This is the final installment of my multi-part review of Adobe’s new Creative Suite, CS3. In Part 1: Dreamweaver, I looked at how easy it was to get a basic Web site up without any prior training in using Dreamweaver and in Part 2: Illustrator I used the vector drawing application to very quickly and (relatively easily) produce a nice 3D logo for the new Web site. Part 3 saw me using Photoshop with the new CS3 application Device Central to produce a wallpaper graphic for the Motorola RAZR, and in this part I’ll…Well, I’m not sure. I have to admit that my “can a layman use it” theme of this review was always likely to be the most severely challenged by Flash CS3 Professional, the subject of the last part of this review. For a start, would the layman really want to use this application, so identified as it is with advanced Web development?

One thing that gave me hope is the fact that the Flash CS3 UI, in line with all the other CS3 applications, has had many changes to make it more standardized, including the introduction of the “panels” feature that I wrote about in Part 3. Also, thanks to YouTube, I know that Flash does video. I therefore decided to see if I could use Flash to create a nicely packaged introductory video for visitors to the Web site, the construction of which has been the subject of these reviews.

I took several wrong steps before consultation with some online tutorials revealed that it’s actually a separate application, Flash Video Encoder, that handles video encoding for Flash. I had a 45 second clip that would substitute for an introductory video and, after some cross platform trickery (not involving Flash) to get it from the Windows based AVI file format into the Mac based MOV format I simply dragged it into the Flash Video Encoder window, accepted the defaults for the “Flash 8 - Medium Quality” setting and hit the “Start Queue” button to encode it. To be honest, once the video was ready I really wasn’t sure what type of Flash Project to start when faced with the Welcome Screen on opening Flash, so I quit the application and opened the file directly, guessing that Flash would automatically  open the right workspace for the file. This it did, after prompting me for the deployment format for the video. Having accepted the default “Progressive download from a web server” I was presented with a choice of “Skins”, or player designs, in which to present the video, and was able to customize the color of the skin by picking a Web safe color - very cool, and very easy. The final stage was the Finish Video Import dialogue box which is very verbose, and gives precise details of what file needs to be placed where in order for the video to work on your Web site, and also features a handy checkbox to view video topics in Flash Help when finished. After some fiddling with parameters via the Component Inspector and a number of false starts I was able to to publish the video and test it playing in a Web page.

Although I eventually produced something useable I have to say that Flash Professional, as I feared, ultimately proved too complex for layman’s use (or certainly this layman’s use). It took me much longer, many false starts and frequent references to the Help files and online resources to wrangle something useable, and my reluctant conclusion is that this application, at least, is better left to the professionals - hence the Flash Professional name, I guess.

Conclusions

So what have I proved from this series of reviews of some of the CS3 applications? Well hopefully I’ve shown that, excluding very specialist applications such as Flash Professional, the core Core CS3 applications that appear in most versions of the bundle: Adobe Photoshop CS3/CS3 Extended; Adobe Illustrator CS3; and Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, despite being powerful programs, are all usable by the non-specialist. Although the price for a small business ($1,599 for Creative Suite 3 Web Premium and $1,799 for Creative Suite 3 Design Premium, $999 and $1,199 respectively for the Standard editions) may seem high, especially for the smaller small businesses, it compares favorably with perhaps having to spend thousands of dollars on Web designers, especially if you have to keep going back to them for minor graphical tweaks/refreshes. Don’t get me wrong: I’m definitely an advocate for hiring professionals to do a professional job and I’m in no way recommending that small business owners should all try and put together their own Web sites. However, in reality many small businesses cannot afford to pay professionals to do everything and an investment in one of the CS3 Suites and some time spent learning the basics may produce something worthwhile until that business can afford to get a professional in.

So then to part 3 of my multi-part review of Adobe’s new Creative Suite, CS3. In Part 1: Dreamweaver, I looked at how easy it was to get a basic Web site up without any prior training in using Dreamweaver (pretty easy actually) and in Part 2: Illustrator I used the vector drawing application to very quickly and (relatively easily) produce a nice 3D logo for the new Web site.

