Acro bytes by Kurt Foss

As has been previously noted, the first significant fruits of Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia will be officially borne when Acrobat 8 begins shipping — early November, according to the latest company reports. The live Web conferencing application formerly known as Breeze, which I must say from experience was aptly named, is now dubbed Acrobat Connect and will be available as a hosted service. You can launch an “always-on” personal meeting room from within Acrobat or Reader and invite up to 15 people to participate.

Soon you’ll be able to test drive the functionality and judge the usefulness for yourselves, as Adobe will be offering a free trial version through the end of 2006. For one example of how a training company utilizes and benefits from Connect, read the case study on Promega Corporation [PDF: 412kb] available on Adobe.com.

You may not get the chance to test Connect in the same manner that Mark Szulc, a Senior Systems Engineer at Adobe, and colleague Andrew Spaulding did recently. So it’s worth reading Szulc’s blog post titled “That’s just damn cool–Acrobat Connect on a plane” for the details of their recent aerial connection. While Spaulding was in flight, he pinged hotel-bound Szulc and they linked up via a Connect personal meeting room to collaborate on an upcoming presentation. They “even fired up the webcams because we could,” Szulc says of the encounter, which took place while Spaulding was “sitting in his seat somewhere above Australia.”

Of course, if you don’t have access to an inflight wireless service, as Spaulding apparently did on Singapore Airlines, this experiment isn’t going to fly. But it’s interesting to see that the barrier to such real-world, real-time global collaboration is not the technology.

Connect may prove to be an equally appropriate product name.

Regarding the upcoming U. S. elections, the good news for most Americans is that in just over a week, the season of often-nasty and increasingly personal political campaign advertising will finally end. All that will be left when polls close on the evening of November 7 is counting the votes.

However, that may itself be a source of further divisiveness and potential scandal, according to a 27-page report titled “How to steal an election by hacking the vote” [PDF: 3MB] published and being freely distributed by Ars Technica, a technology trends website. It warns that security flaws in a number of electronic voting solutions now make it increasingly possible to hijack an election. Author Ken Fisher explains that “I’m not in any way encouraging anyone to actually go out and steal an election. This article is intended solely as a guide to the kinds of information and techniques that election thieves already have available, and not as an incitement to or an aid for committing crimes.”

According to the website, after it initially offered the report only to subscribers to its premium service, “we received a flood of requests that we release a free copy of the article’s PDF … [and] suggested that the PDF should be emailed to elected officials, especially congresspersons and Secretaries of State, as a kind of wake-up call for how insecure our elections are.”

The site notes that its intentions are non-political:

“Please remember, election fraud is a bipartisan issue. Both parties have stolen elections in the past, and regardless of what you may think of one party or the other as we head into the hotly contested November mid-terms, the fate of our American tradition of self-rule is at stake.”

Bob Wulff, Senior VP for Acrobat Engineering, likes to tell the story of how now-retired Adobe co-founder John Warnock pulled him into lending temporary technical assistance “for a couple weeks” on a pet project after a chance hallway encounter in 1990. Wulff is still on the job.

In a recent interview conducted after the September 18 announcement of Acrobat 8 but before it began shipping — a busy time for Wulff and his engineering group that is now spread across several continents — he talked about the product’s history, some of the key features in the forthcoming version and about his expectations for future releases.

“Acrobat 8 has a taste of some new features that are really just the beginning of what you’ll see in the future,” Wulff says. “A good example is the integration of Connect with Acrobat. That’s really Step 1 in what I think will be a long and very exciting journey.”

Read the full interview, then add your comments and questions in the Leave a Reply comment box below (after logging in).

Five years ago I had a chance to interview Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen not long after he ascended to the company’s top management role, following in the giant steps of legendary co-founders John Warnock and Charles Geschke upon the pair’s successive retirements.

Among the things Chizen talked about was the legacy he was already envisioning. “In five years, I hope people can look back and base my legacy on what we were able to do with Acrobat,” he said in mid-2001.

That legacy will likely get another boost when Acrobat 8, which includes the first real product integration resulting from Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia, begins shipping in November.

We also talked briefly about the general state of eBooks in 2001 and Adobe’s efforts to date to become a major player in the fledgling industry, one that featured a variety of different handheld devices from a range of companies, and based on competing formats and operating systems. In that interview, Chizen first mentioned that Adobe would soon be forsaking its special-purpose eBook Reader software for a new version of the Adobe Acrobat Reader that could display both standard PDF files and secure-PDF-based eBooks distributed by publishers using Adobe’s Content Server DRM technology.

Chizen said at the time that Adobe’s interest was not specifically in eBooks, but rather in “eContent,” which included magazines, newspapers, textbooks and other educational materials.

