Adobe officially announced Acrobat 9 today. I'll admit I am VERY impressed with the release (I know, it's Acrobat!), and it's worth heading over to Adobe's website to take a look.
Of interesting note is that Adobe has announced a 3.3 upgrade to Creative Suite Design Premium owners, which is basically Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium PLUS Acrobat 9... and Fireworks! For those who weren't aware, Fireworks was previously available only as part of the Web edition of the suite. This will give more people a reason to see some of the benefits of Fireworks. While I'll admit I've toyed with Fireworks here and there, I'm still firmly entrenched in sticking with Illustrator. Maybe folks out there can help me find more of a reason to use Fireworks.
Of most interest to me however, and what I believe is probably the most exciting news of the day, is Adobe's announcement that alongside Acrobat 9 are a variety of online services. I personally have been relying on several online "applications" (37 Signals' Basecamp is one such example), and most of you are familiar with Adobe's Kuler and Photoshop Express apps as well. Now, Adobe introduces several new online services at www.acrobat.com that include an online word processor (Buzzword) and a suite of tools that allow you to create, share, and host documents online.
If this is a direction that Adobe is moving towards (which appears is the case), then one can only dream of how such online services can also be extended towards the design community. Yummy thoughts.
A blog about Adobe Illustrator and design in general
6 comments:
I want to be there the first time someone brings a Flash impregnated PDF to Kinko's and demands to know why they can't print a YouTube video.
I'm afraid I don't know anyone for whom this feature would be worth a shiny nickel let alone the cost of upgrading. All this Flash brandishing reminds me of a little boy who did not enjoy whitewashing fences.
Are you stating that PDF documents are only useful in print and prepress workflows?
i am going to download it now. hehe
Interesting. I recently designed a presentation for a company that wanted something better than PowerPoint, but not as advanced as full multimedia. So I used a combination of Illustrator and InDesign, and gave them a PDF. They liked the results -- and the convenient format. Being able to add some Flash animation (flow charts etc) could bring projects like this to a new level.
what I find perhaps more interesting is Adobe firing a shot across Microsoft's (and Google's) Bow.
The PDF format tends to be tolerated more often than it is liked in any line of work, but I'd feel comfortable saying that the number of people who actively use it for anything other than print workflows are significantly fewer than Adobe would like.
The best way to make sure nobody ever reads a document on the web is to put it in PDF format. The second best way is to put it in Flash. This just marries the two into an even more esoteric niche I'd be very surprised to see take off popularity-wise. Maybe if they gave Acrobat away for free.
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