Acrobat 9, With Flash, Moves Adobe Farther Ahead of Silverlight


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Flash in PDF files, up to this point, has been a developers' diversion. Just as MySpace, WordPress, and Flickr enable the average person to quickly create sophisticated web content, the new Acrobat aims to be Everyman's basic Flash integration tool

While Microsoft is attempting to whip up excitement over Silverlight—a Flash alternative—the technology remains little seen but oft-discussed, a theoretical science.
With Acrobat 9, Adobe delivers Flash to the masses.

To the outside world, it's kind of hard to look at a new release of Acrobat as exciting new technology. The ninth version of an electronic documents authoring tool. Yee-ha.

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Inside Adobe, however, people are pretty jacked up. In fact, while it's her job to say she's more excited over this Acrobat 9 than any previous version, Group Product Marketing Manager Marion Melani might have good reason to be so excited this time around.

The new version ostensibly makes it easier to incorporate Flash into a PDF than ever before — the way WordPress and Blogger.com made blogging accessible to the HTML-ignorant world, and MySpace and Facebook brought cookie-cutter Web design to even the rankest amateurs.

"Acrobat 9 is a really exciting release [because] it has native support for Flash in Acrobat and Adobe Reader," Melani says. "The possibilities of being able to incorporate Flash and have portable playback no matter what platform you're on through Adobe Reader, we believe, is absolutely huge. It really opens up what a PDF can be and what you can do with electronic documents."

"Flash support," for the uninitiated, doesn't just mean video a la YouTube, although Acrobat 9 can create Flash video from other formats via a simple drag-and-drop operation. Acrobat group product manager Michael Folkers says that the most basic application of Flash are the template-driven "PDF Portfolios," which basically organize data in an easy-to-digest manner.

"The bar for creating these PDF Portfolios—we also describe them as 'document experiences'—is quite low," Folkers says. "We used the quote-unquote average knowledge worker as our design guideline for ease-of-use. It's super easy to create a really compelling document experience in Acrobat."

For more adventurous users, Acrobat 9 includes features for rolling your own rudimentary rich Internet apps that poll the web for updated content and otherwise interact with readers. Putting into practice what could theoretically be done before but not by most of the MySpace generation.

On one hand, people look to PDF because of its print fidelity—you see on the page what you see on the screen. On the other, adding Flash could take Acrobat to some business-useful sweet spot somewhere between paper pages (which are static) and web pages (which are interactive, but are also sometimes incomprehensible when printed).

Adobe's built it, but as the famous line in Field of Dreams goes, will they come? Or, more to the point, will they buy it? For the full-boat Flash video integration, buyers will need to go for Acrobat Extended Pro (Windows only), which will have a suggested retail price of $699, while the Professional version (Mac and Windows) has a partial set of Flash-y capabilities, but a $449 price tag. Standard (Windows only), sans the Flash goodies, is $299. Adobe sorts out the features present in the various Acrobat flavors here.

Besides Flash, there are many other improvements to Acrobat 9, from redaction to new support for ISO document standards like PDF/E, PDF/X, and PDF/A's various iterations, and simpler tools to facilitate collaboration online among Reader-using colleagues. Prepress users get more control over their black colors (a longstanding want) and an upgraded "intelligent overprint preview," an esoteric feature that—if it works well—will likely lower the blood pressure of more than a few deadline-crazed workstation dwellers at print facilities.

But by now, that print stuff's old-skool. While Adobe continues to respect that market—the foundation upon which the company built its Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign empire—it's betting that Flash and Acrobat will do for electronic documents what YouTube, Flickr, and page-layout templates did for social-networking sites and the blogosphere. If Acrobat could scale higher peaks of mass appeal in the enterprise world, Adobe's Flash gambit would more than pay off for the company, especially if it makes the world forget about Silverlight in the process.

Saludos, GAby Menta

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