Clear your commitments this weekend and boot up your download manager: Adobe is set to unleash a public beta of its CS3 supersuite in the next few days.
The wait is nearly over: Adobe will release a public beta of Creative Suite 3 this weekend.
The new release will be downloadable from labs.adobe.com. One version will be for Windows XP and Vista and the other for Intel-based Macs based on a fully rewritten Cocoa-codebase.
Adobe has been the most noticeable hold-out in the move from the PowerPC-based platform to Intel. Some analysts have blamed slow takeup of Intel Macs in creative environments solely on the lack of availability of Creative Suite for Intel.
The arrival of the Universal Binary package of CS3 will change all that, and should prompt a downloading frenzy from the Mac community.
However, the Intel-native suite also stands to capitalise on the dramatic leaps in power which Mac notebooks and desktops have taken in recent months as Apple transitioned from x86 Intel chips to the faster Core 2 processors with dual-core and quad-core engines.
We're told that the beta would be available to all current licensed users of CS2, which means it'll be available to everyone on BitTorrent a day later.
One of the raft of new features are 'live filters' which, like CS2's live layers, apply the effects and let you perform further tweaking as you go, without destroying the original information in the image. This allows you to go back to any stage in the editing process and adjust or completely remove that filter, but without the undoing everything done since -- it's a neat surgical removal of that single step.
Also tipped to show up in the beta is a more customisable interface based on the front-end of After Effects 7 (just what we all need -- another UI change), extended support for 3D and Flash animation, a Device Library to preview how images will appear on the most common mobile phones, PDAs and smartphones, and closer integration with After Effects and Premier.
When will the final product touch down? APC diligently posed that very question to several Adobe staffers during the company's media Christmas drinks a fortnight ago, but despite plying them with cocktails and making cruel jokes about Microsoft's XPS format, none would say any more than "early Q2", indicating an April or May release is on the cards.