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.
Pandora is one of my favorite music services. They’ve got a great library and it’s an excellent way to discover music. They also have (I think) one of the larger user bases for online music. But I’d gotten so used to having my music outside the browser that I hadn’t listened to them in a while. But today I woke up to find that they’ve released a beta of a desktop client built on Adobe AIR.