There doesn't seem to have been much talk about the recent release of Adobe Illustrator CS3. It seems that the number of new features is slight relative to the previous release, but concentrate primarily on increasing speed, and colour handling. They have an interesting new eraser tool; people have been asking for this feature in Xara for some time if memory serves. They've also integrated it with Flash (easier for them now that they own it).

It appears that most of their time has been spent on fixing their UI. While I doubt it's anywhere near Xara's slickness, there appears to be context sensitive toolbars, better toolbar/palette docking, solid dragging and enlarge-when-hovered-over bezier control points.

It still looks like a very messy, complicated and excessive UI though, but it would be interesting to see how significant their speed improvements are.

Oh, and we'll not mention their outrageous prices...Xara's full price is the same as their upgrade!