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Agile Acrobat: An early look at an Acrobat PDF Portfolio, in which each element of the carousel represents a different multimedia component.
Adobe
The new Acrobat.com site will allow users to store, share, and work together on these multimedia-heavy portfolios, without having to swap them by e-mail. But Adobe hopes that people will also use the service for broader document-collaboration efforts.
The site offers a minimally featured word processor called Buzzword, acquired when the company bought startup Virtual Ubiquity last year. Separate functions offer Web audio and video conferencing, including the ability to let participants remotely view activity on the main user's desktop. Users can store and share up to five gigabytes of files, allowing them to work on projects together.
Other companies have beat Adobe to these hosted collaboration services, with services such as Google Docs, Microsoft's recently unveiled Live Mesh, and a myriad of smaller offerings. But Adobe is betting that the simple, easy-to-use design of its new service, and the near ubiquity of its Acrobat software, will give it a leg up.
"This is never going to be a direct competitor to Microsoft Office, because it just doesn't have the productivity value," says Forrester Research analyst Sheri McLeish. "But it gets their foot in the door and is an opportunity to reach more users, who will be impressed by what Adobe has done."
Acrobat 9.0 will be available in several versions, costing $299 for the standard edition, $499 for Acrobat Pro, and $699 for the full-featured Pro Extended version. The beta version of Acrobat.com, accessible now, is free.
Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder aim to simplify the construction of rich Internet applications.
Adobe offers a free, scaled down version of its photo-editing software.
"Acrobat's familiar PDF format has long allowed Net users to create and distribute forms, documents, and other publications that don't translate well into ordinary Web pages."
...sounds like a nice road map to obsolescence...
"No (software program) is an island." - John Donne (if he was alive today)
And I thought that the acrobat reader 8 was bloatware. This one is going to be as bad as a Microsoft product. It is unfortunate that it will be unusable for print material now.
Re: Acrobat Gets Multimedia Makeover
Seriously guys...this makes a lot of sense. Adobe Reader truly does render documents as intended without compromising formatting or quality. In addition, authors who publish in PDF are able to control the way their work is viewed and used. Why do you think PDF so popular??
Anyways, the idea of bringing together, the various forms of information (text, images, audio and videos) into a single package is truly brilliant!!! I'd say it's about time!!
Consider this: With books, you've got text and some pictures; With the radio, you've got audio only; With television, you've got video only; With the Internet, you've got everything (text, pictures, audio, video) except that these mostly exist seperately in a multitude of formats, many of which may not be supported by your OS. Now, consider a scenario where these various forms of information are harmonized into a single ubiqitous format such as the PDF.
Authors would finally be able to express their ideas clearly using their preferred information format or a combination of formats all entrained in a single package that is sure to deliver uncompromised output irrespective of the platform on which it is viewed or used.
C'mon...isn't this expected, where these various forms of media would converge into a single entity. Current trends in technology clearly supports this: faster & cheapers processors, larger, compact & more affordable storage devices and highspeed internet suggests that this is clearly feasible.
I really do think that this is a great step for the PDF!
Re: Acrobat Gets Multimedia Makeover
I agree with your assessment. I think that this was inevitable. In fact, I've read several articles (sorry no citations) where some developers have toyed with the idea of developing entire websites (or sections of sites) within a PDF file. I'm not saying that this idea is without it's drawbacks, but it certainly does open the door for some interesting possibilities.
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lathiatmit
2 Comments
com'on we just need a pdf reader
Now you have added a lot of earrings, noserings, and liprings, wearing a fancy wig, painted your teeth green., and changed your nickname to Acrofat.
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Guest (LinuxBabyLinux)
Re: com'on we just need a pdf reader
I am sorry but are they reinventing the wheel? What they are now doing is called a Web Page or the classic HTML.
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