Adobe's Creative Suite 4, which was officially unveiled today, is huge. There are actually six suites: Master Collection, Design Premium and Standard, Web Premium and Standard, and Production Premium, each offering a different selection from around 20 individual applications; the Master Collection has the lot.

So what's new? The first thing you'll notice is a new look and feel across all the main applications, making them more attractive and more consistent than before.

Tabbed documents in applications like Flash and Dreamweaver are great to work with. The 2005 merger, which brought Adobe's Photoshop, Acrobat and InDesign together with Macromedia's Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver, is now mature and there is deep integration.

You can see this in the new Photoshop Smart Objects in Dreamweaver, which lets you insert a Photoshop image and have it stay up-to-date if the source changes, and in the way Acrobat PDFs can natively host Flash content.

The second thing to note is that most web and design professionals will need some parts of CS4, if only to keep up with the growing use of standards like H.264 high-definition video (and its consumer variant AVCHD), which is supported in Flash 10 and in Adobe Media Encoder, or authoring for Acrobat 9.

Improved 3D support is another theme, as with the 3D translation and rotation tools in Flash, and the new 3D engine and compositing tools in Photoshop.

There is no shortage of compelling new features. In Dreamweaver, an embedded web browser based on WebKit, which is getting everywhere these days, enables a live view without needing to open a page in a web browser.

The new code navigator is a great way to inspect elements, see where attribute settings come from, and move around the document. CSS support is improved both in Dreamweaver and Fireworks.

InDesign has several important new abilities, including better long document support with auto-updating cross-references, the ability to export documents to Flash, and yet another XML language for documents, IDML or InDesign Markup Language.

It is all hugely impressive, and beats the competition, but there are a few reservations. First, the tight integration between Adobe's products means there is a constant push to use runtimes like Flash and Acrobat, which is not so good if you want to do without them or use alternatives.

It is interesting that Dreamweaver has dropped support for server behaviors for Microsoft ASP.NET or JSP (Java Server Pages).

Second, the sheer size and complexity of the suite will be overwhelming for new users.

Third, there is the usual price hike for UK customers versus those in the US: the Master Collection is £1,969 versus $2,499 before tax, around 45 per cent more expensive at today's rates.

Still, after using CS4 for a couple of weeks, even in beta form, it is hard to go back to CS3.

There are many more features not mentioned above and it is worth checking out the information at Adobe's web site and downloading the trial when it is released along with the full version sometime next month.