Bean is a small, easy-to-use, and free rich text editor and lightweight word processor that supports open/save of Microsoft Word format (.doc and .xml) documents (less images). Lean, fast and with an attractive, uncluttered user interface Bean starts up almost instantly on my not exactly cutting-edge 2.0 GHz Macbook, but still has cool stuff like a live word count, page layout mode, full-screen mode, split-screen mode, regular expression search/replace, multi-column text, inline graphics, detailed statistics, and more word-crunching and document formatting bells and whistles.

While full-featured word processors like MS Word, Apple’s Pages, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, and even Google Docs, etc. try to be all things to all people, sometimes you just want the right tool for the job, and that’s Bean’s niche. For example, Bean doesn’t do footnotes or use stylesheets, and is only partially compatible with Word’s file formats, and it does support in-line graphics, but not floating graphics.

I’ve been using Bean as my go-to doc/xml opener and editor for MS Word files for some time now (I don’t use Word), and most of the time it does what I need it to do with them. For occasions when it doesn’t, I keep LibreOffice around or go to Google Docs. Since all three applications are free, it’s no hardship to keep my options open, but of the three, Bean is by far the quickest and slickest to use, so it gets first call.

New in Bean Version 3 are an optional single-window tabbed interface layout, template documents with boilerplate text, the cool split view feature, a two-up layout view, freeform headers and footers, plain text editing, and sundry more minor improvements.

Bean developer James Hoover explains:

Various word processors have come and gone over the years. I started to collect old word processors and became interested in how these programs can either help you or work against you.

One that people still rave about is WriteNow. Mainly they like the fact that it’s lean and fast, and that the font and style menus are easy to get at. That old-style menu system doesn’t work well when you have a gajillian fonts, however.

I remember working with WordPerfect for DOS, which was the industry standard at one time. It was nightmarish. People would accidentally stack dozens of invisible codes together which would fight each other for control of the text. You had to ‘reveal’ them, then root them out like a dentist.

Microsoft Word took the best from Word Perfect and ditched the rest. For instance, they borrowed the ‘white text on blue background’ mode, which is brilliant. It’s easy on the eyes, and you aren’t faced with a serious-looking ‘blank sheet’ when you start to write…

So now, people are stuck with Microsoft Word, which is very nice, but can be quite annoying. (‘It looks like you’re writing a letter, Dave. Would you like me to throw you out the airlock without your space helmet on? I mean…would you like me to format it for you?’).

Text Edit is a great showpiece for Apple’s NSText object, but it goes no farther than that (by design). So what I’ve done with Bean is to make a little word processor that has a live word count and a zoom slider right at the bottom of the window. It does date-stamped backups and has an autosave feature. It has a nice-looking ‘Page Layout’ mode and the ‘white on blue’ (or any other combination) alternate color mode for editing. You can set the page margins, which you can’t in Text Edit. None of the menus are hidden too deep. It has an easy-to-use Inspector with lots of sliders to adjust the formatting of the text.

Okay, Bean sounds promising; great even for a freeware application, but before you chuck Word or Pages or Nisus or Mariner Write, take note of some things Bean doesn’t support, such as footnotes and graphics layering (it does support inline graphics). Headers and footers created by Bean are the Cocoa default ones, like the ones in Text Edit, and can’t be modified (but you can turn them on and off in Preferences).

So what is Bean like to use? Well for one thing, it’s pretty. I love the clean, attractive interface, and am especially smitten with the white-on-blue Alternate Color text option. If you prefer classic black-on-white, Bean will of course accommodate that too by default.

The toolbar is customizable with a wide selection of tools that can be added from a palette if you like toolbar controls.

Bean supports OS X Services, which is handy for exporting content to another Services-savvy application, and for adding third-party capabilities. For example, while Bean has few text-cleaning features of its own, if you want the facility to remove unwanted linebreaks from downloaded text, you can download the freeware WordService 2.6.1 utility, which adds a “Format > Reformat” command to the OS X Services menu and can execute linebreak purges for you, among several other things.

Bean also supports spell-checking—including as-you-type flagging—by piggy-backing OS X’s built-in spell check function, and you get a live, running readout of word, character and page counts at the bottom margin  of the window. There is also zoom support with a slider in the View menu for resizing.

