Adobe Announces Creative Suite 3

Adobe announced Creative Suite 3 in March 2007, bringing major applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, and Dreamweaver into one generation of tools. For Mac users, CS3 was especially important because it was the first Creative Suite version designed to run natively on Apple’s Intel-based Macs.

Earlier Adobe applications could run on Intel Macs through Rosetta translation, but image editing and publishing workloads were computationally heavy, so emulation carried a noticeable performance cost. CS3 used Universal Binary builds that included native code for both PowerPC and Intel processors.

The release also reflected Adobe’s 2005 acquisition of Macromedia. Dreamweaver and Flash now sat beside Photoshop and Illustrator in the same product family. That combination made Adobe extraordinarily influential over both print design and the web at a time when Flash was still a dominant platform for interactive sites and online video.