Yesterday evening I went to the Adobe CS4 presentation in Ghent with Bunker. Koen De Weggheleire, from the Adobe User Group Belgium, organized this free event to celebrate the Creative Suite 4 launch. We even got some champaign! Sadly, we had to leave early to catch the last train and missed the BBQ.

Klaasjan Tukker & Ton Frederiks

Klaasjan Tukker and Ton Frederiks from Adobe started off with an overview of the suite. I’m only an occasional Photoshop user and had no idea how many different products Adobe offers today. Although they rebranded the old macromedia products somewhat to fit in with the other Adobe application, Dreamweaver still looks like a macromedia creation. Some of the more impressive new features include content aware scaling and speech to text transcription in Adobe Premiere. I liked Ton’s remark: “Killing pixels is bad!” when he was showing the non-destructive image editing features in Adobe Bridge. Why do they need Bridge by the way?! Does anyone start the day by opening Bridge as his main interface to all Adobe products?

Aral Balkan

Next up: Aral Balkan. We heard Aral speak at dConstruct 2 years ago, and dare I say this was the main reason we went to Ghent? Once more Aral gave an excellent presentation. He set the tone right at the start when he compared the CS3 logo with Adobe’s new CS4 version. His presentation is titled: “Aim for the low-hanging fruit (or 5 rules for Hedonistic Developers)” but don’t let the name scare you off, really, it’s a refreshing wakeup call for developers with one message: ‘Just do it!’. He went on explaining that quality doesn’t really matter, ideas matter. Don’t let ideas pass because you don’t know this programming language well enough or because you don’t know how to design the logo, just go for it. He advised developers to share early and share often. Something I hadn’t thought about before but yes, I can see why. I could go over the other rules as well, but I think you’ll have to go to listen to him. It’s the way he brings it that makes the message stick.

Thanks Koen and Aral for the great evening! I have some more photos from the event over on Flickr.