A brief thought on Photoshop CS3 Beta

The ubiquitous Photoshop icon, the eye, is not on the tool palette. [begin update] And yes it’s been missing since CS…but it didn’t really strike me until the CS3 beta at just how profound it’s missing is to me. John Nack at Adobe has the reasoning behind the new icon. I like the font being used. [end update] Oh and CS3 is definitely on my upgrade list. Perhaps I should cut the leadership at Adobe some slack. (See my “Waiting for Adobe” post). But they better make sure that Illustrator is just as useful. Perhaps with multiple page handling? And Acrobat – please make sure that in your haste to address enterprise markets you don’t forget us designers and creative folk. Good looking PDFs are important. And are probably more useful then generic server produced PDFs. InDesign – I’ve always felt the XML handling was a bit…under executed. And it would be neat to have built-in support for database publishing…I know, buy one of the several 3rd party plug-ins available. I’m just saying that that kind of functionality would be really nice to have built in. But I see good things coming out of Adobe and I am excited that they let the general public get a peak at it’s flagship product. The transparency makes me hopeful that the Macromedia acquisition wasn’t just to get rid of a competitor but to build better products in the long run.