Carl Young’s AcroViews

If you would like to see some of the differences between Adobe’s three form creation tools (leaving out Dreamweaver and GoLive), take a look at this demo. It’s a Flash movie that shows how to create a “sum” field in Acrobat, LiveCycle Designer and Flash. This demo applies to Acrobat Professional 8 and LiveCycle Designer 8, but was created with Acrobat Professional 7 and LiveCycle Designer 7.

Go to demo.

Note: I’ll do some more Flash demos once Adobe lets me test a release candidate of Acrobat Profession 8 and LiveCycle Designer 8.

During my Adobe-supervised Acrobat 8 demo at the Phoenix Acrobat User Group meeting, PDF guru Steve Matson of Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station smiled when Acrobat 8 converted a native AutoCAD file to PDF. His smile got even bigger when he found out Acrobat 8 can convert *.dwg files to PDF without AutoCAD. Even the layers come in.
The *.dwg I used in the demo was filled with very fine red and yellow lines. When I mentioned that Acrobat 8 preflight tools now repair files as well as generate reports, he asked me to convert the *.dwg to PDF and to then convert the PDF to grayscale. I had no idea if this would work, but I gave it a shot. The “convert to grayscale” preflight profile worked like a champ. The drawing converted wonderfully, and even preserved the layers. The drawing looked a lot better in grayscale, too.

I hadn’t thought of using preflight tools on what Adobe calls AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) PDF files, but I think there is a lot of potential in the concept.

—Carl

The AcroUser blogsphere has been a little quiet lately because most of us have been focused on prepping for Acrobat 8. Now that it has been announced, I am sure you will be seeing a lot of posts about it.

There’s a lot to say. 8 is a big-time release with a new interface and lots of new features and enhancements, like the capability to enable digital signatures and saving in Reader for limited distribution.

To me, the most interesting thing about Acrobat and Reader 8 are the hooks to Acrobat Connect, formerly Macromedia Breeze. Breeze is online conferencing and meeting software based on Flash.

As far as I know, branding Connect as Acrobat Connect is the first time Adobe has put the Acrobat name on a non-PDF product.

Connect/Breeze is not part of Acrobat/Reader, but Adobe has placed very prominent links to Connect in both Reader and Acrobat.

In addition, it appears that Adobe will change the Breeze pricing model for small Connect meetings. I haven’t seen anything firm, but charges are supposed to be along the lines of a monthly phone bill for an online meeting of a dozen or so.

The version of Connect you see offered in Acrobat and Reader puts Adobe in the business of being an Application Service Provider (ASP) in a big way. You subscribe to the service, and Adobe provides it, just like your local utility provides water and electricity.

If Adobe gets the pricing and feature set right, Connect could out-Skype Skype. If Connect takes off with a push from Reader and Acrobat, it could transform Adobe into something like a utility company and make small group online meetings as routine as phone calls.

Who knows where this could lead? In the 20^th Century AT&T was known as Ma Bell. In the 21^st, everyone may look to Ma Adobe for online meetings.