Carl Young’s AcroViews

The closing keynote of technology sneak peeks has some real show-stopping PDF demos:

1) How about an Acrobat 3D file with a Flash background image? The 3D image was of a mobile phone. It also had Flash overlaid on the keyboard, a Flash movie that started sideways and rotated around, and finally, a Flash movie running on the phone screen. Everyone is talking about this one…

2) Tucked inside an Acrobat Connect sneak peek demo was something many may have missed…the Flash player running PDFs. No, not Flash Paper, but a PDF. It had zoom and page turning controls…

Not much PDF stuff at the keynote today, but we were treated to a surprise appearance by John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe and the father of PDF. He said he is spending his retirement building web sites for his hobbies, and he is very pleased with the Macromedia-Adobe merger. He appeared via Acrobat Connect…

Adobe showed off some very cool applications for developing mobile phone applications, including a mobile phone emulator that will run a Flash-based application at the same speed as it would work on the phone.

This is my first Adobe MAX event, and I have to say I am very impressed. The Venetian is a wonderful venue, the food is great and the attendance hit 3,200 this year, a record. It’s good to see lots of old friends here.
The keynotes on the first day were a lot of fun. The kickoff was a Blue Man group show, which was a great way to get energized for a 12-hour day.

While there wasn’t much in the hour and a half of talks that was strictly PDF, a couple of cool things did happen.

1) We saw a demo of a plug-in for Adobe LiveCycle Designer that generated a Flash form and a PDF form at the same time. Very cool.

2) The old Macromedia crowd is slowly warming up to PDF.

Ben Forta, a well known Flash and Dreamweaver evangelist, stood up and said, “I have been drinking lots and lots of PDF Kool-Aid” and indicated he’s learned a lot he didn’t know about PDF.

That PDF stuff doesn’t taste so bad, does it, Ben?

More keynotes tomorrow. I’m betting we hear more about PDF then.

As I mentioned in an E-mail blast to past participants in PDF Conference, I am encouraging everyone to attend Adobe MAX in Las Vegas in 2006.

Jo Lou and I will be at the Acrobat User Community booth in the trade show area of the Venetian. Please stop by and say hello.

In addition, I will be blogging from the show floor for those of you who cannot attend MAX.

The master of Acrobat and FrameMaker annoyances is Shlomo Perets of Microtype. As he points out, the automatic link finder in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 6 and 7 can fail if the web address is split across lines, or if the address includes underscores or dots. Autorecognition of e-mail addresses can fail for the same reasons.

The solution? Always create links with your authoring program so you don’t rely on Acrobat or Reader to find them.

Shlomo has a great publication on PDF Best Practices. Also check out the section at his web site that could be called “Botched Practices” for things not to do with Acrobat.

I see that Acrobat Connect will not include VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol). It’s unclear to me whether your monthly Connect subscription fee includes telephone conferencing. It’s not listed in the comparison chart.

If not, you do have free alternatives, such as Skype (free calls within North America through 2006) and FreeConferenceCall.com. I am sure there are othera as well, but I’m a Skype and FreeConferenceCall.com user.