Opinion: Acrobat 8 is the working man's platform. Multimedia mavens should pin their hopes to Apollo and Acrobat 3D.As a Mac user having lived through the 1.0 days of WebEx and Microsoft Live Meeting—and a current user of Camino, because Safari's more balky than a browser should be—when the Acrobat team took me into its
new Acrobat Connect Web conferencing, I braced for problems. Such as the software refusing connection to my nonstandard computer-browser combo. Or flaky renderings of otherwise normal graphics. Or columns cut off and strobe-light chat windows.
This was my frame of reference. Every Web conference I've led or attended has had some glitch, ranging from minor inconvenience all the way to switching browsers and re-registering or even the embarrassing nuclear option for a Mac user: "I'll call back after I get this running on my Dell laptop," which happens in the real world despite the pithy (and myth-y) Apple commercials featuring Justin Long, the annoying dude who played Warren on "Ed."
Acrobat Connect—the new implementation of the product formerly known as Macromedia Breeze—on the other hand, worked flawlessly. No problems, no glitches, no petty annoyances. No installing a bunch of junk on my hard drive (it used Flash, already on the browser). On Camino, on a Mac. I was waiting for the thing to break, because that always happens. It never did.
If something works on my rickety old Mac in a demo, chances are it will for Joe and Joanna Cubicle trying to get actual work done. There's much potential for this new member of the Acrobat family that's priced better than competitively. But look out, Adobe, the sophisticated, elegant Rosebud's on your tail.
Streamlined Interface
Next up, we all should appreciate the new, stripped-down interface ("minimal UI," as Adobe Director of Product Management Rick Brown puts it). All those buttons, toolbars and menus that Acrobat used to have up there between "File" and the beginning of the document made me feel like I was piloting Battleship Acrobat into some sort of guerilla conflict with unorganized data.
Sure, all the anal-retentive types out there can still take two weeks to customize long rows of buttons to make their work marginally more efficient.
The rest of us can rest our eyes and just get back to wantonly PDF-ing everything in sight like we did back in the good, old days of Acrobat 3, when we didn't have 15 kinds of image-editing tools from which to choose.
Forms and Redaction
People can now save forms data on their hard drives after filling out a form in Reader, as long as the form originated with someone using Acrobat 8 Pro. Sounds like a minor change, but this is huge.
Adobe had been stubbornly holding back on this one feature for many years, trying to get people to buy its Cadillac LiveCycle servers to get it—much to the chagrin of Acrobat users and a developer community who swore up and down that this one feature was holding back the mass implementation of PDF forms in the business, educational and government worlds.
I hope they're right, because it's there now. Get to work, forms developers. I expect to be filling out PDF forms for a lot more processes in my daily life now that this roadblock's been removed. Like, when I register my car. Or file my Ziff expense reports after a night on the town with the ageless feline Spencer F. Katt.
The redaction reaction: I know a well-meaning Adobe's trying to idiot-proof the process of blacking out and permanently removing information from public versions of sensitive documents.
Sadly, there are a lot of idiots out there, and really, while the redaction tools are nice in Acrobat 8, there's no accounting for really, really dumb (or careless) people—who daily invent new and more creative ways to accidentally leak information to reporters and prying eyes on the Web. When Britney Spears' home number or the identity of a minor involved in a court case gets leaked, blame the idiot, not the software.
Flash, but Not Flashy
Adobe took more time in the development cycle to cook up this version of Acrobat. I was ready to be blown away ... and wasn't. Circling back to my earlier point lauding Acrobat's new minimal user interface, I realize this isn't the worst thing.
Over the years Adobe's grown the Acrobat feature set so huge that, honestly, I can't take learning 50 new processes, widgets, menu commands and dialogs. Simplifying operations and making the stuff we already have work better—or more intuitively—do count for something at this stage of Acrobat's maturity.
Adobe did a lot of that, including speeding up conversions of complicated documents to PDF from programs like Visio and AutoCAD, and making PDF-to-Word conversions more accurate.
Truth be told, the most thrilling, cutting-edge PDF is happening in Acrobat 3D and Apollo right now. If that stuff takes off and the general public realizes it can't live without these cool tools, Adobe surely will port them into Acrobat Standard and Pro. Until then, less is more.
Joanna Cubicle and I, we don't necessarily want bleeding-edge 3-D graphics in our presentations and forms; we just want Acrobat to work, as fast as possible, on everybody's machine. Including for that whack job dude who's working at home using Camino, on a Mac. Everyone hates the wait while he sparks up the Dell and logs back in.
Don Fluckinger is a freelance writer based in Nashua, N.H., who has covered Acrobat and PDF technologies for PDFzone since 2000.
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