Adobe's Creative Suite comes in variety of different bundles (such as Web, design, production, and master collection), and these include popular applications such as Photoshop, Acrobat, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Flash. However, not all of the products in Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 have been upgraded in this release.

Major applications, such as Acrobat and Photoshop, have received only minimal changes since the previous version 5 release. However, products such as Dreamweaver, InDesign, and the Flash development tools have all added significant new features in this release.

The rise of mobile devices and the need to develop applications for the many new smartphones and tablets in use today is addressed by Creative Suite 5.5. Plus, much of the new functionality is geared towards developing applications and websites that take advantage of the emerging HTML 5 standard. Several new capabilities available within Creative Suite 5.5 also take advantage of the touch interfaces available in devices such as Apple's iPad.

Although much of Creative Suite 5.5 has improved features for creating content for Apple iOS devices, for the most part these capabilities aren't fully available for Windows-based developers and will often require a Mac version of the suite in order to build and deploy the iOS apps.

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