Well, today’s over. It’s kinda late, but not really. I mean, it’s late back home but it’s somewhat early here. My body’s still on eastern time, so I’m struggling to stay awake. I wanted to get today’s thoughts down though, so I’m gonna soldier through a post and try to put some things down. My class in preconference was fairly straightforward and pretty awesome. Earlier, I had written that I was looking for insight into CS5 interoperability and I got it. We touched on every application in the Creative Suite Web Premium family, and some great stuff came out of it. For design-to-development iteration, I can think of no powerful tool than Creative Suite 5. Designing in Illustrator, Photoshop, and Fireworks, enabling “Creative” to work in an environment that they’re already comfortable with. From exporting concepts & proofs as interactive demos complete with clickable links and mockups of pages to creating fully immersive PDFs straight from Fireworks (complete with all the benefits of providing PDFs, taking advantage of Acrobat features like annotations and comments). The speed and flexibility of being able to rapidly revise pages before writing a single line of code means significant savings of effort, time and energy on the part of all involved while maintaining almost limitless flexibility during the design process. It’s quite simply amazing.
So I was pleased with what I played with today. Well… almost.
I’m really struggling with the Flash question. (I mean really, really struggling) I’ll probably need a little more time to wrap my head around how to both think about it and what I’ll say. But today was a good start. I definitely see reasons to immediately upgrade to CS5.
I’m just not sure how much of it I’ll actually use… right now.