If you need more document information than the running readouts provide, just summon the Info panel, which can be accessed from a button in the toolbar.

There is a serviceable and searchable online Help manual.

However, on the downside, there are relatively few text editing features. That may not bother some users, but I absolutely need text editing functions like capitalize and lower case conversion commands, which Bean doesn’t have. There is also no AppleScript support, the text color command is cumbersome, and the special Characters palette is slow to open.

As usual, when checking out word processing and text editing applications, my benchmark “gold standard,” so to speak, is Tom Bender’s superb $15.00 shareware styled text editor Tex Edit Plus, which, thanks to its support of text formatting, can also serve admirably as a lightweight word processor. Compared with Bean, TE+ is leaner and quicker, with the best AppleScript support of any application I’ve ever used, and an incredibly deep set of text manipulation tools. It’s not as pretty as Bean, and it’s not freeware, but it is the most useful and versatile tool in my suite of production text applications. However, it doesn’t have Bean’s ability to open and save Word .doc and .xml documents. Bean supports several other document formats, and Version 3.x has a new work in plain text option. Both 7Bean and Tex Edit Plus support Rich Text Format (RTF).

One Bean text-editing feature that is much appreciated by me is the View menu’s Show/Hide Layout command, which facilitates dispensing with WYSIWYG formatting and working with just unformatted text. It can also be toggled with a toolbar button.

There is a serviceable Find & Replace dialog, albeit not nearly as powerful and configurable as the ones in Tex Edit Plus or the pure Text Editor, TextWrangler, which I also use regularly.

However, to be fair, Bean is not pitched as a text editor. It works very well within its limitations for general word processing, is a convenient and free Word file “can–opener,” and it looks great. Bean supports several file formats, and determines an existing file’s format by looking at the file name’s extension. For example, an MS Word document named “My Great Novel” will not load properly unless you add the “.doc” extension to the name. It also has plenty of potential to grow, but hopefully not too much in terms of ponderousness.

In summary, for the present, Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor that features:

• a live word count
• a Get Info panel for in-depth statistics
• a zoom-slider to easily change the view scale
• an Inspector panel with lots of sliders
• date-stamped backups
• autosaving
• a page layout mode
• an alternate colors option (e.g., white text on blue)
• selection of text by text style, paragraph style, color, etc.
• a floating windows option (like Stickies has)
• easy to use menus
• remembers cursor position (excluding .text, .html, and .webarchive formats)
• all of Cocoa’s good stuff (dictionary, word completion, etc.)

Appletell Rating:

Buy Bean

In Appletell’s Nisus Writer Pro 2 review back in September, I wrote:

Whether you want the power to write novels, academic papers and such with relative ease or you just need to write a letter to your grandmother, Nisus is well-suited to the task. It’s very powerful, but the power doesn’t get in your way or slow down the process. It allows you to grow with it in a clean, logical way. And I can safely say that Nisus Writer Pro v2.0.1 is my favorite version I’ve ever used. Fans of the pre-OS X Nisus Writer may consider that heresy, but Nisus Writer Pro 2 is much easier to use and nearly as powerful.

The full list of features that led to this conclusion and the software’s 5a rating be seen at the Nisus website.

Product [Nisus Writer Pro and Nisus Writer Express]

Tincta, a new text editor for Mac OS X, was a nice surprise. I’ve been a longtime fan of Smultron, an Open Source text editor by Peter Borg. However, Smultron has decamped to the Cloud, specifically the Mac App Store where it’s now exclusively available for $4.99 as opposed to formerly for free via Sourceforge. I try to avoid Apple’s walled garden as much as I can, and that method of distribution seems to me against the spirit of Open Source.

Happily, I found a nearly dead-ringer Open Source clone of Smulton from French developer Jean-François Moy, and have been using it ever since. But development evidently ceased in March, 2010, and while Fraise 3.7.3 still works well with Snow Leopard, I’ve been concerned about its future compatibility.

My favorite feature of Smultron/Fraise has been that they display multiple open documents in a left-hand list similar to iTunes so you can easily switch between them—functionality that suits my purposes well when using the program as a work-in-progress database of research information.

