New Acrobat and Introducing Acrobat.com
Two big announcements today. One, we’re announcing Reader 9 which includes the ability to render SWF content inside of your PDF. That means you can actually put Flash/Flex content directly into created PDFs. That opens up a lot of very, very interesting use cases like exposing form entry applications right inside of the document or starting to use a lot of video content inside of your PDFs. I think this is one of the more interesting things to happen with the Adobe/Macromedia merger. With PDF’s right’s management built in, this also provides you a way to protect your SWF content from being decompiled.
The second announcement, my favorite of the day, is that we’re rolling out Acrobat.com. You’ve seen a lot of the services in different parts of the web, but we’re finally bringing them together under one umbrella brand with one account and a lot of functionality. You get Buzzword, “Share”, and “Brio” all as part of Acrobat.com and the line between the online software and the desktop software is starting to blur. For instance right from the Adobe Reader menus you can create a new Buzzword document or start a collaborative meeting in “Brio” which as been named Connect Now. Your Buzzword documents can now export to PDF and you can use Share to both create PDFs from documents as well as make it easy to send them to friends or embed them on your blog. There’s even an Acrobat.com AIR widget that lets you drag and drop files and create PDFs from them. Here’s a list of the features/apps:
- Adobe Buzzword – Online word processing.
- Connect Now – Online collaboration. Allows you to do Connect meetings with up to 3 people.
- Create PDF – Create a PDF from any file.
- Share – Upload files, send them to friends, or embed them on your blog.
I’m exited to see us bring all of our knowledge worker services under one brand. With PDF and our collaboration tools I think we’re uniquely positioned to help people work together more easily. But the best part is that with Flash and Flex, our development community can get involved as well. You can start leveraging PDF, you can start building applications on top of these services. It’s a big day for Adobe and I think for our development community as well.
Good quote from Allen Stern:
One of the things I find interesting is when we talk about the big Web companies, Adobe is usually not on the list. With today’s Acrobat.com launch, we might just begin to group them with the top players in the Web space and specifically in the collaboration space.
Yes and Yes.
Posted in Adobe
June 1st, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Ryan.
A couple of questions:
1) when can you actually sign up for the beta? (sign up button redirects to the acrobat product line page)
2) Are there any stats like the flash player census on acrobat/reader for things like version penetration / time to reach percentages / number of installs etc.
Cheers,
Aran
June 1st, 2008 at 9:36 pm
congrats on the launch Ryan!
June 1st, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Acrobat.com: Very nicely done!
June 1st, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Thanks guys! And great writeup Allen!
Aran, to the first question, you should be able to sign up now. As long as you have an Adobe ID, you can put that in and go. Let me know if you’re having problems. I didn’t see the redirect that you’re seeing.
On the second question, I don’t know what our penetration numbers are for the Acrobat penetration. I’ll try and find them out.
June 1st, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Adobe Reader supports Flash content embedding since Acrobat Reader 6. Where can we find the announcement with a description about the real changes ?
June 1st, 2008 at 11:10 pm
@Tek – Here’s the press release from Adobe – http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200805/060208AdobeAcrobat9.html
I think the main news around Flash/PDF is that we’ve got a lot more integration than we had previously. This isn’t just embedding, it’s interacting with the Flash movie, it’s manipulating the PDF DOM, it’s video support, and the ability to quickly add entire working Flex/Flash applications to Acrobat.
June 2nd, 2008 at 12:40 am
[...] información y comentarios en el blog de Ryan Stewart, empleado de [...]
June 2nd, 2008 at 12:40 am
[...] información y comentarios en el blog de Ryan Stewart, empleado de [...]
June 2nd, 2008 at 1:42 am
Thanks Ryan, manipulating the PDF DOM at runtime seems a really interesting feature. I’m sure there is a lot of thing to do with a Flash application that uses AlivePDF (the AS3 library made by Thibault Imbert : http://www.alivepdf.org/). Like generating PDF content from Flash or editing PDF content in Flash.
June 2nd, 2008 at 3:21 am
Wow, that’s really awesome movement! Now we could create a “live” book using Embedded flash in Pdf Document. Congratulation Ryan.
June 2nd, 2008 at 4:23 am
[...] of other bloggers have the news today that Adobe has launched Acrobat.com with five great free knowledge [...]
June 2nd, 2008 at 4:57 am
[...] http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=1449 [...]
June 2nd, 2008 at 5:22 am
Just a quick headsup that the links above to stage.acrobat.com (e.g. Adobe Buzzword, Create PDF and Share) don’t work… I presume they are meant to be to http://www.acrobat.com...
June 2nd, 2008 at 5:51 am
Whoops, thanks a ton Kelvin. Fixed.
June 2nd, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Hi, I think the more significant fact is that now Acrobat 9 delivers a real native support for Flash, including compatible video / application files.
French introducing from Adobe :
http://www.adobe.com/fr/products/acrobat/
June 2nd, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Still think you guys missed the boat…
Should have called it “Adobe Productivity Portal” (A.P.P.)
I have bad memories of Acrobat (but maybe version 9 will change that).
- Jason The Saj
June 2nd, 2008 at 4:54 pm
[...] información y comentarios en el blog de Ryan Stewart, empleado de [...]
June 2nd, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Ryan.
Sign up not working – Cool. The sign up links work now. I think your blog post beat the app being place by a few hours
PDF stats – It would be great if you could. I have never been able to find any useful stats to tell clients (I have one now who wants to do PDF forms / flash content for one of their banking clients, and I need to be able to tell them what % of users would likely have reader 7+)
June 3rd, 2008 at 3:59 pm
[...] New Acrobat and Introducing Acrobat.com [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 6:34 am
Great job guys
I am sure the distributions will go to a whole new level with the SWF feature, this is something that would make a lot things a lot easier for those of us that write ebooks and are into info commercial stuff.
I checked Acrobat.com and I will have to get hang of it, but it seems a powerful one.
I will put more insight later when im back Ryan.
btw goodluck with it all..
Ernest