Microsoft Windows Vista support with Adobe Applications

(Link thanks to John Dowdell) Bridging my old world to my new world, this document details the support for current Adobe applications with Microsoft Windows Vista. It is well worth a read, especially as Adobe products: Flash Player and the Adobe Reader are very common installs.

Summary: no Acrobat 7 support for Vista, only Acrobat 8: with an update expected first half 2007 for full support. There are known issues with Acrobat 8 on Vista. Similarly with Office 2007; the update will have support. You can make PDFs directly from Office 2007 using the Save as PDF and XPS plugin.

For Adobe Creative Suite 2.3: (note that Creative Suite Premium 2.0 with Acrobat Professional 7.0 is not a good combination). For Macromedia Studio 8, the following seems to also apply.

we are not currently aware of major issues that would adversely affect customer use of
Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 on Windows Vista.

In the document, it is worth noting the paragraphs in regards to the forthcoming, pre-announce status Adobe Creative Suite 3.0:

…Adobe Creative Suite 3 is being designed for and thoroughly tested on 32-bit versions of four editions of Windows Vista—Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate.

Adobe Production Studio (video products) seem to install OK, but Vista is not recommended as an OS. EncoreDVD is reported to not work on Vista. Shame, as I was just about to purchase a Production Studio for some Microsoft video projects. 

Altsys/Aldus/Adobe/Altsys/Macromedia/Adobe Freehand? Oooh. Maybe not so good:

Adobe does not plan to update Macromedia FreeHand to install or run on Windows Vista

Do go have a read, and look at the support forums: Vista in Adobe Support Forums.

As a Microsoft Vista and an Intel-based MacBook Pro user, this year is a key year for Adobe products.

Having a Holiday

As one wise man once said to me on a trip to New Zealand: I get stressed when I don’t know where I am sleeping that night whilst on holiday. No tents for me.

Roamfree.com.au is a new entrant into the market; a web service where you can find accomodation. What’s more, is is fast. Very fast.

Vista is made for Tablets. And pens.

I have my new tablet PC (which I’ve named Captain Darling), and l am highly surprised how excellent the text recognition works on Vista. And not only the text, it’s also the whole Aero interface: it lends itself to the pen. lt’s the whole UX. Windows flip 3D rocks with a pen!

My last experience with text recognition was attempting to learn that weird Palm graffiti system. Before that I attempted to yet that Apple Newton stuff working. And l haven’t trained the recognizer yet! The best part of the Newton environment was the programming language, Newtonscript. Dynamic, object oriented and very rich.

Now You ave probably thinking: you have to purchase a Tablet PC thing. Nope, just avail yourself of a WACOM tablet. Bingo. Vista Home Premium, Business, or Ultimate becomes a Tablet PC.

Wool off a Sheep’s Back

Fell off the plane, smelt the wet-wool and knew I was home. The smell of wet wool is something that is slightly sweet; and reminds me of school in Adelaide. The blazers and jumpers we wore were 100% wool; and the fresh rain made a unique smell of dampness. Obviously, the carpets in Sydney airport are wool and there is a leakage somewhere in the terminal.

After getting home at around 10am, beautiful sleep on my own bed in the heavy rain interrupted my attendance at the Microsoft UPConference 2007 at the Powerhouse Museum.

Northern Pylons, Sydney Harbour Bridge
Tuesday started better: up early, and into the UpConference. Choice: head into work and start setting up my new and first Microsoft-owned laptop, or go into another day of talking to a whole bunch of interesting community-minded people and listening. UpConference won, especially as Frank is resting up, and Uncle Mike is in town. A big thankyou from Frank Arrigo and myself to Jill Taylor and Mike Seyfang for standing in for Frank for the Monday presentation. Get better Frank; and interestingly, Jill’s perspective was perfect for the audience. Message here is that there is much work to do in UP group of people to get into this social networking thing: blogs, podcasts, vidcasts, RSS and the whole thing. Uncle Mike, the genius Matt Wong and I will push this along through 2007. There were three highlights today:

