Just before the holidays, Adobe did the unexpected and released a public beta of Photoshop CS3. One of the most notable features of the new version is a totally revamped interface. While Adobe has not announced the fact, it is widely expected that this is not just for Photoshop alone but will be the new interface for InDesign CS3 and other members of Adobe Creative Suite 3 as well.
You can still see the familiar Photoshop palettes in the new interface, but the way they are organized is new. They are arranged in vertical “stacks” called docks. You can easily click on the gray strip at the top of a dock to toggle the dock between its expanded view and a contracted view that shows only an icon for each palette. Clicking on a palette’s icon opens that palette. Clicking the icon again (or choosing another palette’s icon) closes it.
You can quickly add palettes to a dock or create new docks. Dragging a palette (or group of palettes) over a dock shows a thin blue drop zone, which indicates where the the palette or palette group will land if you release it. If you want to create a new vertical dock, when you drag a palette or palette group toward the edge of an existing dock, a gray receive strip animates out to indicate that dropping there will create a new dock.
The new interface makes very efficient use of limited screen real estate. It also ensures that palettes can’t hide behind other palettes which can easily happen in InDesign CS2. You also don’t have to turn your head sideways to read the labels as with InDesign’s current “stashed” palette interface. However, if you don’t like the dock system, you can still float palettes and palette groups as you can now.
There are other changes as well. By default the Toolbar opens at the left as a single column of tools. This takes up less space. But at any time, you can click at the top of the Toolbar to switch it to the more familiar two-column view.
One of my favorite features in the Photoshop CS3 beta is what happens when you hide all your palettes and the Toolbar by pressing the Tab key (the same behavior we’re familiar with in InDesign CS2). When the palettes are hidden, if you move your cursor to the edge of the screen, the palettes or Toolbar appear so you can select them. Moving the cursor away, hides them again.
To get a preview of these new features, it’s not necessary to download the Photoshop CS3 beta. There are several video podcasts which demonstrate the new interface: Check out Mordy Golding’s PEN 12.06 Special Edition, or Terry White’s Creative Suite podcast of 12/14. You can also read an interview John Nack, Photoshop product manager did with the interface designers on his blog.
Update: See this post for new CS3 information.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on December 29, 2006
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indesign, photoshop interface is s**t for mac. macs are s**t. coreldraw could teach adobe many things for user friendly
Adobe does not usually pre-announce the release dates of its products. However, it has been officially announced that Adobe Creative Suite 3 (and InDesign CS3) will be released in Q2 2007. Since Adobe’s financial year begins in December, this means the Mar – May 2007 range.
Does anyone know if there is an official release date scheduled for InDesign CS3? I’m looking to upgrade an auxiliary machine from CS for the improved inline graphic placement capabilities in CS2, but since I will have to upgrade the entire Suite, (I had initially assumed I’d be able to upgrade individual applications as needed but apparently thet’s not the case when you purchase the Suite.) I’d like to wait for InDesign CS3 to upgrade if it’s only a matter of a couple months.
The only thing I don’t like here is that the new icons leave a lot of grey space below them. Look at the screenshot. Before you would have seen more of the picture. In fact the scrollbar would have been on the far right, so you would also see the picture underneath the palettes as well. Much space has been lost this way. Though you can always reduce the palettes to their icons, which should give more room?
Hmm… looks like Freehand. I hope they implement some more nice features from Freehand.
I happen to use Photoshop most of the time, switching just occasionally to InDesign or Illustrator, so I?m happy already :-) But if they do make it into all CS apps, that would be just great!
(Happy New Year by the way!)
I love the icon view for palettes. It saves so much screen real estate! This new UI will definitely take some getting used to, but if Adobe adds this to InDesign in CS3, I think we’ll all get more productive in the long run. Thanks for the update, Steve.