Adobe, who only last week was denying Creative Suite 4 release date rumors (or that the next version of Photoshop will be called Photoshop CS4), has just released the first CS4 betas for three of their products. Early versions of the next-generation of Soundbooth, Dreamweaver and Fireworks are all available for download for both Mac and Windows (Soundbooth is only available for Intel Macs).

Dreamweaver and Fireworks were both part of Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia in 2005, and to us, neither program felt fully integrated with the existing Adobe products in CS3. The CS4 betas promise to provide better Creative Suite integration (especially for Fireworks users) as well as providing some great new features.

Dreamweaver now boasts a Live View Mode so that users can see real-time previews without having to leave the program. Fireworks features a new user interface and compatibility with other Adobe technologies. The big news with Soundbooth is support for multi-track editing.

The beta applications will be active for only 48 hours, unless you are an existing CS3 customer. If you already have a CS3 license for the product your are trying, you can continue to use the CS4 betas until the final release.

Thanks Kent!

Ryan Stewart, Evangelist for Adobe's Integrated Runtime project (AIR), takes a few minutes to tell us what all the fuss is about. Ryan taking part in Adobe's live cross-country bus tour to promote AIR. The tour kicks July 10th at the Elysian Brewing Company in downtown Seattle.

DS: Can you briefly describe Adobe AIR?

Ryan: Adobe AIR is a cross-platform runtime that allows you to build desktop applications with web technologies. It runs on top of your operating system so that developers can build applications in AIR that take advantage of OS features without having to develop the application for a specific operating system. And instead of needing to learn desktop languages like C or Coco, you can take Ajax or Flash and build desktop apps with them.

DS: Why should consumers and average computers users be excited about Adobe AIR?

Ryan: I think the biggest reason that users should be excited is because they'll have a lot more applications to choose from. Web apps have become all the rage and part of the reason is that they're easy to build and people can jump in quickly. We wanted to capture some of that with AIR and bring it to the desktop. Hopefully users will see more apps like the Pownce desktop client, Finetune and Tweetr.

DS: Can you give an example of how an Adobe AIR application could use a web service and a person¹s computer hard drive to build something that isn¹t possible with the web alone?

Ryan: Being able to read and write to the hard drive gives you a lot of storage options and also lets you hook into parts of native applications. For instance the Finetune desktop client looks at your iTunes.xml file and figures out which artists you might like. It then allows you to listen to a radio station based on those artists. With AIR you can also associate files with your application, so you can create your own new file format or write a viewer for other file types.

DS: What is the coolest AIR application you¹ve seen so far?

Ryan: I really like the way Finetune integrates with their website, but I just got to check out Pownce, Kevin Rose's new project, and their desktop client is pretty cool. For pure silliness Dryerfox is classic. There are a ton of AIR applications at AirApps.net and ApolloHunter.com for people to try.

DS: What type of services or assists can Adobe AIR applications connect to?

CS3 pricing is out, and it looks a bit high! Amazon might have let the cat out of the bag a little early when it comes to the not yet released Adobe CS3 applications. Officially CS3 is due out on March 27th, but Amazon accidentally flipped the switch to show the pricing of the newly designed creative suite a day earlier.

The pricing structure looks like this:

• Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Web Premium - $1599
• Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Master Collection - $2499
• Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Production Premium - $1199
• Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Design Premium - $1599

We know we weren't the only users grinding our teeth hoping that Adobe might bring the pricing down slightly, but that looks like that's out of the question for now.

DLS wants to know - If you are dishing out and buying into the new CS3, which version do you have your sights set on?

Check out a chart that displays what applications are bundled with which version in the new CS3 here.

[via Gizmodo]

The springtime is full of growth, and that's no exception for the creative software market. Adobe has just dropped the news that it will be announcing Adobe Creative Suite 3 March 27th, 2007 in New York City, with the full product shipping later in spring 2007.

If you can't be there on site, you can also tune into Adobe's live webcast where they will reveal all of the new features and configurations. Adobe says that this will be the largest software release in their 25 year history. Could this new CS3 include all of the recently acquired Macromedia products like Flash? It currently does carry Dreamweaver in the 2.3 Premium CS package. Now that would make for a slamming package! I don't want to see the price tag for that one.

During last week's Adobe Live event, Adobe announced that it would halt development of Freehand and GoLive, according to Macsimum News. The programs are the first to be axed since Adobe's acquisition of the company late last year. Their elimination is not unexpected, though, since the products overlapped Adobe's Illustrator and Macromedia's Dreamweaver, respectively. Though the programs' development will cease, Adobe intends to continue to support the products, and back in April the company released a Freehand to Illustrator migration guide (PDF).

[Image from Flash Insider]

The million-dollar question: will Microsoft's Expression package (which includes Graphic, Interactive, and Web Designer flavors) dethrone Adobe as king of multimedia creation? Today, according to Techworld, Microsoft's Expression Web Designer will be released as a Community Technology Preview today. The big difference between this tool and Adobe's Dreamweaver? According to the one guy quoted in the article, it's deep support for ASP 2.0. I'll admit, Dreamweaver's pretty lame when it comes to working in ASP (although to be honest I'm still stuck in ASP 1.1 land myself). But the question is really: will consumers upgrade to Vista fast enough for Windows Presentation Framework to be relevant? In other words, just buying Expression won't guarantee clients or customers can see your coolio new content. Granted, WPF can be installed across a variety of machines that don't need Vista (they released an OS X version, in fact). But with an installed user base for Flash hovering around 98+ percent, are consumers going to download yet another framework? Anyone remember the Great Code Hope that was .NET? We'll see. I still think Adobe and Macromedia were smart to merge before Vista hits though... Just for the record though, I am actually pretty excited about Windows Presentation Framework. If nothing else, it'll force Adobe to continue making Flash better.