  1. Steve Lawrence
    Steve Lawrence, CEO of Work Ventures, presenting on Leadership in the Not-for-Profit world. Excellent words on social enterprise, and how these can heal the pains of deep social problems. Steve commented on how Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential program is an excellent example how global corporations can assist in this healing process. Communications and Collaboration are key.
  2. Podcasting
    Mike Seyfang discussing Subscribing to feeds, Podcasting. Mike is Australia’s premiere social-networking expert for the learning and not-for-profit industries. A must-have speaker.
  3. Senior Australian of the Year 2006, Dr. Sally Goold telling her story from living on the fringes of society to being one of the pioneering Aboriginal Registered Nurses. Her story bookended and clearly demonstrated that all have Unlimited Potential. No matter backgrounds, personal ability or cultural resistance.

Stories, using the software and networks we have to network between conferences. Some work to be done here. It is a time in the world’s history where the barriers are falling down; and we as technologists have to help as many people as we can. Just as reading and writing was taught in the Victorian Era in England: we must be a part of imparting digital knowledge to lift Australia to it’s knowledge potential. We can no longer ride on the sheep’s back.

Geek Gear

APC Magazine Australia has started a unique experiment: Geek Gear.
Geek Gear is an ongoing experiment and it will feature over the next few months in APC Magazines ecommerce workshop series. Be sure to get the next issue when it hits the stands!

Count me in as a lab rat: I am a sucker for T-Shirts and Caps.

Professional Geek Goes Seattle, WA.

Seven days of internal meetings and thousands of like-minded geeks can turn physically pear shaped. The content, if you have spent the last few months with your brain purposely set on idle, is just what the doctor ordered. All the Microsoft people I have met have been friendly, helpful and way smarter than me. And there is a distinct, resonating tone of listening. I am here to listen, so Microsoft doesn’t go pear shaped.

In the spirit of listening; it applies to internal conversations too. This week, Seattle, Washington, could have easily been Seattle, Western Australia. Which brings me to the hero of the week: Michael Kleef. More guts than the rest of the room combined, he had the heart to ask the difficult question about Exchange and global timezones: and through it became the Meme of the Week.

The two highlights of the week have been seeing Sir Bill Gates (although I note my esteemed collegue from the UK, Paul Foster, did not correctly refer to the Chairmain in this manner). Excellent view of the state of the technology and biology world. The other highlight was seeing BMW’s Director of Design: Chris Bungle present on Design as a meta concept.

The Starbucks virus started replication in Seattle. If you want to see your Starbucks future, with a Starbucks on every corner and in every hotel and arcade: visit Seattle. As a bright spark from New Zealand noted, it will be good to get home to real coffee. Not Starbucks. In fact, the best coffee I’ve had all week has been a French Pastierrie near Pike’s Wharf.

After introducing Jesse to Canada’s last resident comedians, Trailer Park Boys, I think he’s given up on posting the pictures of our outing to the edge of Puget Sound. Believe me, some of us did get out of the Hotels/Meeting Rooms into the harsh morning sea air of Puget Sound.

So I love Dynamic Languages. It has been interesting to hear the internal conversations related to C# and dynamic languages like Javascript. In my deeper learning of Microsoft, I had watched some of the Channel 9 videos of the language guru Anders Hejlsberg. There are some more dynamic “things” inside C# 2.0 (and the forthcoming C# 3.0) that make it and the CLR more dynamic.

Perfect evidence of this is the IronPython project. I have yet to get some cycles to pump out a project like Jon Udell. Or maybe I’ll go down the Ruby route thanks to some smart guys in Queensland, Australia: Ruby.Net. After seeing the ASP.NET Ajax stuff: from a Javascript and PHP perspective, I am all inspired to do some cool stuff. And see if MVC relates to these environments.

Office 2007. Now even Mac users are saying the interface shows that Microsoft can do innovative user interfaces. Yeah. And there’s a lot more inside Office 2007 that I will get to show off. There’s cool stuff inside IE7 related to RSS that are excellent for making your site more approachable, too.

Nextly, on to the “onboarding” training. This will make me less organisationally pear-shaped. Or so the HR and management theory goes…