Adobe Systems on Saturday will be unveiling a slightly sleeker version of its Acrobat.com hosted-application service.
The site, which combines a number of tools, including word processing, PDF conversion, spreadsheets, and live Web meetings, has been reworked with a new architecture the company says will help it scale beyond its 6 million existing users. Currently, it is garnering about 100,000 sign-ups a week, with about half those coming from the United States.
Saturday's release includes 35 new features, all of which have been suggested by Adobe's customers through its Reddit-like Ideas page, which lets anyone vote up or down user-generated suggestions. The most notable addition is a new organizer, which consolidates all of the user's files and projects saved on Adobe's servers.
In a phone call with CNET earlier this month, Acrobat.com Director of Project Management Rick Treitman, said the organizer was the No. 1 most requested user feature. "It used to be confusing. We had three organizers, or places where users could organize files. Now there's one," he said.
The new file organizer adds some subtle changes, the most apparent being a white background, which goes against the company's infatuation with using black or dark-gray backgrounds in its products, but which makes it easier to differentiate the text and file types. Treitman said users overwhelmingly complained about it being too dark and hard to read.
Users also wanted a way to search through their files, Treitman said, so the company has added file-searching capability, albeit at a limited capacity. You can, for example, search by file name, but not within the contents of each individual file, something Treitman says is planned for a future release.
The new file organizer, a sea of white, features a new search tool that lets users wade through their files.
(Credit: Adobe Systems/CNET)Other organizational niceties include a way to create lists, which Treitman compared to the playlist feature in Apple's iTunes software, since you can add files to multiple lists without changing their organization in your main file explorer. Files can either be dragged and dropped into these lists, or added through a right-click contextual menu.
Along with improvements to Acrobat.com, Adobe is also launching its first mobile application for the site, designed for iPhones and BlackBerry handsets. The app itself was actually built by ScanR, and it looks about the same as the company's existing mobile tool. It lets users view and convert any file they have stored on Adobe's servers, as well as convert it into a PDF or send it as a fax. Users can also snap a photo with their camera and have it sent straight to their Adobe storage.
Treitman told us the next big plan for Acrobat.com is to add a work spaces feature that offers an area in which multiple users can collaborate on documents at once and keep track of any changes made. This should bode well for the company's business users, who may have been wooed by tools from Google or Box.net, the latter of which is doing more and more to keep its users within the confines of its file storage service with features like a built-in document editor and a news feed that tracks collaborators' changes.
The new features will not change the price of Adobe's Acrobat.com paid services, which run anywhere from $15 a month to $390 a year, depending on which of the two plans users choose.
Adobe is taking Acrobat.com out of beta on Monday, and turning it into a business with paid user accounts. The service, which has more than 5 million registered users will retain its free version, however there are now usage limitations on certain features which can be unlocked by upgrading to one of the two new premium plans. These can be purchased on a monthly or yearly basis and cost $14.99 or $39 a month, or $149 or $390 a year respectively.
The "premium basic" plan allows for 10 PDF conversions per month, as well as up to five meeting participants though Adobe's ConnectNow tool. The "premium plus" plan dials that up to unlimited PDF conversions, and meetings with up to 20 users. Both premium plans also gain phone and Web support. In comparison, free users will only be able to convert five PDFs, and connect with two people at once in ConnectNow, which is just one less connection than users were able to have during Acrobat's beta period.
Along with the move to paid accounts, Acrobat.com is getting a new collaborative app called Tables that handles basic spreadsheets. Just like Buzzword, Adobe's online word processor, this lets multiple users work on a spreadsheet at once, as well as track revisions and roll back to earlier versions.
Tables may not have as many features as some more established online spreadsheet tools, but Adobe is promising to get it there.
(Credit: CNET)In a call with CNET News last week, Eric Larson, who is Adobe's director of product management and marketing for Acrobat.com, told me that Tables is not quite ready to replace Microsoft's Excel, which is why it's being rolled out in Adobe's Acrobat Labs section first. Larson did stress, however, that it will allow users to do things Excel can't, like see where other people are on the document, and provide a subtle warning when users are making a visual change that will affect others.
Little things that users are used to doing in normal software, like changing column width or sorting order, yields a small warning message that tells them to think twice if there are other people working on it at the same time. It also provides the option to switch to "private view," which lets users make edits without the changes going live to the main document. Adobe is hoping this type of work flow will cut down on the e-mail overload, and versioning problems that typical office software creates.