So, I was delighted to discover Tincta last week. Tincta’s user-interface layout is quite similar to Smultron and Fraise, and it’s available in both a free version (“Always free” the Website pointedly declares) and a feature-enhanced Pro version. Tincta’s developers say the app was written and designed from ground up, that they don’t use any third party code or technologies (besides Mac OS X) and that they keep their codebase small and clean to maintain maximum speed, avoid bugs and add improvements very quickly. However, it seems obvious they have been inspired by Smultron.

I’ve been using the free version in place of Fraise, and it makes a perfect, up-to-date and actively-developed substitute that, as a native 64-bit Mac OS X app, will unequivocally support OS X 10.7 Lion if and when I finally upgrade.

Features in both Tincta and Tincta Pro include:

• native 64bit Mac OS X app
• line numbering
• syntax coloring
• find & replace
• auto complete brackets
• auto indent
• highlight current line
• convert line endings
• block selection
• column guide
• spell checker
• convert encodings
• show invisible characters
• browser preview

If you pop the 13 bucks for Tincta Pro, you also get:

• split views
• integrated file browser
• script support
• snippet manager
• regex search and replace
• search and replace in all open files
• smaller sidebar icons
• auto update

An attribute of both apps, which share the same basic core, is speed, and it is indeed a lively responder.

Other features in both versions include:

• Syntax Coloring – Tincta combines intelligent coloring algorithms with the least resource use and comes with syntax definitions for over 65 languages. And you can also freely change the color profiles according to your taste.

• Line Numbering – Tincta’s line numbering engine is blazingly fast and also manages line wrapping, calculating every line correctly, even for large files.
• Small Things – Tincta supports full drag and drop, indents selected text when you press tab, knows when an open file was changed by another application, supports the OS X spellchecker, features block selection, and has an in-window live search with highlighting. The latter is convenient and works fine, but the keyword entry field is obscured when one is using Tincta with its window interface minimized, which is my standard mode working on a 13″ MacBook where screen real estate is always at a premium. Both Smultron and Fraise have floating Search dialogs.

Text editing features include live search and replace with highlighting, change case, show invisible characters, page guide, printing, spelling correction, convert line endings and convert tabs to spaces (or vice versa).

Tincta Pro’s Split Views feature could be very handy, allowing one to edit two files simultaneously side-by-side to compare, edit and even drag text from one to the other. Tincta Pro also supports the full power of Regular Expressions to search your files. And to speed up repetitive tasks, you can search and replace across all open files with one click. Also exclusive to Tincta Pro is support for any Unix compatible scripts like Python, Shell, or Perl and more. That means script programmer users can just click “Run” to test their code. and immediately see the output in a log file within the application.

Another Tincta Pro wrinkle is its built-in snippet manager that lets you organize snippets in groups and makes them easily accessible from the snippets menu. By assigning each snippet a shortcut you won’t need to take your hands off the keyboard; just type the shortcut and on pressing blank Tincta Pro automatically replaces the shortcut with the appropriate snippet while your cursor is set to the predefined position within. An integrated file browser lets you browse your project, and for each file you instantly get a Quicklook preview along with important file info like size and modification date. You can also open files directly from the file browser—including multiple files at once.

Finally, Tinca Pro features subtile interface tweaks tailoring it better to the needs of professional users, such as the sidebar items representing your open files being significantly smaller, allowing at least 20 open files to be visible without scrolling (on a 13″ MacBook).

Not being a coder, I can get along well with the fewer-featured free version of Tincta. But for those who can make good use of the Pro version’s enhanced feature set, it’s not difficult to see thirteen bucks worth of value added.

Appletell Rating:

Buy Tincta Pro

Tex-Edit Plus can read, convert and save files in various international formats, including Unicode, ASCII and RTF. It can also open the “raw” text of MS Word and other formatted word processor documents.

