Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled for Intel-native speed improvements and a pretty box. But my cynical imaginary friend, Horatio, tells me to not get too mesmerized by the pretty colors and Flash animations. So, I’ll be cautious and spend the next few days wading through press releases, reviews, and blog posts. No doubt, there’ll be a million blog posts on how butt-ugly or eye-soothing the new box design is.

What do you think so far? Will you upgrade with glee? Or are you dreading another bloated–and expensive–software upgrade?

Will the new CS3 sport this feature? Probably not. According to LenHewitt on Adobe’s forums, there are some major technical limitations:

Page layout applications are very different from other graphics apps. They are essentially database applications, where every object has a database entry describing the object, it’s position of the screen, size, fills, strokes, position in the document layering etc.

Consequently, that data is then available to rebuild the document if tragedy strikes.

This makes page layout apps slower in operation but more robust. Were Illustrator or Photoshop to use a similar technique, I suspect the performance would be seriously degraded.

Is this true? With the multitude of smart engineers at Adobe, I have to imagine there’s a way to make it work. After all, isn’t InDesign partially based on Illustrator’s code base? And from what I remember, the original beta of InDesign AKA Quark-Killer looked almost exactly like Illustrator, except with multi-page support.

Until Adobe gets it right, the only course of action is to remember to manually save every few minutes–a habit everyone forgets to do.

The new icons use a system of abbreviations to represent each Adobe product, a bit like the symbols in the periodic table.

Since their introduction in 2003, the Adobe Creative Suite icons have suffered criticism. So this new round of vehemence is not a surprise.

MetaDesign, the company I’ve worked at for the past 3.5 years, worked on the new icon system for CS3 (as well as the branding and icon systems for CS1 and CS2).

I remain neutral on the issue, but Layne, a devoted LifeClever reader, wants to know what you think. Do these new icons inspire love or hate? Post your rave or rant in the comments.

If you’re color-challenged like me, you’ll find inspiration in kuler’s growing library of user-submitted themes. Better yet, you can create your own themes for others to rate, download, and critique.

A well-designed interface of color wheels, swatches, and sliders makes it easy and joyous to make perfect color combinations. Once done, you can download your theme as an Adobe Swatch Exchange files (.ASE) to use in your Adobe apps.

Like many new web-apps, kuler is a “technology preview” (beta), so beware of bugs and downtime. Adobe implies it may charge for using the tool later. If Adobe wants the love of designers and color enthusiasts, it’d better keep it free.

Thanks to Mark Roudebush for sending this to me.