A Spring Surprise from Adobe: CS5.5

DVInfo.net by Pete Bauer

Adobe has surprised those of us who have long been accustomed to a major release roughly every 18 months. Just a year after launching the CS5 titan, they announced not only a new version of the Creative Suites, but a new release schedule and a subscription option for their suites. The just-released CS 5.5 is an incremental version that provides improvements in 5.0’s first-generation 64 bit features, several cool new tools, and one of the most asked-for changes to the suite’s software line up: the return of Adobe Audition.

The New Schedule
The release schedule calls for a new version about every 12 months. As things would appear to march out, odd years will get a “dot release” (CS 5.5 this spring) and a major release should be offered in even years (expect CS 6.0 in the spring of 2012). We will continue to see free maintenance patches and updates as needed in between, but each release is a full version of the software requiring purchase, installation, and activation.

As Adobe folks explained it at NAB, they want to shorten their response time to the frequent but unpredictable technology and market changes we experience these days, while at the same time recognizing that not all components of a suite need a major rewrite every 12 months. So the dot releases will tend to be more focused on specific features that keep the suite on the cutting edge rather than being deeper re-writes of the entire suite that we anticipate in the major releases appearing in even years. read more...