Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 review

EPub is still a fairly limited format, though, and best suited to eBooks. The real excitement comes from designing for tablets, which are much more flexible when it comes to typography, layouts and interactive features. Flash-based tablet apps would have been a natural fit, thanks to CS5’s extensive Flash support, but Apple’s refusal to support Adobe’s Flash and Air platforms gave Adobe a headache. The company has got around this with its Folio Producer tools. InDesign CS 5.5’s Overlay Creator lets you add content to your layouts such as slideshows, 360-degree tours, web and audio and video content. You can then export the layout as a Folio file, which can be read by Adobe’s Content Viewer app – which will be available on Android, BlackBerry and iPad.

Another big advantage is a subscription model. While you had to download each edition of early iPad magazines manually, Adobe’s Digital Publishing Platform lets users subscribe and have editions delivered to their device automatically. It’s not cheap, though – the cheapest subscription to the web-based service is $495 a month, and Adobe will also charge you platform fees depending on how many publications you want to deliver – starting at the basic package of $5,500 for 25,000 downloads. There will also be the vendor’s cut, such as 30% to Apple to be hosted in the App Store. Print publishing isn’t cheap either, so despite the charges we’re sure many publishers will jump at the chance to have an effective distribution model for their electronic magazines.

DESIGN PREMIUM

The chief additions to Design Premium are Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks. Fireworks, the graphical, non-HTML web design tool, is unchanged, but Dreamweaver and Flash are updated. Dreamweaver CS5 was criticised for not including HTML5 support, but CS5.5 lets you code in HTML5 and its preview section supports HTML5’s video and canvas tags – which lets you draw vector graphics using JavaScript. CSS3 support is also now included in Dreamweaver’s CSS Styles panel.