Category: adobe

Geek and Roman Toys

Apple finally releases Intel Core 2 Duo versions of the 15 and 17″ MacBook Pro. The concept of 200Gb of disk space and 3Gb of RAM is attractive, but we’ll have to see … I don’t think Santa is that generous. Unless someone wants a 5 month old 15″ MacBook Pro.

Myriad of things from Adobe. Apollo gets US$100m of backing from Adobe; but still no code to get your hands dirty. Flex Builder 2.0 for MacOS is out. Woot!

DigitalEditions comments from Ryan Stewart; in fact, Ryan has some excellent comments on Adobe Apollo too.

However, the biggest announcement is a parry to Microsoft’s XPS: Adobe Mars project. This is a representation of PDF in XML, but packed in a ZIP container. This one has been bumping around for a while: and it seems the SVG might just be getting another run at Adobe.

Just as Adobe starts to head toward the moon in the Apollo, we have another space metaphor to deal with: Mars. Or mabye it’s just a penchant for Roman Gods?

Fittingly, Mars is the Roman god of war.

Too much stuff, my brain hurts. Especially as I have some serious Javascript and Adobe Extendscript revolving in my head.

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Competition is a Good Thing

Competition is breeding the best of corporate behaviour: innovation. Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, the AJAX/HTML/Browser community are all attempting to make rich web development easier. Whilst this Google video by David Pollack (from Athena Design) goes a bit philosophical at the start; there are many perspectives on web development that will strike a chord.

Recent posts from Adobe’s John Dowdell, in response to Robert Scoble and ZDNet’s Ryan Stewart have highlighted a feted “deathmatch” between Adobe and Microsoft. Well, it’s more than Adobe and Microsoft. Sun haven’t given up on Java and Swing just yet; and there have been interesting HTML/AJAX tools appearing daily.

Microsoft have heightened the battle by posting Visual Studio 2005 vs. Dreamweaver 8 on MSDN. More interesting would have been Expression Web vs. Dreamweaver 8. I doubt that Adobe will publicly respond: in product marketing strategy when you are the leader, you ignore the follower.

The consensus is that Adobe has the designers whilst Microsoft has the developers on their respective sides. News for all: no-one owns the customer. Products that make the creation of leading customer-service centric experiences will win. And the winner may be a big name vendor.

In an effort to gain more mindshare, Adobe has released their LiveCycle and Flex tools for developers, free. The next stage for Adobe is heavy long-term evangelism for their platforms. Adobe MAX will likely see all sorts of stuff released. Hopefully the mooted Mac version of Flex, and a developer/experimental version of Apollo.

No to forget Microsoft: it has has been in a constant web-like beta-cycle of their Expressions tools. The Graphic designer needs lots of work. Like a whole plastic surgery makeover. I am sure Microsoft has the WPF/E stuff ready to throw over the fence before the end of November. The developer within me hopes that Microsoft is 3 months late because it is going the extra mile.

Designers, or as Microsoft might classify them “User Experience Engineers”, are an amorphous mob. From the colour and geometry constraints of print design to the flow of an online application: all designers are very aware of what can and cannot be developed. It is my opinion that there is no distinct line between designers and developers.

My humble suggestions to both parties:

Adobe: expand beyond the form/document centric view of the world. Good to see that you are reaching out to the developer community with a rich set of tools; but don’t forget that the interface between developers and designers is fuzzy.

Microsoft: don’t forget the Mac and LAMP platform. Don’t make a half-assed WPF/E, either. That will just kill the platform outside the firewall. Microsoft might own the enterprise, but the wider internet include mobile devices, Macs, Linux.

New York Times Reader Trumps Adobe Reader

The recently released New York Times Reader (http://www.nytimes.com/mem/reader_regi.html) is what the Adobe PDF Reader should be today. Small, data-driven, dynamic, interactive and skinable.

Scott Hanselman states this is a precursor to WPF based RSS readers. I am going to go one further and state this is the future of dynamic publishing for large, paper-based publishers. A territory traditionally marked by Adobe as their home soil.

Adobe, the old leader in this space with PDF, has missed the ferry to New York and may be stuck on the island for a while. Even Macromedia (now married to Adobe) has missed this boat.

Small:

Times Reader will requires .Net Framework 3.0. Today this is a hassle. In the future, with Vista and wider deployments the base Framework, the comparative size of the downloads will become very noticeable.

The installer is less than 1Mb, installing an application that is 2.5Mb.

The Adobe Reader is larger (21.5Mb).

Data-driven:

Rather than the content being bound up with the presentation, something that IT professionals constantly consider bad architecture, with the Times Reader these are kept separate.

The display resizes correctly, but within the bounds of the New York Times look-and-feel. Designing for this style of layout is not simple today: it requires the smarts of a developer to generate. I believe there is a market to wire backend services to custom publisher-centricinterfaces in a mechanism non-experienced programming designers can grok.

Maintaining the ownership of the content, even in a creative-commons mantra world, is critical. There is a significant investment in infrastructure to run a publisher, and this must be paid for. Adding value is the only way a large publisher can charge for their premium content. Whilst the Adobe Reader has mechanisms for, cough, DRM, inbuilt – it is another barren wasteland in daily publishing worlds.