TE+ developer Tom Bender this week released a new OS X 10.7 Lion compatible TE+ beta that he thinks may be ready for primetime. Tom tells me that the latest TE+ 4.99 beta seems to run fine on both Power PC and Intel Macs, supporting MacOS versions 10.4 through 10.7+. He says he’s tried to minimize the formatting loss when moving between PPC and Intel documents (although more complex docs can be ported using RTF, if needed). Tom also notes that the speedup when upgrading from Rosetta-dependent to Intel-native TE+ is surprisingly dramatic for some operations.

I’ve been using an earlier build of the TE+ 4.99 beta for about a month now, with very good success, and this new one seems even smoother and quicker. And Tom’s right—it’s a lot faster than the old Rosetta dependent build.

TE+ Version 4.9.9 beta 8 (September 28, 2011) Changes:

• Improved translation between PPC-style documents and Intel-style documents. Window size, position, selection, text wrap width, background color, and Page Setup now maintained.
• Improved Page Setup dialog extension and removed redundant Print dialog extension.
• Improved localizations, especially Italian, thanks to Agostino Maiello.
• Now Requires OS X 10.4 Tiger or later.
• Changes to interface cosmetics for OS X 10.7 Lion compatibility.
• Added scriptable prefs switch to allow use of RTF as default document format. Note that RTF does not support all “normal” document data (sounds, movies, window position, etc.).
• New Intel preferences file allows both TE+ versions (PPC/Rosetta and Intel/Universal) to coexist on same volume. This also causes fewer problems when replacing old versions of TE+.
• Fixed “Show Fonts” bug.
• Improved memory handling when saving files that contain big resources (e.g. TIFFs).
• Universal build.
• Lion compatible.
• Document format is NOT fully cross compatible with old Tex-Edit documents. Read the warnings.
• Check out version 4.9.8 if you need the formal PPC release version.

Full release notes are available at www.tex-edit.com. Tex Edit Plus is $15 shareware.

Product [Tex-Edit Plus]

I collect word processors like some people collect tiny spoons. Difference is, though, that I use all my word processors. I’ve got Storyist for writing novels, Montage writing stage plays, Pages for heavier layouts, and when I need to open a Word document, I’ve got Word. Different functions, different tools. But if I had to get rid of them all and use just one word processor for everything, it’d currently be Nisus Writer Pro 2.

This is mainly because it’s so incredibly easy to use, but without sacrificing power or capabilities. The interface is clean and logical, and it never gets in your way. The majority of your tools are grouped into palettes on the right hand side of your main window (or left, if you prefer), easily accessed and easily hidden if necessary.

If you’re on a smaller monitor, you can hide elements of groups you may not use as freqently, but it’s just as easy to create your own groups. You can access the Palette Library to alter the provided palettes with drag and drop simplicity, or you can create an entirely new palette group that uses only exactly what you need. Then, if necessary, you can switch back to the default groups with just a couple of clicks.

What I like about these palettes is that advanced features are grouped with the more common counterparts. If I select the Type palette, for example, I not only get full font control and spacing, but I also get window/orphan prevention, lists, etc. Having these displayed in a long toolbar makes them easy to recognize and use, unlike when they’re hidden cryptically in a button bar at the top of window. And because they’re always visible, you’re actually more likely to take advatage of features you’d otherwise forget about.

If you’re more of a keystroke writer, no worries. Nearly every command can have menu keys assigned to it, and you can alter those that are already assigned. I found the defaults to be just fine, but in the event you use certain functions more than others, it’s easy enough to change in the preferences.

And, of course, you can also customize the toolbar with drag and drop simplicity.

But okay, this has all been about how easy Nisus Writer is to set up for use. How about power? For word processing and basic page layout, Nisus Writer Pro 2 holds its own. This update contains over 500 changes, even more after the subsequent v2.0.1 update. The biggest of these is likely change tracking, which now makes Nisus Writer a viable option for those working collaboratively or who just want to follow the progress of a term paper, novel, etc. And I’ll admit I got a kick out of the Track Changes icon: a monkey evolving into a man. If only my progress from first to final draft was that significant.

Nisus Writer Pro 2 now also includes paragraph borders and shading, basic drawing tools, behind content watermarks, and one of my personal favorites, the ability to generate PDF documents with clickable links to internal bookmarks. When sharing documents with those who don’t have Nisus, this makes it much easier to direct them to specific areas.

