December 01, 2008

Illustrator CS4: Faster launches, new scripts, & more

As I’ve noted a few times, I really like the way the Illustrator team focused on the fundamentals in CS4. Among these, they’ve made some great headway in bringing down the application’s launch time. Brenda Sutherland from Illustrator QE passed along a few benchmarks:

Win XP	CS3	CS4
Cold Launch on Benchmark Machine*	21.7s	12.8s
Cold Launch on User Machine**	36.4s	19.5s
iMac (Leopard)
Cold Launch	25.5s	16.4s

 

* Benchmark machine is the optimized setup machine for taking consistent launch performance numbers. It has no virus scanner and a totally defragmented hard disk.

** User machine is the one similar to user environment, having a virus scanner, fragmented hard disk with a few common applications installed.

My own unscientific tests (using Watch It on a 2.33GHz MacBook Pro) produce similar findings, knocking about 35% off the cold launch time & cutting the time for a warm launch roughly in half relative to CS3. Thanks, guys!

In other AI-related news:

• The team has posted a series of how-to guides and source files created by leading designers.
• Jack Westbrook came up with a set of scripts for exporting each AI layer as a separate PNG.