Adobe releases time-sensitive betas of Creative Suite 4 tools

The latest betas of Adobe's Dreamweaver, Soundbooth, and Fireworks tools are now available for free download. But unless you already own CS3, they'll only give you a brief peek at the product, before the 48-hour self-destruct timer goes off.

Registered owners of Creative Suite 3, however, will be allowed to use these betas until the release of CS4, which currently has no release date. However, unless Adobe has some kind of registration system built into those betas, they may need to be installed on production systems alongside CS3.

Which means they'd be installed on "dirty" systems, so exactly how valuable a beta test this will be, is uncertain. Adobe had to cancel an interview with BetaNews on Friday, during which we had hoped to learn more.

Adobe's popular Web design and development tool Dreamweaver received a couple of noteworthy updates, including a Related Files toolbar, a Code Navigator, and a Live View Mode. The related files toolbar provides instant access to files used within a page, whether XML, JavaScript docs, or HTML; and the code navigator function allows code updates to be performed in several places with a single entry. Live View Mode is based upon the open source Webkit browser engine which also powers Safari. With this tool, a live preview of projects can be viewed within Dreamweaver.

While it is difficult to find an equally-classed comparison to Dreamweaver, open source software SeaMonkey has existed in various forms for almost as long as Adobe's product. Starting its life as Netscape Composer component in the late '90s, and then being passed along to Mozilla's Application Suite, the free multi-purpose developing tool received an update to version 1.1.9 at the end of March worth checking out.

Fireworks site prototyping and graphics editor received some compatibility upgrades in this beta, as well as an overall tweaking of the UI to match the rest of Creative Suite. Design comps can be exported as interactive .PDFs, or can be made available as Adobe AIR, Flash, Flex, or HTML documents.

The Soundbooth audio editing software received a bump in usability, with new multi-track support, restore points, compression preview mode, and speech-to-text transcription. Autocompose, a main feature of Soundbooth, actually defies the "creative" moniker of Adobe's suite, automatically generating royalty-free music for video projects.

The feature is not a new one in Soundbooth and bears a resemblance to Garageband's royalty-free loop creation system. As software not intended for professional musical composition, but rather to accompany video presentations, it offers some premium features that cannot be found in open source music software package Audacity, which saw an update in version 1.3.5 beta earlier this month. One of these features is speech recognition, which takes a vocal track, analyzes the waveforms, and generates text synched to the sound. It's a feature that I personally could have used on dozens of quarterly corporate earnings calls.

The CS4 betas are available on Adobe Labs.