The number of new features and fixes in Nisus Writer Pro 2.0.1 is far too extensive to cover here, but there’s one issue I’m afraid I have to address; importing from Word. The 2.0.1 update switched the .docx/.doc importers from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. Along with a couple other fixes, that addresses problems such as garbled text and formatting bleed, as explained at the Nisus Website. This is welcome a welcome update, and I’m pleased to see that Word table importing is a bit more reliable. However, it’s still not a perfect process, and can be unreliable if the Word document is too complex. And unfortunately, because it seems the bulk of Word users have no idea how to actually use it, importing is often quite messy. Nisus can’t be fully faulted for that, but if your work requires you to share documents with Word users frequently, it’s something you need to consider. At the least, tell your collaborators to save their documents as RTF files, which remains the Nisus default.

Well beyond what I’ve scratched here, you can see a full list of updates and fixes at the Nisus website. I also suggest you take the feature tour. An even better idea, however, is to try it out yourself with the 15 day fully functional trial.

Whether you want the power to write novels, academic papers and such with relative ease or you just need to write a letter to your grandmother, Nisus is well-suited to the task. It’s very powerful, but the power doesn’t get in your way or slow down the process. It allows you to grow with it in a clean, logical way. And I can safely say that Nisus Writer Pro v2.0.1 is my favorite version I’ve ever used. Fans of the pre-OS X Nisus Writer may consider that heresy, but Nisus Writer Pro 2 is much easier to use and nearly as powerful.

There’s still room to grow, features to add and quirks to clean up. For instance, if you have your text at 100% in normal view and expand to Lion’s full screen mode, the text remains at 100%, which is too small. If you expand it and then switch back to normal view, it stays expanded, making it too large. But I have no fear the developers will continue down the right path. If you don’t at least try Nisus Writer Pro out in the meantime, you’re handicapping yourself. It’s that simple.

Appletell Rating:

Buy Nisus Writer Pro 2

The Nisus Writers Pro and Express are now fully Lion compatible via updates released today. The updates are free for owners of Nisus Writer Express 3.x and Nisus Writer Pro, and fix a handful of bugs in addition to adding Lion compatibility. The already Lion compatible Nisus Writer Pro 2 has also been updated with a few fixes and support for full screen.

• Nisus Writer Express 3.4 adds Lion compatibility and Lion full screen, and receives a large number of bug fixes. This update also includes a different file importer that is compatible with both Intel and PowerPC Macs.
• Nisus Writer Pro 1.4.2 contains basic Lion compatibility, fixes for .doc/.docx importing and other smaller fixes and enhancements.
• Nisus Writer Pro 2.0.1 fixes a page number display bug, a Bookends scanning issue, and .doc/docx importing. It also fixes Lion compatibility and adds the new Lion full screen feature.

These new fixes and enhancements add to an already rich feature set that includes an intuitive interface, multilingual text support, powerful find and replace, easy to use style system, multipart selections, full screen mode, and a native file format (RTF) that almost any word processor can read.

Nisus Writer Express, and Nisus Writer Pro are universal binaries and require Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger) or later. Nisus Writer Pro 2.0.1 is available through the Nisus web store for only $79.00 (USD), and $49.00 for the upgrade version. A three license Family Pack is also available for $99.00. Versions on CD are available for an additional $10.00 plus shipping. Nisus Writer Express 3.4 is available for purchase for $45 (USD), and $30 for the upgrade version. A three license Family Pack is available for $79. These updates are free to current license holders of Express 3.x and Pro.

Product [Nisus Writer]

Keeping your system safe and sound is important if you work with any sensitive data or if you just have to share your system with your family (or nosy roommates) and you want to maintain your own personal privacy. Since you cannot always lock out the whole system, locking single document is a solid option, as it allows you to keep just some data secured.

iWork

1. Click on the document and open Inspector.
2. Click on the document tab if it is not already open.
3. Check the box labeled “Require Password to Open”.
4. Choose your password, enter it twice, put in a hint and click on the “Set Password” button.
5. Save your document.

