This morning, I joined hundreds of thousands of people around the world for an online streaming presentation of Adobe Creative Suite 4. My overall impression . . . Well, I guess I’m hard to impress.

Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of exciting new features that are going to make Flash, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and the rest of the Creative Suite a lot more efficient and a lot more fun. But I was a little underwhelmed with the presentation. They talked a lot about the integration between various products (which is handy), but in a presentation like this, I’d like to see a lot more about the bells and whistles of individual products.

Some of the bells and whistles they did cover included Flash CS4’s inclusion of inverse kinematics, 3D effects, and a new animation engine. For Photoshop, they covered some smart resizing features and new 3D features. But all-in-all, I would have liked to have seen more, especially since he started off the presentation by saying that Creative Suite 4 was going to be no minor upgrade.

The most disappointing part of the presentation was that they never announced a release date for CS4. In fact, I had to stumble upon the right link just to figure out how to get notified about the release of the products. (Click here to be notified by email.) But I do really like the packaging of the new products!