Upgrading CS4 Design Premium to CS5

Question

Hi All,
I recently purchased Adobe CS4 Design Premium with the free upgrade to CS5 Design Premium. I'm using a Mac Pro (2.66Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon). CS4 is currently loaded, but I'm holding off loading my copy of the CS5 upgrade until I've read whether there are any known issues to consider (I also have some important work to finish before I start dabbling). Have any of you taken the plunge already?
Is there anything I should be aware of with this system set-up?
Should I uninstall CS4 before loading CS5?
Should I first upgrade the Mac OS to 10.6.3?
Will upgrading the OS to 10.6.3 affect CS4 if I leave it on the computer?
Any suggestions from graphic design professionals would be most appreciated.
Thanks,
Tom

Answer 1

Hi Tom,
We have exactly the same spec, 2.8 8 cores and 30" LCD's.
I also got the free upgrade. I've still got CS3 and CS4 loaded, so if you get a problem with something in CS5 you just open in CS4.
All that happens is that documents will open in the latest version when double clicked. You have to right click and open in a lower version if you choose.
Bear in mind though that things created in a later version cannot be opened in a higher version! esp Indesign, Illustrator, Flash etc.
I'm using CS5 everyday, the normal stuff we use every day works fine, no problems and nothing will hinder your work. Obviously there is loads of stuff in the apps which we haven't even looked at or used yet because of time.
Few kinks are:
Indesign - by default it has all the new measurement and guide lines turned on, they annoyed me so I turned them all off. A bug is that you can't turn off the new frame highlighting but Adobe are aware of this and it's discussed on their forums. Everything else, including all menu items seem to be in the same place.
If you are exporting a big pdf, it seems very very quick but this is because it has background processing now. If you try to close the document straight after saving the pdf, it will come up with a note saying 'process in action' or something. Good feature if you want to carry on working.
Also, remember to change the preflight settings to include RGB images and colour as it's not on by default.
Indesign also forgets page window sizes so if you had two documents open side by side, next time you open them it's forgotten this whereas CS3 used to remember. THis is a bug.
Illustrator - Same as Indesign, you may want to turn off all the stuff you don't need in preferences, remember to turn on scale stroke widths etc because its off by default. In Illustrator you CAN turn off frame highlighting (shows a different team works on this!). And they STILL have not added a shortcut to place an item!
Photoshop - All more or less the sae for day to day use. It is faster when running on a 64 bit Mac. Loads of new features, but the ones we are used to are still there, and where you expect them to be.
Dreamweaver - This is the one with flaws. It forgets ftp login details and the new live site view has problems. If you open a file up it can hang for ages if you have used a direct link to the jquery site for the code, (you need to keep code locally, better practice anyway), and if you use live site, it has a big flaw with the related files. If you hover over them you'll see it thinks some are in the wrong folder. If you try to edit them it says it doesn't exist, but this is because its looking in the wrong ftp folder! You have to manually open it, which kind of makes related files redundant.
Away from the live site feature general web updates and static sites etc is the same, the UI is now consistant with the other apps, its just the ftp details being loss each time on relaunch that is annoying.
On all apps, by default they have a pointless application bar which uses space, I turned this off.
There may be others which I havn't come across yet, but I use it daily, there isn't anything which should stop you installing as far as I'm concerned.
Hope this helps
Cheers