Like many early enthusiasts and supporters, Adobe eventually decided that eBooks and eBook-viewing technologies were not yet ready for prime time — based on the general public’s satisfaction with ink-on-paper — and lessened its involvement and investment. (A contentious public dispute with ElcomSoft, a Russian software that cracked Adobe’s eBook security — a copyright battle that played out in the court system and earned Adobe considerable ill will — didn’t help either.)

Chizen noted elsewhere that the move shouldn’t be seen as an abandonment of the vision, but rather a pause that would allow better solutions to emerge.

With its release yesterday of a public beta of Digital Editions, a Web-based application built on Flash 9 for viewing eBooks and other kinds of eContent — in PDF and XHTML — Adobe appears to believe the time to make another push has come. Announced at its Adobe MAX 2006 event in Las Vegas, the beta includes integration with Adobe Acrobat 8 and Reader 8, both which can install and launch Digital Editions from within their respective user interfaces.

According to a detailed FAQ, “The intention is to support in Digital Editions those PDF features reasonably needed by eBooks and other commercially-published content, balancing 100% coverage vs. the focus on small size and high performance. Also, certain capabilities defined in PDF may be delivered in Digital Editions via Flash SWF or the new reflow-centric PSF.”

The public beta (Windows) can be downloaded from the Adobe Labs website, with a Mac version due out by the end of the year. The company says version 1.0 will be available in early 2007. Not all features are implemented in the current beta.

A number of sample ebooks and other viewable content are available for download from Adobe’s Digital Editions Library.

Design Tools Monthly, a commercial newsletter aimed at graphics design professionals, summarizes timely articles, tips and other useful information from a broad range of design industry magazines and websites.

Coverage includes both Acrobat and Reader, which in a sense is also a tad self-serving, since the monthly newsletter is made available to paid subscribers in PDF. It behooves publisher and editor Jay Nelson to have newsletter readers who are savvy with PDF files, in part so they appreciate the various user-enabling features he and the staff build into each issue–including bookmarks, active weblinks and article threads.

TThe DTM website currently features a free-to-view Quicktime video clip that highlights the publication’s helpful navigational elements and provides a demonstration of how to take full advantage of the search functionality built into Acrobat and Reader. The “PDF Power Search” [QT: 17.3 MB] tutorial reviews both basic and advanced search capabilities, showing how a newsletter subscriber can maintain a folder of of archived issues and then easily search them using various criteria–search terms are highlighted in the results.

The site offers a free sample issue for download.

In the latest in our ongoing series of interviews with a variety of key Acrobat team members at Adobe, I talked recently with Randy Swineford (right), part of the product management group led by Rick Brown.

Randy explains his specific duties and key areas of responsibility, which includes interacting with both customers and with other Acrobat team groups.

“We get involved with every team at Adobe–marketing, sales, legal, engineering, documentation writers–and we constantly interact with customers. I never get bored with this job, mainly because I get to talk to people at companies in every industry– from power plants to defense contractors to financial services to pharmaceutical companies to government agencies–and in every job function. They always enjoy having a conversation about Acrobat and I always enjoy showing them the product.”

His key areas of responsibility include the Combine and Collaboration features, both significantly enhanced in Acrobat 8. In addition to the Q&A-format interview, we’ve published a related sidebar in which he explains in greater detail the advantages of the new Shared Review collaboration process in Acrobat 8 as compared to Acrobat 7’s browser-based review.

“The new shared-review infrastructure is no longer dependent on the location of the document,” he says. “The path to the comment server is baked into the document when you send it for review, so you can open a document in a web browser, make comments, save it to your desktop/open Acrobat, make more comments, save it and then e-mail it to someone else–in all cases, the review will ‘just work.’”

Check out the interview and add any comments or questions in the ‘Article Feedback’ area at the bottom of the page.

First, as a follow to a previous blog post, we have now uploaded for member viewing an archived version of the popular “Adobe Acrobat 8 & Acrobat Connect webinar” offered several times on September 19, the day after Adobe’s public announcement.

Next up: In tune with the anticipated release next month of Adobe Acrobat 8 is a series of live seminars, currently slated for the following locations and dates:

• October 31 - Chicago, IL
• November 14 - Toronto, Ontario
• November 17 - Irvine, CA
• November 30 - San Francisco, CA
• December 4 - New York City, NY

Following an opening address by Tom Hale, Senior Vice President of Adobe’s Knowledge Worker Business Unit, is a series of 90-minute, concurrent breakout sessions aimed at professionals in the following fields:

• AEC/Manufacturing
• Creative and Marketing
• General Business/IT
• Legal
• Education/eLearning

Online registration is available for all locations.