Dynamic:

The central dogma/mantra of the Adobe Reader is to retain the original designer’s intent (including fonts) Acrobat does have limited reflow and resizing ability; mainly tacked onto the Reader to permit accessibility. There is an under utilised feature of Acrobat called the Article Tool. Ever used it? It has been in there since the very early versions.

The Times Reader permits resizing of the application and correctly reflows the text; in a composition mechanism that Adobe has living in InDesign, InCopy – even PageMaker. Why can’t these be bolted into an Adobe Reader? InDesign could be turned into the frontend design tool; Coldfusion is at the backend. Maybe this is too old ground for Adobe?

Interactive:

Searching in the Times Reader is a pleasure, and surprises you. With dynamic searching; that is the relevant articles appear under the search box as you type is way excellent. The Topic Explorer is worth the price of entry, alone. It reminds me of Apple’s MCF/Hotsauce/Project X.

Topic Explorer

Skinable:

New York Times owns the interface, lock-stock-and-barrel. The experience is theirs. Being a newspaper of record, this is critical. To change the interface to match their corporate standard is something that the Adobe Reader should permit.

As Scott Hanselman states, the Times Reader is the current poster child for Microsoft’s WPF technologies. The only arrow I can aim at its heart is the Windows XP/Vista only nature of the Reader. Come on Microsoft, release a MacOS version! Having .Net on the Mac platform is probably the friendliest Unix you guys are going to get since Xenix.

It also happens to trump the old king of type and presentation: Adobe. Will Apollo save Adobe’s reputation? Let’s hope its Apollo 11, not Apollo 13.

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) Deprecated.

RIP Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).

Deprecated equals don’t use it. The momentum in the web-world has slowed to grinding halt.

Whilst SVG is a W3C technology, not owned by Adobe, the original specification came from PGML.

Sad, there was much potential for SVG. All it would have taken was Adobe to make a standard programming model and builder application and SVG really could have taken off. SVG is an example of good technology becoming cannon fodder, lost in the charge to an enemy: rather than technology being used for good.

Today, we have two XML-based model for generating rich interfaces: MXML and XAML. One is in the operating system and a part of a download, the other requires a bolt-on application in the browser.

SVG pre-dated these technologies by some years. A standardised widget library; extension into 3D and co-operation by large companies could have advanced the world of rich, connected applications.

Standard file formats invite competitiveness in software applications. Consider open, standardised file formats like world-free trade. The most efficient and best survive. A darwinian selection for the best.

Better luck next time.

Into that goodnight, GoLive?

A part of the Acrobat 8 launch today, Creative Suite Premium is getting a revamp.

And not just with Acrobat 8. Goodbye GoLive, hello Dreamweaver 8.

GoLive Systems, a small Hamburg Mac-only developer, was purchased by Adobe before the dotcom boom. Sadly, it might have been the boom’s first casualty as it languished behind Dreamweaver.

No surprises here.

Forms are the key to Acrobat 8.0 Professional

As I am no longer “inside the Adobe-loop”, I found out about the announcement courtesy of Robert Scoble’s post. Of all people!

My first question: where is the beta of the Reader? With Acrobat 7.0, the beta Reader shipped very close to the announce. Also, Intel Mac users; I am assuming its Universal binary, as the system requirements clearly mention “Intel” processors. There are still too many Windows-only features for a denizen and poster-child for cross-platformness (read Forms Designer).

OK, onto the good stuff. Forms are the bane of everyone’s existence. Even lawyers.

Every paper form that I have to fill out I cringe. Purposely, I filled in the last Census online.

All forms should be online/digital/electronic.

They should be smart, and know who I am. There have been some attempts at getting browsers to remember data.

They don’t have to match printed forms; if a physical (or wet) signature is required: I should be able to just print + sign. Smarter forms will let me fill in online and submit online or via email. Securely.

Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Professional:

Enable advanced features in Adobe Reader

Enable anyone using free Adobe Reader software to participate in document reviews, fill and save electronic forms offline, and digitally sign documents.

If you are small organisation, and just want to collect data quickly, it looks like Acrobat 8 (Professional) is going to help out. The Datasheet has a footnote “For ad-hoc forms distribution and data collection for up to 500 people”

One of the most frustrating, and therefore commented on missing abilities has been for people to be able send out forms, and have anyone with the free Reader fill it in, and send it back. Previously, the only mechanism has been to purchase a big block of code called “Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extension Server“

This lead to all sort of hocus-pocus Javascript libraries, and server-hackeries. Thankfully, software is making it simpler. Like it should be.

I note with interest that guys at PlanetPDF.com in Melbourne has missed this one as at 6:30pm AEST.

Rorohiko ImpositionCompanion for InDesign CS, CS2

The Lightning Brain ImpositionCompanion Plug-In helps to overcome some limitations of InBooklet SE, which doesn’t impose correctly when a document contains objects that overlap two or more pages. The Lightning Brain ImpositionCompanion Plug-In unlinks text threads and splits objects which overlap two or more pages. This allows the page order to be changed without problems.