Acro bytes by Kurt Foss

If you’re among the early adopters of Acrobat 8, you’re probably busy exploring the new, streamlined user interface. And if you’ve been using a previous version, no doubt you’ll be spending a little time making sure you know where some features, tools and menus are located as a result of the UI makeover.

One area within Acrobat 8 that isn’t likely to get a lot of user attention is the listing of credits, found under ‘About Acrobat.’ The scrollable fine print acknowledges the Acrobat team members who’ve contributed to the development of the new version, including individuals from engineering, user interface, marketing and business management, product management and other internal working groups.

Rather than extolling the product’s virtues, today I want to draw your attention to this seldom-seen list of credits–and to one particular name out of the many. Listed among the product management group staff is Chris Gulker, a team member I’ve known and whose work I’ve respected–and learned much from–during the past couple of decades.

While his Acrobat team colleagues are now looking ahead to new challenges as the product has begun shipping, I learned only yesterday that Chris is at home facing a different type of challenge. He was recently diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor (grade 3 glioma). I know he’s home (following a brain biopsy prior to chemotherapy) because he’s sharing details of his spiritual and medical treatments–including a Magnetic Resonance Image of his brain showing the tumor–on his personal blog at www.gulker.com, one that he started in 1995 before anyone was using the term. Chris was ahead of the wave with blogging, as he has been with many other of his numerous technological feats and achievements in his diverse, interesting career.

Chris and I both came to the worlds of technology and software from backgrounds in journalism and news photography, and our paths crossed numerous times. In the early 1990s, we linked up and travelled to Australia and New Zealand together to participate in several digital imaging and publishing workshops sponsored by a large Pacific Area newspaper publishing organization. We were also both part of a “Virtual Newsroom” team that used early digital cameras, film scanners and related desktop publishing tools to cover and distribute photographs digitally from a trailer at the 1992 Super Bowl in Minneapolis.

Chris was also an early Acrobat and PDF user. Working as a photojournalist in Los Angeles, he published an experimental “retrospective photo book” [PDF:693kb] in 1995 and made his electronic portfolio available for download on the Web. He told me recently that more than a decade later, it’s still getting 8-10 daily downloads.

He was subsequently hired by the Hearst organization in San Francisco–where journalists were still using typewriters at the time–to help the Examiner explore how newspapers could harness and publish on the Internet. His boss, Will Hearst, explained that the WWW made it possible for an individual to set up his or her own website as a personal printing press–using www.gulker.com as a hypothetical example–and even to potentially compete with traditional newspapers. Chris jumped on the idea and the Internet that same day, launching Gulker.com in 1995. He’s been blogging regularly since then, right up to and including this week’s biopsy and return home. (And as you might imagine, the quality of photography is considerably higher than at the typical blog.)

After driving the launch of and managing the Electronic Examiner, one of the first online newspapers in the U.S., Chris left the world of traditional journalism. He joined Apple Computer as a publishing markets director and then later worked on a couple of small Silicon Valley start-up businesses. In 2004, he joined Adobe–first to work on its since-discontinued Atmosphere, later switching to the Acrobat product management team, where he’s been primarily focused on forms, accessibility, product internationalization and Mac OS X-related issues.

One of his most recent personal productivity experiments “to see what a full digital life is like” involved setting up a scanner and Acrobat as part of a solution to convert, index, manage and archive all of the typical documents he routinely deals with–articles, reports, invoices, receipts and so on. Of course, he’s been blogging about The Paperless Project, too.

Harsh reality intervened in mid-October, as he recounts in a separate blog area, with a frightening incident at work:

“Sitting in my office at Adobe, in San Jose, I had just finished typing a document and was reaching for the phone to call a colleague when my left arm suddenly convulsed into a painful contraction that froze it, every muscle tightly clenched and curled up against my chest. Wild contractions began to flow up and down the arm.

Completely nonplussed, and absolutely at a loss to figure out what was going on, I slid to my knees and crawled to the corridor and said ‘Help.’ Three colleagues appeared, 2 headed for the phone and one came and tried to calm me down. By now I was hyperventilating and completely freaked out.”

Luckily, paramedics arrived and he was whisked away for evaluation. The brain tumor diagnosis soon followed. With it came much soul-searching and necessary lifestyle changes. Chris was able to set up a home-based office to continue his Adobe work for a while. Acrobat Connect became an invaluable tool, he says, for arranging and conducting personal meetings. But following the biopsy earlier this week, Chris now faces six weeks of daily radiation treatments, with plans to return to work in 2007.

We’ll be watching Gulker.com for good news about the treatment and recovery of a true technology visionary–and a friend. He said in a brief e-mail message today that “we have every intention of getting through this and right back on Acrobat.”

Like all of the Adobe staff listed in the Acrobat 8 credits, we very much look forward to–and will be cheering for–that day.

Best to you, Chris, and to wife Linda and the family!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 3:20 pm and is filed under Acrobat 8, PDF, Acrobat team. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.