Why is CS4 restricting the way I prefer to work?
abstractium77 Nov 25, 2009 9:22 AMI just recently switched from CS3 to CS4 and I'm incredibly disappointed at how Adobe has seen fit to make changes that only makes things more complicated for the user, and it's been done for either no logical reason or even worse, cosmetic reasons.
1. First thing I noticed of course is that the canvas outside of the artboard is now a light grey color versus the former pure white. As someone who generally uses the canvas as my workspace to keep the work in progress stuff on and have the artboard be used for the final designs, having it be another color (that I can't change!) is a big difference. You may disagree, but for me working with color means there IS a big difference between having 245/245/245 and 255/255/255 in the background. With so many options to change the color of all the rulers, guidelines, etc., why not offer an option to change the canvas color if you are so bent on having it be a light grey? Yes, it goes away if I hide artboards, or use the Overprint Preview, but I actually use the artboard's frames for my final design, and Illustrator exits the Overprint Preview once I go in and out of Outline mode (which I do often) so that's not an option either.
2. I've always used Smart Guides, and CS4 changes these as well, replacing what we had (snapping to lines, anchors, etc.) to the new way of it trying to align you to anchors and center points of other shapes at even angles. Now the new way can certainly be very useful, but this isn't an addition, it's putting in a completely different function and removing something so basic as snapping one point to another line. At first I was ready to abandon CS4, but by accident I found out that if I hold down the Command key it'll work as it used to. Even though I'm glad I still have access to the way I prefer to work, and to a function that doesn't exist in the standard CS4 Smart Guides, it's silly to need to hold down a key to do something so fundamental as snapping one shape to another, especially since those functions in themselves don't conflict with the new Smart Guide functionalities. Why not combine them, or offer an option in the preferences to either use Smart Guides "1.0" or "2.0".
3. Then there's the Eye Dropper tool. I don't know if this is a bug, but I'm going to have to assume it is because it works very randomly. It seems to always pick up on a shape's color regardless, but unless I'm using a shape CREATED inside the artboard in the same document as my source, it won't take other characteristics like opacity and blending mode along with it. Right now inside my artboard I have two shapes created within this document, both using the Multiply blending mode, and I have two other shapes that were copied and pasted in from another document that are also set to Multiply. Next to those I have two other solid color shapes that I want to apply the colors to, opacity and blending modes to. If I source from the objects created within the document, it applies all those things to them, but if I source from the objects copied from another document, it only takes the color. Absolutely bizarre.
I can only deduct that Adobe is hell-bent on having us use multiple artboards and only work within those, but why even have a canvas area at all in that case? You might as well just have the entire canvas be an artboard from the get-go and just remove the canvas because it's been rendered useless, and now I have to make one giant artboard the size of the canvas to be able to work in some way similar to what I've been used to. Not to say this is an enormous inconvenience, it certainly feels like CS4 has taken several steps backwards when I have to take extra steps, hold down extra keys just to get extremely basic functions like snapping shapes to each other, or be able to use the canvas.
The sad thing is that most of these things could so easily be fixed just with adding options in the preferences. Give me the option to change the canvas color (or remove it completely and turn it into an artboard from the start). Give me the option to use Smart Guides the way I want to without having to hold down keys for such simple, basic functions. And fix the damn Eye Dropper tool, CS4 is a whole year old by now, there's no excuse to still have bugs like that.
Maybe I'm a nitpick, maybe I'm stuck in my ways, but I would like to think that Adobe would prioritize allowing the users of their software to do their work in the way they prefer to work, and CS4 has mostly limited my ability to work the way I prefer so far. A real shame.


