FWIW, I can tell you all that Creative Suite 5 is a MUCH better upgrade than was Creative Suite 4.

I have Macromedia Studio 8 in the closet, CS3 3.0, 3.3, BLAH

Was the upgrade to CS4 worth it for me? Definitely yes. After working with it a while I definitely saw a time savings in masking. The improved dodge and burn, improved zoom, etc also saved time. I enjoyed additional savings in more filters being non-destructive. Bridge was an improvement as well. Again, for me, it was well worth the upgrade.

So I will probably be upgrading to CS5 once I know it plays well with my Mac.

Not affiliated with Adobe in any way.

What would I like to see in CS5?

• How about text in tables treated like any other text. Why can’t footnotes be in tables?!? At least the text now shows up in the editor. (For that matter, why do endnotes require a plugin? Are endnotes too new and trendy to make in the app yet?)

• Fire the CS4’s interface designer. As a Mac user, why on earth would I want the Windows interface? Wouldn’t I just use a PC if I wanted that? And please, for the love of pixels, bring back CS3’s interface artwork. CS3’s interface design makes me happy just launching the app (I’m not kidding. It’s beautiful.). CS4’s is hideous (and what’s with ALL THE YELLING in the interface text?). Shouldn’t a design apps interface look like it came out of a design house, not Redmond, WA circa 1995 (What’s next, tool bar buttons for New, Save, Cut, Copy, and Paste)?

• More sophisticated table layout tools. I haven’t given any thought as to how to make it better (I’m not a programmer), but I’d like a more definite way to layout table than the tab-stop dragging method, shifting sands way that all apps use today. Maybe something with a layout grid and guides to form the cells?

• Why do I need Acrobat to do forms? I realize most full-time designers have the whole suite, but I don’t. Just Photoshop and InDesign. It seems an arbitrary and silly distinction to make to force people to buy Acrobat to do forms when InDesign already does so much with tables. Especially with all of the interactive tools Adobe keeps adding to InDesign from other apps.

I think the real problem Adobe faces is that while there are some cools additions to its flagship apps from version to version (yes, the alignment guides, something that CAD has been doing for decades, and GREP styles are cool to me, but not must haves), they’re already pretty mature products. There isn’t a lot they can add that will blow people away. That’s why my little company has been only getting every other version of Photoshop for years now. That, and Adobe, Apple, and M$ all getting on the bandwagon with coding only for high end machines and “letting the hardware catch-up.” (aka, “let’s shift everything to really expensive video card processors” for one.) It gets a little expensive for really small companies to keep up, if you have to keep replacing all of your hardware and peripherals just to keep up with what, from the outside, appears to be minor software updates. (Note: I use InDesign and PhotoShop as adjuncts to what I do for my company, and are only a part of the end result.)

Sorry for the cranky rants, don’t really mean it sound hostile. I haven’t had my caffeine today.

Whether I upgrade to CS5’s InDesign depends on the features it offers, but as someone else has noted, spread over two years, keeping with the latest version costs about 50 cents a day. That’s not only less than a latte-a-day at Starbucks, it’s less than making your own coffee. Adobe has always added more than enough features to justify that small charge.

What features would I like? I’ve already told Adobe that they need to make linking frames less clumsy with a pair of features that could be called Named Frames and Smart Frames. You’d give a frame a name when you create it and all frames with that name are automatically linked. (You can still create the old sort of frames.) Smart Frames then links them in an order that applies 99% of the time: top to bottom, left to right and in page order. It’d be marvelous for magazines and newspapers and also save me time as I create books. No more manually linking. I hate linking.

As a writer, editor and publisher, I’m also becoming concerned about being able to create once and release in many formats. Until the ebook market settles on one or two standard formats, I’d love to see InDesign smart enough to export in all of them and not just Flash and ePub. Keep in mind that most are so crude, exporting in them wouldn’t be nearly as hard as exporting to ePub or PDF.

New formats often mean new page sizes, and InDesign needs to make changing page sizes easier by creating a feature than makes doing it more obvious. I’ve managed to change the size of books without making hash of them, but the process was so unintuitive and riddled with the ‘black arts,’ that every time I do it, I have to figure it out again. It’d be better to have a Change Page Size window where we could specify the new size and check off various options.

Adobe also needs to sort out the mess that’s been created by trying to market their product as parts of a Creative Suite. For design firms, that may make sense. For the Rest of Us, it creates pressure to make more upgrades than we want or none at all. I upgrade InDesign every time, but only upgrade Photoshop when my right to an upgrade is about to expire. The rest of their products seem to offer so little, I resent the few features that Adobe puts in them that pressure me to buy.

Why, for instance, do I need Acrobat to make a PDF so reviewers can comment on it? It must be little more than a flag in the PDF. I should be able to do that in InDesign. And why can’t InDesign do ’round trip’ PDF editing? A document created in InDesign would create a PDF that reviewers could comment on and return. InDesign could then import and present those comments on the page where they were made. It’s something Acrobat already does with Word documents. Why not do the same with InDesign and from within InDesign? That’d save a lot of time.

–Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle

There are those who say “if it works, don’t fix it” but how do you know what you are missing? Are you progressing in your skillset? your talent? your offerings to your clients?
Quark 3?! You are doing yourself and your clients a disservice – don’t mean to be disrespectful but InDesign 1.0 was better than Quark 3 and our team was relieved to ditch that buggy behemoth that cost us time and credibility with our projects. The world has changed a lot in the last couple years and Adobe is keeping up with that.

Every technology upgrade costs money and some are beter than others, but I have to say that every cent we put into tools and always pays back in dividends.

Upgrading 25 seats is painful, and it is too bad Adobe doesn’t have better (cheaper) upgrade paths for volume clients, but if the tools make you money and are the basis of your income, is this the place to scrimp?!