Adobe S today introduced Adobe Acrobat 9 software, an upgrade that will transform the process of creating and sharing electronic documents. Acrobat 9 delivers native support for Adobe Flash technology, the ability to unify a wide range of content in rich PDF Portfolios, and access to real-time capabilities for co-navigating a PDF document with colleagues.
Acrobat 9 lets users include Adobe Flash Player compatible video and application files in PDF documents. Recipients need free Adobe Reader 9 software to consume the content. Now, says Adobe, “static documents can come to life as dynamic communications.”
The Acrobat 9 family consists of Acrobat 9 Standard, Acrobat 9 Pro, and the new Acrobat 9 Pro Extended software.
Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, Acrobat 9 Pro and Acrobat 9 Standard for Microsoft Windows, and Acrobat 9 Pro for Mac OS X, are expected to be available by July 2008 in English, French, German, and Japanese language versions. Acrobat 9 Pro Extended is expected to be available for US$699, and registered users of qualifying earlier versions of Acrobat2 can upgrade to Acrobat 9 Pro Extended for US$229. Acrobat 9 Pro is expected to be available for US$449, and registered users of qualifying earlier versions of Acrobat3 can upgrade to Acrobat 9 Pro for US$159. Acrobat 9 Standard is expected to be available for US$299, and registered users of qualifying earlier versions of Acrobat4 can upgrade to Acrobat 9 Standard for US$99.
MacDailyNews Take: In other words, Adobe offers more options to WIndows users and fewer to Apple Mac users.
Adobe today also announced that the new Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro software will be integrated into Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium and Standard editions, Creative Suite 3.3 Web Premium and Creative Suite 3.3 Master Collection editions. Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium also includes Adobe Fireworks CS3 as a special offering for designers who need to rapidly prototype and generate Web sites. This powerful update to Adobe’s industry-standard design and development software gives designers, Web professionals and print service providers new ways to create and deliver engaging content.
With Acrobat 9 Pro, designers can combine PDF files, video, audio, and other documents into PDF Portfolios, which users browse using customizable interactive navigation designed in Adobe Flash. Designers also can include Adobe Flash Player compatible video and application files in their PDF files and then play back this content in Acrobat 9 Pro and Adobe Reader 9 software.
Adobe Fireworks CS3, now bundled with Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium edition, provides designers with a tool to prototype Web pages for interactive design projects. Fireworks CS3 includes a common library of pre-built assets, provides the ability to edit vector artwork and bitmap images, and allows integration with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Flash.
Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 will begin shipping worldwide by July 2008. All editions will run on Mac OS X 10.4.11 or 10.5 on Intel-based systems and Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista platforms and will be available through Adobe Authorized Resellers and the Adobe Store. Estimated street price is US$1799 for Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium, US$1199 for Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Design Standard, US$1599 for Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Web Premium, US$2499 for Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Master Collection and US$159 for an upgrade from CS3. There are numerous upgrade paths available for Adobe customers.
Adobe today also introduced Acrobat.com, a suite of hosted services available as public beta for free signup, that put communication, productivity, and collaboration tools into a Web browser. Much like Adobe Acrobat software enabled the publishing of electronic documents that anyone can read, Acrobat.com looks to enable individuals to truly work collaboratively on electronic documents. Acrobat.com is a set of online services — file sharing and storage, PDF converter, online word processor, and Web conferencing — that take advantage of PDF, Adobe Flash and Adobe AIR technologies to deliver online experiences that go beyond traditional office productivity tools. It’s also accessible through Adobe Acrobat 9 software.
The hosted services in Acrobat.com include:
– Adobe Buzzword, a Web-based word processor that can be used to easily co-author and share documents for comment and review, creating high-quality print results;
– Adobe ConnectNow, a personal Web conferencing service that includes desktop sharing, video and voice conferencing and integrated chat;
– Centralized online file sharing with access controls, online PDF conversion for up to five documents, and support for high quality, Web-embeddable documents;
– Developer APIs for real-time collaboration, file sharing and conversion.
