An interesting (but not terribly surprsing) message was posted on Twitter a couple of days ago:
“@chad_perkins Back from Adobe. Finally can tell you that the next version of After Effects is a WEAK upgrade (IMHO). But PS and AI will be GREAT upgrades!”
(via AE Portal)
The original statement has since been retracted because apparently the poster was under an NDA and spoke too soon… luckily I am bound by nothing of the sort, so I get to “retweet” (as it were) whatever I want.
No official word on new features yet, but judging by the rumors making the round it looks like After Effects CS5 is going to be the second lackluster upgrade in a row, 64-bit support notwithstanding.
Maybe the company that is no longer in the Flash business needs to spend a little less time coming up with cheesy feel-good marketing slogans and instead focus on what they used to be good at:
Making tools that just let their users get their damn work done.
Hint: Homebrew installers that take more than an hour to complete and require one to shut down their web browsers, upgrades that lay waste to all existing plug-ins and the oh-so pretty “Flash-y” but increasingly non-standard GUIs are not things that make artist’s lives any easier. Nor do they “help people communicate”, to put it in Adobe’s terms.
