Order Pending???

This morning a rental truck appeared in my driveway. "Strange, " I thought to myself while sipping my coffee, "I'm not moving and don't know anybody who is so what is going on?" The driver of the truck then walked to the door and knocked. Answering the door, I discovered that there was a delivery person at the door with my package from Adobe. It appears that there was trouble with his vehicle so he had to use an alternative vehicle while it was repaired. After installing and playing around with the various applications, I decided to check to see if they finally updated my order status on the Adobe site. It was still marked as order pending! My order is here so I am now able to learn CS3 and now own a copy of Photoshop!

I must say that Adobe does a much better job of packaging their software than Macromedia use to. The box is kind of small, but it only contains an overview book (that covers the key features of all the different applications that come in the box) and a DVD case that contains the three DVDs that make up the package. The first DVD is the application disk, the second is a content disk, and the third disk is a video workshop disk. It takes quite a while to install everything, I would guess it took about 45 minutes. No interaction is needed so you can do other things while it runs. Adobe has adopted Macromedia's authorization procedure, meaning that once installed, I had to go online to authenticate my copy and register. If you don't authorize the copy within 30 days, it stops working. Thankfully I never had any problems authorizing my copy.

My overall first impressions of the actual software is good, though the 1GB minimum that they state is probably on the low side if you like to run more than one of the components at the same time. On the other hand, if you tend to only work with one program at a time, 512MB would probably be more than adequate.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will give my impressions of the different programs that make up the package.