MacDailyNews Take: Crickets. Please see related DailyTech article from last November, “Yahoo, Adobe To Embed Web Ads in PDFs.”
In addition, Acrobat.com gives Acrobat 9 users access to a “personal workspace in the clouds” that is available for working with others online. Acrobat 9 users can work with Acrobat.com as a central location for sharing forms and collecting forms data, conducting shared reviews, and co-navigating a PDF document with colleagues.
Acrobat.com also works with Adobe Reader 9 software, giving Adobe Reader 9 users access to Acrobat.com so they can share files, convert up to five documents to PDF online and participate in electronic forms and shared reviews initiated by Acrobat 9 users.
Acrobat.com is available immediately in English as public beta for free sign up.
Source: Adobe
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Ampar” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: Hopefully, Adobe is also planing to debut a Ph.D. program designed to help teach users HTF to decipher (and finance) their many idiotic, overly-confusing, stupidly-named, and wildly-overpriced applications/versions.
Thankfully I’ve got a PowerPC-based Mac and don’t have a choice in being bothered by this or not.
Let the river of filth begin…
MacDailyNews Take: In other words, Adobe offers more options to WIndows users and less to Apple Mac users.
It’s either too many options or too few. Why bother trying to make anyone happy?
ChrissyOne,
I see you can’t refute the following statement:
“In other words, Adobe offers more options to Windows users and less to Apple Mac users.”
But, it’s not your fault. How could you?
In other words, Adobe offers more options to WIndows users and less to Apple Mac users.
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Adobe needs to improve their process management/workflow for their applications, which may mean changing their philosophy of… “designed by engineers, for engineers”. They don’t seem to have an overall model of how each application flows into one another.
For example, if you have Photoshop and Lightroom installed, you have to work out your process of why you have three applications on your system to contend with: The Bridge, Photoshop, and Lightroom. All three have aspects that overlap each other. Just as the file manager in Photoshop was split out to become The Bridge, then Adobe created Lightroom. Lightroom has metadata editing, but The Bridge has it too and better. Photoshop has the image editing and plugin support, but so does Lightroom in many ways.
Adobe! Your software is bloated and outrageously expensive.
Adobe: Infected with Microsoft disease.
@ Former Adobe Customer
I don’t work for the Refuting Spurious Internet Gripes department. Sorry.
Acrobat is nothing but a bloated mess these days. It annoys me every time I sit down at a Mac, open a PDF, and have it opened in Acrobat or the equivalent browser plug-in.
Unfortunately, there are some (very infrequent) times when I might need to open a PDF in Acrobat. About as often as I need to open a Word document in NeoOffice or Pages.
I’m enjoying my bloat-free computing world.
@ Gone Nuts
Wow. You don’t understand how to use any of those apps, do you? Bridge is a file browser. It’s for people who just want to preview different kinds of media files in place. It has a Camera RAW interface and some basic editing powers, but it’s really just a media browser.
So Bridge has what Lightroom has… ‘but better’? Uh, yeah. Maybe you haven’t used it enough to know what you’re talking about. Okay.
So, ChrissyOne, are you saying that Adobe does not offer more options to WIndows users and less to Apple Mac users?
Or that many of Adobe’s apps are not stupidly-named in an overly-confusing manner and/or are not wildly-overpriced?
This oughta be good…
I can tell this is going to get me nowhere. Have fun everybody!!!!
-c
Adobe sucks donkey dick.
@ Fred Mertz
No, Fred. I don’t speak for Adobe. And I don’t answer to you.
“In other words, Adobe offers more options to WIndows users and less to Apple Mac users.”
that’s pretty much been par for the course since Acrobat 5.
ChrissyOne,
As I expected. It’s really not your fault. You had nothing.
You can’t refute cold, hard facts.
The differences between the Mac Pro version and Extended Pro don’t seem to be that great apart from embedding functionality for Powerpoint and Word. If you have Keynote, you’re probably not using Powerpoint anyway unless you’re collaborating with someone.