For this part I’ll be reviewing the new CS3 version of Photoshop, arguably Adobe’s best known application along with Acrobat, and in my view easily the best pixel wrangling program out there. Having already declared my hand I guess I’ll give the game away upfront with my conclusion that the new version makes an already excellent application even better. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the second part of a multi-part review of Adobe’s new Creative Suite, CS3. In Part 1: Using Dreamweaver, I looked at how easy it was to get a basic Web site up without any prior training in using Dreamweaver (pretty easy actually) and in the following parts I”ll be using other programs in CS3 to add elements to that Web site.

Next up: Illustrator, to make myself a nice logo for my new Web site. Now I know next to nothing about Illustrator, Adobe’s vector drawing application, and if I’m honest being a Photoshop user I’ve always been a little intimidated by it. However, in keeping with the ethos of this collection of reviews I decided to dive straight in and see what could be done just by using the application. Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t need much persuading from Adobe to review the newest version of their Creative Suite (CS3). As a company Adobe has long been at the forefront of innovation in the printing, graphics and design software space, principally with Acrobat and Photoshop (among others) to the point where they are now undoubtedly the market leader. Following the acquisition of Macromedia they have extended this market lead into the Web design/content/multimedia space with Dreamweaver, Flash, Contribute et al. (See here for my review of the previous version of Contribute). Read the rest of this entry »

For the latest in our series of quick hardware reviews I’ve just given the HP Officejet J5700 All-in-One a quick spin.

The HP Officejet J5700 is compact, easy to set up, fast and, at about $135, very keenly priced. As a printer it’s competent producing decent quality color and black and white prints, although photos printed on brochure paper are a bit washed out using the default ink set supplied with the unit. Setting up the fax function is easy and quick and HP provides a comprehensive fax setup guide that covers all the different combinations of fax, phone line and dialup/DSL line sharing that the SOHO user is likely to encounter, with instructions on how to configure the machine for each scenario. Impressive. Copying is easy - just a case of putting the page to be copied in the automatic feeder and choosing from 3 quality levels and whether to copy in color or black and white. Normal quality in color provides acceptable copy quality and is fast too. For scanning plenty of “scan to”options are provided for routing the scanned document to your editing software of choice and the OCR functionality works well enough with standard documents in portrait layout. However, when I tried to OCR a certificate in landscape layout the OCR software could not cope at all, which was disappointing. Read the rest of this entry »

We don’t do traditional SYSmark or PCMark test benchmarking here at the Small Business Technology Magazine. When we test a piece of hardware or software we incorporate it into what we know to be a typical small business systems environment (sometimes a couple of flavors of such an environment) in order that we can see how the products perform in something approximating the real world.

So when the good folks at Dell sent an Optiplex 745 loaded with Microsoft’s new Windows Vista Business operating system we were primarily concerned with testing two things: Read the rest of this entry »

Following an earlier blog post on Synology’s DS107 I’ve been provided with its big cousin, the CS407, to review.

The CS407 is, in Synology’s words, a “High-performance, Low-cost 4-bay SATA NAS Server with Advanced Data Protection and Windows ADS Authentication for Small Business…” Currently, the market is awash with small form factor SATA based Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. Our reference product for NAS devices suitable for small businesses here at the Small Business Technology Magazine is the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+, a really top performer in an incredibly small and quite form factor. In fact it’s so good we recently awarded it one of our coveted “Product Of The Year” awards. Netgear must agree with us too, because they recently announced an intended acquisition of Infrant. So I was eager to see how the CS407 stacks up against the ReadyNAS NV+. Read the rest of this entry »

As if to underline the prescience of my post the other day, a vendor (Bitam) has uploaded a demo video of their Artus dashboard product to our DemoLounge site. See it here.

I was on the phone yesterday to Richard Heitmann, Vice President of Product Marketing/Management at EVault, to get a briefing on their SMB product line. I’ll talk about this at greater length in a forthcoming post but if you can’t wait there’s product details here. However, it’s something that Richard alluded to as a feature of their product offering, a web based management dashboard, that interested me because coincidentally I’d been wanting to write a post about the importance of dashboards as a management tool and the increasing number of software applications targeted at small businesses that are including this functionality. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello everyone. My apologies for not having posted for a while. Rather than bore you with excuses, and to make up for it, I’ve decided to do a quick roundup of small business technology products that have caught my eye in the past couple of weeks and which I think are worthy of consideration by small business owners. No particular theme to any products mentioned, other than they are worth a look: Read the rest of this entry »