I gave the tool a spin over the weekend, and for basic spreadsheet tasks it's quite nice. Unlike Google Docs, which opens up to a sea of white cells, Tables opens up to just three columns and five rows which can be expanded one at a time. It's also incredibly responsive, letting you re-organize, and snap around columns and individual cells as if you were using desktop software.
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Adobe now offers an online presentation service.
(Credit: Adobe Systems)Expanding its push from software toward online services, Adobe Systems on Wednesday introduced a technology for collaboratively producing and sharing online presentations.
Acrobat.com Presentations, hosted at Adobe Labs in its current, somewhat experimental state, joins Adobe's Buzzword online word processor with its ConnectNow service for screen sharing and other online meeting activities. Adobe also offers a basic online version of its Photoshop image-editing technology called Photoshop.com.
"The application includes built-in tools and layouts for adding visually appealing elements, such as pre-defined color sets, intelligent image placement and graphic tools for creating diagrams and adding effects," Adobe said in a statement.
Acrobat.com Presentations also lets multiple people work on the same presentation at the same time. "With simultaneous editing capabilities, no one is locked out of the presentation while others are making changes," Adobe said. "The application also makes it easy to see who has access to the presentation, who is viewing, who is editing and which slide each person is editing."
Acrobat.com Presentations is based on Adobe's Flash technology, an add-on that's widely installed in Web browsers. In contrast, a rival service, Google Docs, uses the JavaScript programming language built into Web browsers. Microsoft's upcoming online Office service will use JavaScript but get extra abilities if a browser has Silverlight, Microsoft's rival to Flash, installed.
PDFVue is a new tool for both viewing and annotating PDF files. Similar to services like PDFMeNot and PDFHammer, PDFVue can open up PDF files right in your browser, forgoing the need to use desktop software. Better yet, if you've got the service's new browser extension installed, it can be set to automatically open up any PDF link you come across while browsing. This is not the fastest process since it first has to download and render the file, but if you've ever experienced hang-ups with Adobe's Acrobat Reader it's a nice step up.
So why use this service other than for speed? One good reason is the annotation tools. It includes all the usual goodies that let you fill in forms and highlight text. It also lets you upload images to stick into the PDF, making it a lightweight desktop publishing tool, since when you're done you can save it as a separate PDF file.
One thing users may not enjoy about PDFVue is that it doesn't take advantage of your screen real estate very well. Documents are kept to the very middle of the page and cannot be expanded to take up the whole screen. If you're on a desktop computer with a nice big screen, this isn't a problem. But when using it on a laptop, I found myself having to zoom into a level that required quite a bit of scrolling to navigate around the document. This can be somewhat remedied by minimizing the tools window on the right side of the page.
Related: Preview PDFs in your browser without downloading them
PDFVue's PDF editor and viewer is full of tools to that let you mark up PDFs.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Adobe released on Tuesday the first Reader application to bake movies and animation into the Portable Document Format.
With Adobe Reader 9, users can play Flash movies, Shockwave animation, and other rich media content without needing to open a third-party player.
With Reader 9, one click would play a Flash movie embedded in the PDF shown here.
(Credit: CNET Networks)PDFs are reaching new levels of interactivity with this release. Past versions of the nearly ubiquitous and free application, by contrast, have enabled dynamic forms but served largely to open print-ready PDFs.
The update is supposed to load more quickly than version 8, addressing the gripes of many users who felt that Reader slowed down Web surfing.
Adobe has described this release as potentially leading to a one-size-fits-all media player. Acrobat 9, released in June at between $299 to $699, will embed video and animation within PDFs.
Acrobat 9 document-creation software can embed videos and animation as well as custom-developed applications alongside maps that preserve geospatial data, 3D models, images, word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in common formats. The priciest, Pro Extended flavor of Acrobat can convert multiple video formats into Flash.
Security enhancements to the refresh of Acrobat and Reader include support for digital signatures and 256-bit AES encryption.
Adobe's launch of an online word processor and conferencing tool via Acrobat.com in June enables users to comment and collaborate simultaneously on documents, and to convert documents to PDFs.
The Adobe Reader 9 download for Windows and Macs requires at least 128MB of RAM on either a Windows 2000 SP4 or newer system, or an Apple Mac G4 or newer running OS 10.4.11 or higher, respectively.