Word for Mac

1. Open your documents.
2. Open Preferences from the menu bar.
3. Click on the “Security” tag.
4. Choose the Password to Open box and enter your password.
5. Confirm the password and click OK.
6. Save your document.

My benchmark “gold standard,” so to speak, of text-crunching applications is Tom Bender’s superb, Apple-Scriptable, $15 shareware-styled text editor and text cleaner Tex Edit Plus. Thanks to its support of text formatting, it can also serve admirably as a lightweight word processor, filling the gap between pure plain text editors and full-featured word processors. TE+ is lean and quick, with the best AppleScript support of any application I’ve ever used and an incredibly deep set of text manipulation tools—easily the most useful and versatile tool in my suite of production applications.

Another thing I love about TE+ is its backward compatibility. The latest OS X version of the application fully supports documents I created on Mac Classic OS Tex Edit some 15 years ago. The vast bulk of my document archives and much of my research resources materials are stored in Tex Edit documents. Most of my composing, editing, and HTML markup has been done in Tex Edit and Tex Edit Plus for about 15 years now.

Aside from its brilliant AppleScript implementation, Tex-Edit Plus supports grep expressions, Apple’s Automator and Text-to-speech capabilities, and can save documents as audio files. It also supports inline images, and you can simply paste pictures from the clipboard and save them with the document. Tex-Edit Plus is multilingual, based on the WASTE text engine, and can read, convert and save files in a wide selection of international file formats, including Unicode, ASCII and RTF, and can get at the text content of many others, such as Word documents even though it doesn’t support Word files with formatting intact.

Another area where TE+ shines is for cleaning text downloaded from the Web or cut-and-pasted from email. It can virtually instantly remove unwanted text characters and artifacts, both visible and invisible. It’s not quite as powerful at doing this as Bare Bones Software’s wonderful pure text editor, TextWrangler, but does the job most of the time. Another function for which I find TE+ indispensable is instantly purging line feeds and character returns from imported text. It also has very good find and replace support, although again not quite as powerful as TextWrangler. On the other hand, TextWrangler deals with plain text only, unlike TE+’s hybrid text styling, image, and audio support.

There hasn’t been a whole lot of new development for TE+ since 2007—the last stable release being version 4.9.8 on July 30th of that year. From my perspective, that’s just fine; it’s working great, and it’s hard to think of how it could be improved.

However, while Tex Edit Plus still works just fine in OS X v10.6.6 Snow Leopard, it is a Carbon application with a few Cocoa elements grafted on, and it’s an open question as to whether it will continue to be supported by OS X v10.7 Lion.

Tom Bender tells me that although he’s been quite busy with other developments in his life for the past couple of years and has not been able to invest the quality time he needs to finish Tex Edit Plus’s conversion to Cocoa yet, he says he’s planning on having more time any day now (although those plans could change due to forces beyond his control).

Here’s hoping…

Appletell Rating:

Buy Tex Edit Plus

Additions have also been made to the Nisus Macro Language, and a host of bug have been fixed. The new abilities add to an already rich feature set that includes an intuitive interface, multilingual text support, powerful find and replace, easy to use style system, multipart selections, full screen mode, and a native file format (RTF) that almost any word processor can read. A full list of features and enhancements can be found at the Nisus Writer Pro website.

Nisus Writer Pro 2 is available now at the Nisus web store for only $79.00 (USD). An upgrade version is available for $49.00. A three license Family Pack is also available for $99.00. Versions on CD are available for an additional $10.00 plus shipping. Nisus Writer Pro 2 is a universal binary and requires Mac OS X v10.4.11 (Tiger) or later.

Product [Nisus Writer Pro 2]

Since Adobe first launched the Creative Suite family of programs, they’ve released updates about every 18 months or so. This was good in that it allowed them to stay on top of the latest technologies and to introduce some of their own. It was bad in that updates and fixes were slow to be released, and it always felt like we were missing things that should have should have been part of the previous version. Adobe would focus so hard on the next big feature that simple fixes and improvements would constantly slip past. Anyone forced to use Dreamweaver’s FTP tools knows what I’m talking about.

Adobe has now changed all this up. Major releases will now appear every 18 to 24 months, with mid-cycle releases to show up between them. Adobe CS 5.5 is the first such release. There are two methods for paying for it, which I’ll cover later on. For now, let’s look at features.

