I was at the Adobe Acrobat 9 launch with some colleagues today.
I must say I was blown away by the features and functions of the product.
Some of the things that impressed me were:
- PDF acting as a file container for other file types. e.g. Office 2007, CAD/CAM
- Full Support for Microsoft Office 2007.
- Embedded Flash and Flash Videos into PDF.
- Templates to “showcase” the bunch of documents in the single PDF, e.g. via a Apple-like turntable UI. You can annotate anywhere. Sticky notes, Reviews, etc…
- PDF Forms… at last it is no longer chunky to use. You can create forms from Microsoft Office or a scanned hardcopy. And it comes with the Standard edition.
- Connection to Acrobat.com to upload forms and other online services like statistics from forms.
- Adobe Presenter is pretty cool. Think of it like Microsoft Powerpoint on with standalone auto-run presentation with video/audio narration and surveys built in.
- PDF Difference ! Now you can compare 2 versions of PDFs and a 3rd will be generated telling you the differences !
- Basic OCR is built in and have “font smoothing” for tiff images.
- Splitting of PDFs into smaller sizes !
The less impressive things were:
- Acrobat.com allows only 5 PDFs only.
- 500 emails (responses) are allowed for online forms services. This is tied to the client license.
- The huge Acrobat 9 extended installer at 722 MB compressed ! Adobe Presenter is at 63 MB. Acrobat Reader is at 33.5MB as previously mentioned.
- The output PDF files is huge ! There is no optimization of other files. Only PDFs can be “optimized”. Some of the sample PDF 9 files are 100 to 200 MBs big. Luckily you can split them up…hmm doesn’t that defeat the “single file container” concept ?
- OCR is not full blown. It cannot support hand writing, non-acsii words, etc…
Other odd ends:
- Adobe’s licensing terms are in HTML and not PDF. duh?
- Acrobat.com do not have any SLA or guarantee in security or uptime.
- Adobe did not save any trees in the seminar and did not use Adobe Acrobat Forms for this event. They are still using paper survey forms themselves.
- Someone in the audience pointed out that the “synced” view of Acrobat.com documents between multiple users are not “exact”. He got a sharp eye for resolution differences between multiple users.
- CAD/CAM viewing in Acrobat may require a local CAD/CAM client (aka you need a license for the CAD/CAM format !).
- Yet another complain about not having any food during the Tea Break. Cost cutting ?
See Adobe Matrix for more.
After the promotion period.
Std at SGD 522
Pro at SGD 785
The Adobe Acrobat Extended would probably set you back by SGD 1110 (excluding GST) based on Adobe’s Store and today’s exchange rate.
With such premium prices, I think it would be certain departments in any company that would be using Acrobat 9.
There was a long queue of eager people asking a tonne of questions.
Ah ! If only my Adobe pals are there, I got more questions on my own.
On the whole if Adobe gets the online side of things right, there will be even more potential.
BTW, Acrobat.com is powered by Apache/Tomcat and uses a Flash interface.
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Powered-By: Servlet 2.4; JBoss-4.2.1.GA (build: SVNTag=JBoss_4_2_1_GA date=200707131605)/Tomcat-5.5
If you think of it, there is no other company that do what Adobe Acrobat alone does ! Which is why Adobe command such high prices for Acrobat.
I have seen Acrobat 6, 7 and 8. I think version 9 standard makes it quite a compelling upgrade for existing users who are still using Acrobat 5 (horrors).
The UI has changed but should be very easy to pick up after probing it for a day.
If Acrobat 9 still fails to gain adoption, then there will be trouble as there are a lot of companies who can produce or read basic PDF. Foxit is one hungry fox.
Is Acrobat 9 “over-featured” ? Any comments ?
BTW… if you are attending IBM’s Unleash the Power of Collaboration with Web 2.0 do let me know your comments… I can’t make it as I will be overseas and would miss the talk by Armchair Theorist ! 
All the best !
Posted by fatguppy 