Buzzword offers the usual word processing tools, such as a spelling checker and keyboard shortcuts.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Adobe Systems' beta release of the free Acrobat.com suite Monday should appeal to small-business users. In our early tests, the stand-outs are tools for Web conferencing and directly sharing text and PDF documents.
Acrobat.com includes a Web-based word processor, conferencing and remote access, PDF creation, and 5 gigabytes of file storage.
I like the services' uncomplicated, charcoal-background interfaces. Like other online word processors, Buzzword is no Microsoft Word killer, but speedy enough to serve as a go-anywhere text editor. Documents can be exported as Microsoft Word DOC or DOCX; PDF; rich text; HTML; or XML.
Inviting someone else to edit a file takes one step, although my colleague Josh Lowensohn, on the other end, had problems initially logging in for access. I'm hoping that Adobe removes the log-in speed bumps.
Once you're in, conferencing capabilities shine in Acrobat.com. In addition to one-off invitations to view and edit a Buzzword document, it's easy to launch an impromptu meeting. The Meet button in Buzzword opens Acrobat ConnectNow, a lightweight cousin of Acrobat Connect Pro, announced earlier this month.
ConnectNow enables screen sharing, chatting with a headset and Webcam, whiteboarding, and phone conferencing. Once I accepted the ConnectNow add-in, it switched from the browser to its own window, which then appeared in front of other windows to display chatting and Webcam views. You can allow a user to control your desktop remotely, and cut them off just as quickly. Other than the log-in glitch, the ease of use might bring a frown to the folks at WebEx, owned by Cisco Systems.
You can invite people to edit and comment on Buzzword documents.
(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CNET Networks)Makers of online office suites like Zoho and ThinkFree, on the other hand, needn't worry, for now at least. Buzzword as a standalone word processor is pretty, though unremarkable. It offers only seven fonts alongside basic text choices such as bold and strikethrough, with some more color choices than Google Docs and other online word processors. By contrast, Google Docs allows 10 fonts and ThinkFree provides more than five dozen. I'd like more formatting options if I were using Buzzword as a starting point to make interactive and print-ready PDFs.
Keyboard shortcuts work, such as CTRL-Z on a PC to undo the last action. Still, some annoyances to typing within a Flash environment include disabled options, such as Copy and Paste, that otherwise appear when you click the right mouse key in Windows. And CTRL-F to search for text sometimes failed.
Buzzword does let you draw tables and bullet points, and insert images. Special characters for typing accent marks in other languages are easy to find. Red squiggles underline potentially misspelled words and suggest alternatives. There's a running word count and link to a history of edits at the bottom of the screen.
Uh oh, really?
(Credit: CNET Networks)That's not enough to make me ditch more than two years of relying upon Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Nevertheless, the Adobe online suite should lure business users who already make a lot of PDFs and may not bother to jump to another brand for online conferencing.
Acrobat 9 software, due for stores in July, will stand out for being able to bundle video and animation within PDFs, enriching the online life of a format originally focused around the printed page.
But Buzzword doesn't appear to embed videos. Nor can you use Acrobat.com beta's PDF creator to bundle MOV or other video and animation file types into Portable Document Format.
ConnectNow appears in front of other windows so you can chat via text and Webcam with another user.
(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CNET Networks)Doing so would require Acrobat 9, but its starting price of $299 will deter people on a budget from exploring its rich features. They may already turn to free, third-party apps or online converters to make flat PDFs for printing.
Adobe should make even more goodies available for free or at a lower price if it aims for PDFs to get rich quickly with Flash videos, PowerPoint files, and even applications and games. Such creation capabilities remain in the hands of those who can spend hundreds of dollars on Acrobat 9. Google gave away Maps, Earth, and SketchUp, after all.
For example, PDF geospatial mapping, a plus for architects or city planners, will only be available in the $699 Acrobat Pro Extended 9.
Adobe already offered the online Photoshop Express and is hinting that the desktop app may become extensible within widgets. It remains to be seen how the company will integrate its new online services with the next, hulking Creative Suite, expected this fall.
ConnectNow enables conference calling, handy for business meetings.
(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CNET Networks)Adobe unveiled an online community Monday with a word processor; file storage and sharing; and deep tie-ins to a newly Flash-enabled Acrobat 9.