Across many of the programs, Adobe is focusing on web and tablet publishing. The Web Premium tools (Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop, etc.) offer new HTML5 and Adobe Flash authoring tools that do a decent job of making the latest technologies somewhat accessible. I’m still surprised by what a confusing mess Dreamweaver is when it comes to doing something as common as building CSS pop-up (or flyout) menus; Adobe has a habit of ignoring basic needs when they’d rather draw our attention flashier capabilities.

In this case, it’s the ability to build a website once and have it targeted to numerous mobile devices. The number of people using the iPad and smartphones to view the web is growing quickly, and Adobe has no intention of being left behind. Whether building websites or mobile applications, CS 5.5 allows you to view in real time how your development will look in your targeted devices via a multiple pane window.

If ever there was a time to justify that multiple monitor setup you’ve been wanting, this is it.

jQuery Mobile support, CSS inspection, enhanced ActionScript editors and more all help to keep your work efficient and clean…once you’ve learned to use them.

Adobe offers a lot of training videos to get you started, but those tend to take me back to Algebra II class. Everything made sense when the instructor would explain the procedures on the chalk board. But when I’d get home and try to apply what I’d learned, forget about it. Thankfully, Adobe Community Help is a great resource for getting your questions answered and gaining useful tips until the third-party manuals start rolling out.

In addition, some of the new features and coding methods seem to require you to build them that way from scratch. If you’re looking to update a site to take advantage of the new mobile templates and objects, it’s possible that Dreamweaver CS 5.5 is going to become just as confused as you are.

I’ve focused mostly on the web tools because that’s my area of expertise. Adobe has paid close attention to other areas, though. Production Premium has received a rather impressive overhaul, with an improved workflow in Premiere Pro CS5.5, advanced audio editing in Audition CS5.5 (now available for both Mac and Windows), some nice new tricks in After Effects, streamlined collaboration via CS Live, and more. I’m not versed in these programs, and have therefore not factored them into this review, but I do suggest you check out the Production Premium website to learn more about what this upgrade has to offer until we post our dedicated coverage.

I can, however, weigh in on Design Premium’s nods towards digital publishing. Whether it’s creating magazines for the iPad, authoring eBooks in inDesign, or simply creating more feature-rich PDFs, Adobe has done a nice job of making it easier to create and integrate dynamic content into your publication and deliver it however you want to.

However, a lot of this is dependent upon Adobe’s web-hosted Digital Publishing platform, and that’s not cheap. It starts at $495 a month, and then you’re adding platform and vendor fees. Large publishers may have the means to handle these costs, but smaller publishers will find the price as prohibitive as print.

Speaking of costs, Adobe understands that it’s hard for new users to hop onto a Creative Suite package, or to even pay for an upgrade. Design Standard is the cheapest package at $1,299 (upgrades start at $399), with the $2,599 Master Collection being the most expensive ($1,399 upgrade). As such, they now offer a Pay As You Go plan. For Design Standard, you’ll pay $65 a month with a one-year subscription, or $99 a month on a month-to-month basis. Those prices are $129/month and $195/month for the Master Collection, respectively. The other Creative Suite packages fall somewhere between.

Whether that’s worth it depends upon mostly on how much you’re going to make back with it. With competing products cutting deeper into Adobe’s feature sets, and with Adobe ramping up the capabilities of their own consumer and prosumer products, the Creative Suite packages have shifted into higher gear. This is great news if you’ve got a need for these complex but powerful sets of tools (and a company paying for your upgrades and training). If you’re on your own, the subscription model is a viable option, but hopefully you’ve also got the time required to stay on top of these new capabilities, which will now be coming about once a year.

As we do the same, Appletell will post in-depth looks at some of the new features rolled into the CS 5.5 updates. In the meantime, we can recommend the suite as a whole (check the buying guide to determine which edition best suits your needs). There’s no denying that Adobe is pushing web/mobile development and digital publication forward, I just wish they wouldn’t shove the little things to the side along the way.

Appletell Rating:

Buy Adobe Creative Suite 5.5