The much anticipated launch of Adobe’s CS4 product range and Flash Player 10 happened today.This brings with it many exciting new developments.

Creative Suite 4

Whatever you think about the logo (and the price), the products in the new CS4 suite bring some major improvements. There’s the content-aware scaling in Photoshop, which somehow identifies the key parts of an image, and scales the bits around them. As well as more advanced 3D editing tools, improvements to smart objects, and increased non-destructive editing abilities.

I’m also glad to see the back of the annoying floating windows, with the introduction of a new tab-based unified UI accross all products. Plus there’s much closer integration with the former Macromedia products (Flash, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver). While CS3 went some way towards this, they only had half of a product cycle to do it, but now they’ve had a full one it should be air-tight.

Flash Player 10

The thing I’m most excited about however, is the introduction of 3D to flash as I mentioned in a previous post. This is a significant advancement and something that many of us have been awaiting for a long time. Not to mention the introduction of After Effects-style motion path editing and inverse kinematics tools.

All of us at IE are keen to embrace new technology, so expect to see some great new projects from us in the near future.