Adobe Announces Illustrator 10, Including Mac OS X Support

by , 1:00 PM EDT, September 24th, 2001

Adobe has announced Illustrator 10 today, and though the press release does not mention it, the illustration app will include native support for Mac OS X for the first time. Illustrator 10 also has a host of new features and other enhancements, including support for data driven graphics. From Adobe:

Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced Adobe® Illustrator 10®. Adobe Illustrator 10 defines the future of vector graphics by providing indispensable tools to cross media design professionals, Web designers, and Web developers for efficiently publishing artwork. With Adobe Illustrator 10, Web designers and developers can work together more closely than ever in high-volume publishing environments.

Adobe Illustrator 10 software delivers powerful, integrated tools such as symbols and slicing for creating and optimizing Web graphics, creative options such as live distortion and productivity enhancements such as dynamic data-driven graphics. In addition, Illustrator 10 integrates tightly with Adobe's professional graphics programs including Adobe Photoshop®, Adobe AlterCast™, Adobe GoLive®, Adobe LiveMotion®, Adobe Premiere®, Adobe After Effects®, and others. Also, with the release of Adobe InDesign® 2.0, Illustrator 10 users can now maintain transparency between the two products.

Powerful Production Tools for Network Publishing

Adobe Illustrator 10 streamlines production with support for new dynamic data-driven graphics, which automate the preparation of repetitive artwork. Print professionals can use dynamic data-driven graphics to create an unlimited number of variations of similarly formatted graphics. Web designers can create a template, and then use the new Variables palette to define objects, such as the product name and company logo in a Web banner, as variables. Users can then quickly generate an unlimited number of unique variations using scripts or dynamic image servers such as Adobe AlterCast™, which generates customized graphics content on demand.

Producing Superb Web Graphics

With Illustrator 10's new support for symbols, professionals can reduce file sizes and manage repeating graphics more efficiently. Users can insert instances of a symbol into their artwork and update those instances automatically by redefining the original symbol.

Adobe Illustrator also offers robust new support for object-based slicing, HTML tables with Cascading Style Sheet layers, and enhanced SVG import and export and Macromedia® Flash™ (SWF) format export. Users can reduce production time by slicing objects, groups or layers, and optimize performance by specifying raster and vector format options for each slice.

Enabling Extraordinary Creative Freedom

Illustrator 10 adds exciting new creative features such as Live Distortion, allowing users to easily bend, stretch, and twist text, graphics, and images in any way imaginable using live enveloping, warping, and liquify tools. Distorted objects and text remain completely editable no matter how much they have been manipulated, giving users unprecedented creative flexibility.

Groundbreaking symbolism tools allow users to create naturalistic masses of repeating elements quickly and easily. Users can spray instances of one or more symbols onto the artboard, and then use one of seven other specialized symbolism tools to interactively adjust colors, spin, resize, and scrunch to quickly achieve the desired look. Symbolism tools can be used to simulate foliage, crowds, and other large groups of similar objects.

You can find more information on Illustrator 10 at Adobe's Web site. The list of new features is where the company mentions support for Mac OS X. Current owners of Illustrator can update for US$149, and the full version is priced at US$399. Adobe says the product will ship in the 4th quarter of 2001.

The Mac Observer Spin:

It's curious that Adobe makes no mention of support for Mac OS X in the press release for Illustrator 10. There is no mention of Apple's new OS on the main Illustrator 10 page either. This is not to suggest some sort of conspiracy or any other such nonsense, we just find it curious. In the meanwhile, this will be a big release for Mac OS X. It should also be a big release for Adobe as the feature set of Illustrator 10 is fairly impressive.

Adobe