The online push for Acrobat is a bold move for a brand perhaps best associated with the free and nearly ubiquitous Acrobat Reader, which opens print-ready Portable Document Format, or PDF, files. Now, PDFs will play movies.
The announcement comes in advance of the release of Acrobat 9 document-creation software, which adds dynamic features such as integration of animation, dynamic maps, 256-bit encryption, and improved forms.
The free Acrobat.com beta includes the Buzzword word processor. Its ConnectNow Web conferencing and desktop sharing tool enables chatting via text, video, and voice. The hosted services invite file storage and sharing with the capability to convert up to five documents to PDF.
Buzzword and companion tools would provide interactivity lacking in leading online word processors such as Google Docs.
The free Acrobat.com launched in beta mode on Monday.
(Credit: Adobe Systems)Users can store files on Acrobat.com and join each other in virtual meeting rooms to share identical document views in real time. The site also can host data from forms created in Acrobat software.
Acrobat 9 document-creation software will arrive with a slew of support for creating interactive, secure documents and integration with Acrobat.com.
Acrobat users can convert MOV and WMV files to Flash content that can be embedded within PDFs alongside audio content and even 3D models. The free Acrobat Reader 9 will play the movies, eliminating the need to open other media players.
The new PDF Portfolios feature in Acrobat 9 lets users drag and drop content into a portfolio, then choose from myriad layout and presentation options.
Mapping features only in Acrobat Pro Extended 9 preserve geospatial coordinates and enable users to mark locations and measure distances.
The next Acrobat will take snapshots of Web pages and convert entire pages or chunks of them to a PDF that preserves links and animation.
Developers can tweak layouts with Flex Builder 3 or Flash CS3.
The new Acrobat.com will enable users to stash their work, edit documents, and collaborate with each other.
(Credit: Adobe Systems)Adobe also tried to make it easier to for companies to make pages match visually with themes and custom logos, and it improved tools for comparing documents.
For creating online forms, Acrobat 9 adds intelligence to recognize content for conversion to fillable fields. And a forms tracking dashboard will show, for instance, the status of responses to a mass party invitation e-mail and let a user send reminders to guests. Responses can be sorted, filtered, and exported to spreadsheets.
Acrobat 9's security enhancements enable users to add 256-bit encryption, used by banks online, to PDFs.
Redaction tools, a key selling point of Acrobat 8, will offer searches for numeric patterns in addition to multiple words and phrases. A company could, for example, find every accidental mention of a social security number or top-secret product being developed and black out the potential leaks from a PDF with one blow.
Business users could opt to access documents at Acrobat online or via SharePoint workspaces, network folders or WebDAV.
Acrobat Pro Extended 9 will enable maps to be marked up, preserving latitude and longitude.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Acrobat 9 comes in three flavors, set for stores in the coming weeks: Standard at $299 or $99 to upgrade, Pro for $449 or $159 to upgrade, and Pro Extended for $699 or $229 to upgrade. Pro Extended also comes with Adobe Presenter, which plugs into Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 for adding interactivity to presentations.
We'll have a review of Acrobat 9 software once we receive final code, and we'll share our experiences soon with Acrobat.com beta.
I still groan when I have to open a PDF file from the Web (my PCs make loud grinding noises), so I'm curious to see how the new tools might make PDFs faster to open as well as more dynamic to explore.
PDF Portfolios in Acrobat 9 will package FLV and SWF content with the usual word processing files and more.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Adobe Systems plans by the end of May to unveil the latest version of Acrobat Connect Pro, which can handle Web conferencing as well as conduct corporate trainings and manage academic courses.
Web conferencing is increasingly being touted as a "green" tool that reduces the costs and carbon emissions of business travel.
Users of Connect can chat during online meetings, which can be recorded and archived with audio, video, and transcripts of chats intact. Among the unique features are whiteboarding tools and the capability for groups of users to separate into virtual breakout rooms. There's also integration with third-party IM applications.
Audio recording options allow precise controls for presentations.
(Credit: Adobe)Connect can work in any Flash-enabled Web browser. There's no need, for instance, to enable Java or to monkey with administrator privileges.
Adobe AIR enables Flash presentations from Connect to be played on the desktop away from the browser, which could come in handy for business travelers who fly frequently. The files can also be viewed on Flash-enabled mobile phones.