There are some pretty cool features involving CAD, but not something I need, but for people that do, it will potentially save ‘teams’ a lot of money. And the Lotus Notes compatibility is not something I’m worried about. And Flash? Really? Really?
It also looks like they’ve added another 3 or 4 more applications to this one program too, making it even more bloated than it was. It was already slow to begin with, I hope they sped it up.
Something that does seem odd to me though, is the fact that it appears the Adobe button-functionality of printing to Adobe from within Office appears to be listed now as only for Windows, but maybe I didn’t read that correctly. I mean we have pdf functionality built into every app anyway, so maybe they decided they didn’t need it?
I really do not get this company though. As far as existing and potential future user-base goes, they consistently do not go the distance on the Mac platform. It seems like they really have a problem with Apple, when Mac users have always supported Adobe in a big way.
They’re reluctant to release updates in a timely fashion, and when they do, they offer “less-than” versions of their software – as in this case – to their Mac customers. I’m sure this is not something Apple is not noticing. To think Steve could walk in, buy them and restructure is more interesting now…
Oh well. As far as I’m concerned, Acrobat 8 is good enough.
Adobe = The mud hut of apps. Apple’s reign will wash it away
Embedded flash video, audio, and applications in a PDF portfolio? Sounds like a security nightmare.
I am wondering if someone here has an answer for me:
I have some PDF documents that I want to reorganize for my personal use (they are Toyota shop manuals). I can use Preview in Leopard to combine and delete pages, but I also want to add a Table of Contents for my new PDFs.
Does anyone know of an application that will allow me to create TOC for PDFs other than Adobe Acrobat?
$300 is more than I can justify for this task. Thanks for any responses.
As a graphic designer, I am glad that Adobe products are expensive, it means that some random John Doe doesn’t start learning the trade and take away my business. As for the apps being overly complex: Good, they are supposed to be. who said being a design or media professional was easy?! Adobe released Photoshop Elements for the hobbyist, chances are a random person will not ever need the advanced features PS offers, so why pay hundreds of dollars for things they will never use? same goes for Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, and Dreamweaver.
The complexity and the cost ensure that the cost of entry into the design field remains high. This keeps the level of quality fairly high and designer’s wages fair.
Gosh, it’s becoming less of a Portable Document Format now isn’t it?
I don’t think I’ll be getting version 9. Too much crap in it that I’d never use.
Hey WOULDN’T it be GREAT if EVERYBODY uses our __(insert_company_product_here)__ platform/software/format? Riiight. Google will likely take over 80% of the common browser apps by 2011. Everybody else dream on and find another niche. All Apple or Google or MS have to do is create the plug-in to their own platform (iPhone, gWhatever, WindozeME – mobile ed. that is) that works better than PDFlush and, hopefully Samsung or Nokia still like you, Adobe.
I was once a fan of adobe, until they started playing butt monkey to M$. Now we are hostage to them until apple has time to round out Aperture/Pages (and an illustrator replacement). As soon as there is a reliable replacement for the adobe troika, supported by an industry heavyweight, they are toasted.
All the sh*tware they can shovel will not get them back into the good graces of the graphic designer community. They might as well change their name to Qvark.
Really, their strategy seems to be to ride the windows wave down to the last trickle. This plan should serve their executives well enough until they retire. In reality they are setting up the company for a spectacular flame-out in 10 years.
Again and again these bozos forget that professional commercial artists are their core audience. Most of us are college educated. We can see right through you adobe!
Aperture’s new plug-in architecture is the beginning of the end for the King of them all – Photoshop. The crown jewel in adobe’s kit is under serious, credible threat. As in chess, the King is in “Check” – games over.
to Matthew Rudowski:
A Professional Graphic Designer, has nothing to fear from easy to use software, as long as s/he has talent.
You can give a man a paintbrush and paint, but that does not make him VanGough!
You are only as good as Your book (portfolio).