Adobe

The days when Web pages were static collections of text and graphics are long past. But as the Web matures, there’s a fierce competition over which technology will propel it into a medium for rich, interactive applications.

On one side of the battle lines is the original Web page description technology called HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language. Over the years, its abilities were augmented first with JavaScript, a basic programming language, and later a JavaScript-on-steroids technology called Ajax.

On the other side is Adobe Systems’ Flash, which got its start as a method for graphic animations. It’s grown into a much more powerful programming foundation over the years and has been joined more recently by a competitor: Microsoft’s Silverlight.

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Adobe announced a partnership with Google and Yahoo to make rich Internet applications (RIAs) friendlier to search engines. The enhanced capabilities by search engines are targeted at crawling and reading the Flash file format (SWF). Previously, search engines like Google were able to crawl text and links on static SWF Web content, but the new partnership looks to help bring that information to users immediately.
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Adobe on Wednedsay made available Acrobat 9, the latest version of its PDF creation and reading software, and also revamped its Creative Suite 3 bundle to include the new Acrobat edition. As previewed late in May, the new suite is an evolutionary upgrade that makes standard features that were previously left to outside plugins and reworks existing features.

Adobe’s biggest offerings are its format and collaboration tools. Version 9 now adds native support for Flash animations embedded into PDF files, a redesigned interface for packaging multiple PDFs now dubbed PDF Portfolios, and a beta online collaboration service at acrobat.com that lets workgroups view and edit PDFs online at the same time.

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Apple hasn’t shown much interest in putting Flash on the iPhone, but Adobe is still pursuing the project.

During a recent conference call with industry analysts, Adobe was asked for a progress update on the project to bring support for its Web-based multimedia system to Apple’s smartphone.

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Adobe’s Kuler (coverage) is neat for finding color schemes that are aesthetically pleasing, but what about when you want to figure out what colored text will look like on a colored background? You can either spend time trying each combination in something like Dreamweaver, or by using this handy tool, which lets you select a background then the secondary color (for something like text) by just hovering over each color hash with your mouse.

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Adobe’s decision to add Flash support to Acrobat could weaken the value proposition of PDF.

This week, Adobe announced details of the next iteration of its Acrobat line of products, due in late June or early July. Perhaps the most prominent new feature of Acrobat 9 will be the ability to embed live Flash animation and video directly into PDF documents.But while this capability sounds appealing, I can’t help but be skeptical. PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It seems to me that this new direction that Adobe is taking in some ways flies against the original idea of what PDF is all about.

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After a number of companies have had plenty of time to mark their territory in the web-based document market, Adobe has finally tossed its hat into the ring with Acrobat.com. Adobe pitches the site as an online space to “share documents, communicate in real time, and simplify working with others,” so I gave it a run-through to see if I could use it to impress my editors.

Acrobat.com is in open beta for anyone to try out. Its main landing page serves as a sort of dashboard to the five current loosely related components or applications of the site: Adobe Buzzword (which we looked at when it launched last October), Adobe ConnectNow, Create PDF, Share, and My Files. The entire site is designed in Flash, including all the applications.

Going down the line of Acrobat.com’s applications, Buzzword hasn’t changed much since we looked at it. It’s a halfway-usable word processor, though extremely low on formatting options. Buzzword’s Flash-based nature, however, also throws out all the text conventions and tools that users may be used to from their OS. Mac OS X, for example, offers a rich set of text manipulation and selection controls, as well as a system-wide spelling and dictionary tools; none of these are available in Buzzword.

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