Adobe Presenter, also receiving an update, adds a tab of functions to Microsoft PowerPoint 2007. It lets users create presentations rich with audio, video, and animations, which can be integrated with Acrobat Connect.
Adobe says it has 72 percent of the market share for "eLearning". Among the competitors to Connect--which starts at $42 per month--are WebEx, which Cisco Systems bought last year, and LiveMeeting, which Microsoft is selling to direct retailers.
We've been giving some play to Adobe Acrobat replacements and other PDF tools in the last few weeks, and it's clear people are serious about handling a large variety of document types without having to muck about with the right software or browser extensions.
To that end Scribd, a start-up that's all about documents and how to share them with others, has had a solution of its own using Adobe's FlashPaper and crunching all sorts of documents to fit in it. This morning the company launched its own viewer that not only replaces FlashPaper, but also improves upon its design for both users and publishers.
The new viewer is called iPaper. While the name might bring to mind Apple products of yore, the document viewer is a total Acrobat killer. It's fast, lightweight, and is designed with Web readers in mind. While it may look similar to FlashPaper, there are several key differences that make it much better suited for long documents, photos, and Web videos.
Scribd's iPaper one-ups FlashPaper in letting you view, share, and integrate documents into Web sites.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The biggest one being that iPaper has been designed with publishers in mind. The viewer goes hand-in-hand with a new publishing platform that lets Web publishers integrate advertising into documents or media they feel like sharing. There are no preroll or off-to-the-side ads; instead Scribd has worked in Google AdSense text ads that have been put between every few document pages and that slurp up contextual ads based on what's contained the document (example here). It's effective and not annoying.
Secondly, the publishing platform lets site owners integrate iPaper into their sites. There are three basic ways to do it. The first is basic embedding (which existed before iPaper), as well as a tool called QuickSwitch that will automatically convert any linked document into a hosted iPaper player when site owners install a small line of code on their page. For power users, there's also an open API that lets them integrate iPaper and document conversion into the back end of their sites or services.
While I think Adobe will eventually address the bloat that Acrobat has become for Web users, it's up to publishers to take a proactive approach to letting the greatest number of users access content in the same way they read words or watch videos. For that, Flash is definitely a phenomenal go-to. The iPaper document viewer shows promise at unifying document sharing by lowering the barrier to entry for users who simply don't want to deal with the hassle of extra applications.
I've embedded an example of the iPaper viewer after the break. Be sure to play around with the table of contents and zoom controls.
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Hot on the heels of my writeup of PDFMeNot yesterday, reader Bonexaw tipped us off about PDFescape, another Web based Adobe Acrobat replacement. This time around, PDFescape pulls double duty not only as a free PDF reader, but also as an editing tool and Web host for PDF files.
PDFescape lets users fill out forms--one of the most commonly used features (besides reading). Additionally, the authoring tools let users create their own forms and send them out to others to fill out and send back. The best part is that the entire system is set up to avoid recipients having to touch a piece of software.
PDFescape's editing tool feels a lot like a simple desktop application, with a toolbar up top, and a workspace that's set up with a file source list, and a tool pallet. The one major drawback is that there's no zoom toggle, making it a pain to use for general reading unless you're got a monitor with a large horizontal resolution, or don't mind panning with your mouse. Otherwise it's simple, intuitive, and definitely a step up from Adobe Reader if you need to change something on a PDF file and don't want to shell out for Acrobat, or use a third party editor.
Edit PDF files using PDFescape's editor that lets you get away with about as much as Adobe Acrobat for a lower price tag.
(Credit: CNET Networks)To help keep the service afloat there are small ads on the side of the editing and reading environment. Small watermarks are also added to each published PDF form, which users can get rid of using credits that can be bought in increments ranging from $.50 to $1 each, depending on how many you're buying. The real money, however, is in publishing, which is a paid service. It's aimed mostly at employers or other businesses that need to host a PDF with forms online. Publishing credits are considerably more expensive than the "premium" credits, but offer a year of hosting, increased file sizes, and automated sending of completed forms.
I still think PDFMeNot is the go-to service for opening up the occasional PDF file you come across, but PDFescape's publishing tool offers a whole lot of features in a small package that make it much better for publishers trying to escape Acrobat's price tag. Of course if you end up shelling out for the publishing credits, you might be better off investing in a copy of Acrobat and a Web host instead.
