A revised beta build of Bridge CS3 is available on Adobe Labs, and Bridge PM Gunar Penikis has posted a detailed overview via the Bridge CS3 beta forum. Highlights include a new flat view (useful for browsing nested folders as if everything were on one level), better multi-monitor support, a fixed memory leak, and loupe tool improvements. Please let us know whaty you think via the Bridge forum.
John:
I’ve heard rumours that CS3 is going to abandon those of us that choose to remain on Windows 2000 (for whatever reason).
[Andrzej, that’s correct. –J.]
Is that true? Is Adobe going to try to force users that want CS3 to use a particular Windows version (XP or Vista)?
[It’s not a matter of wanting to force anyone to switch. Rather, it’s a matter of spending our resources wisely. Adobe doesn’t get paid by making you upgrade your OS or hardware, yet we can’t afford to maintain unlimited backward compatibility while simultaneously taking advantage of Vista, the latest Mac OS features, etc. –J.]
You did that with Premier….and so I (and many others) didn’t buy the upgrade, and still haven’t. Nice revenue loss….and it becomes permanent since many look for alternatives.
[It’s not, really. We’d lose more revenue by hamstringing the feature set and architecture of our applications in order to support older OSes. I mean, if we had to make everything work on Win95, or 98, or OS 9, or whatever, we’d do a lot of additional work and testing to implement things multiple ways. The result would be weaker features & consequently less revenue. It’s a trade-off no matter how you slice it. –J.]
Now that Premier will be available on a Mac (some time down the road), think maybe Adobe will relax the XP requirement?
[I’m afraid not. –J.]
Is the new JPG editing feature non-destructive? That would be such a nice feature if the edits were in a sidecar file or somehow could convert into a DNG file. Just a thought.
[Yes, the editing is non-destructive. There’s no need to save a sidecar file, because JPEG–like DNG–can store rich metadata (XMP) internally. Therefore edits can be written into the header of a JPEG file, leaving the pixels alone. –J.]