From the 23rd to 25th of October the CreativeProExpo took place at Olympia Hall in Kensington, London. Formerly the event was known as MacExpo but with the growing support for Open Source development, Linux was invited in too. I attended on the opening day and I must say it made a change to see some Linux faces around – yes they do look different from Mac fans. The 1 hour Great Linux Debate attracted a small crowd which perhaps demonstrates the growing interest for Linux since the launch of Ubuntu 8 or perhaps it’s because IT budgets are being cut.

Adobe had the biggest stand in the event to show their latest offering, Creative Suite 4. An extensive demonstration took place at 15:00 of Design Premium which now includes Fireworks. The whole suite now includes a more standardised workspace which includes tabs. Photoshop CS4 has a pretty nice feature for stretching images without distorting them by smart cloning dead areas. InDesign CS4 can export straight into SWF. Fireworks remains on the Adobe line-up thanks to its ‘magical’ compression engine which Photoshop still doesn’t have – credit to old Macromedia who first developed it.