that we’re using in professional settings. Professionals need control, very granular control over every option and facet of an asset for a project. Removing that control is counter-productive.
The fact that Adobe has labeled Save for Web as “Legacy” is the biggest concern of all, because it feels as though they will retire this functionality at some point. Adobe’s official line is that it won’t happen until all of the options found in Save for Web are re-located elsewhere, but I still have a feeling that I’m going to be progressively more disappointed in Photoshop in the coming months. For now, I still have not updated to the new version on my work machine.
Adobe Seems to Consider the Web as an Afterthought
I used to be a die-hard lover of Fireworks. In fact, the last time that I was this disappointed in an Adobe release was when it was announced that Fireworks would no longer be supported. The reason that I loved Fireworks was because it offered the design and image-management tools that web professionals needed, without the extra weight of the photographer’s tools in Photoshop. Designing a wireframe or a comp was a very smooth experience in Fireworks.
One of the things that I liked so much about Edge Reflow was that it was built to the way that a developer thinks. The interface used CSS properties and DOM elements, rather than photography tools that always felt re-purposed for design. I felt as though I was using a prototyping tool meant specifically for the medium, not a tool that was attempting to work with all mediums. Reflow was, I hoped, what Adobe was going to use to fill the niche that Fireworks left void. As development on Reflow doesn’t appear to be active right now, I doubt that’s the case.
Adobe seems to consider the web as an afterthought. That is, they seem to add web design tools onto graphic design or photography tools that are ultimately meant for other mediums. It’s never firmly under one roof, at least not since Fireworks. We’re left bouncing between two or three pieces of software to design our sites or applications. I’d love to see Adobe focus a single tool on web design, as they have with most other mediums, and give web professionals tools that will truly streamline our workflow. Using multiple Adobe applications for any given project is normal, but being able to consolidate a bit more would certainly make me feel as though they still have developers’ best interests in mind.