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Microsoft pre-released their XAML-in-the-browser tech­no­logy, WPF/e earlier this week. XAML inside.

XAML “smells” like the W3C’s Scal­able Vec­tor Graph­ics (SVG). DOM-inside-a-DOM, Declar­at­ive anim­a­tion, 2D graph­ics. XAML maybe not SVG, but it cer­tainly tips its hat to SVG.

Adobe today pre-released their XML-in-a-PDF tech­no­logy, Mars, for Acrobat 8. Essen­tially, Mars as a tech­no­logy is presently delivered as plu­gins for Adobe Reader 8 and Acrobat 8 Pro­fes­sional. You can save an exist­ing ‘bin­ary’ PDF out as a .mars file. These .mars files are like .jar or .war files: mani­fes­ted, struc­tured ZIP files. Look­ing inside a descrip­tion of a page, you have an SVG Tiny 1.2+ (as Adobe state, SVG/FSS0 rep­res­ent­a­tion. The spe­cific­a­tion clearly doc­u­ments that .mars takes the cur­rent concept of PDF, a doc­u­ment format, and extends this as XML.These tech­no­lo­gies do not dir­ectly inter­sect: an XML rep­res­ent­a­tion of SWF rather than PDF would be closer to XAML. Hav­ing cross-platform viewer sup­port for Microsoft’s XPS would be closer to PDF.

I was pre­ma­ture in say­ing SVG was deprec­ated.

Panasonic does a deal with Con­nex­ion, spe­cific­ally so you can GSM/GPRS whilst Qantas flights.

Peter Jack­son to dir­ect “The Hob­bit” movie? Oh the horror!

Par­al­lels for Mac is now at build 1910. For those who want to keep their feet in both worlds, you can run Win­dows XP and Vista at the same time.

Vista RC1++ (alias build 5728), the “show and shine” / “spit and pol­ish” or most cor­rectly, the Rule#12 “Fit and Fin­ish” releases have started.

Microsoft Office 2007 Beta (and the fol­lowup Beta 2 Tech­nical Release) is now avail­able for Aus­trali­ans to down­load. Aus­tralia was miss­ing for the first month or so.

I may have killed SVG off too soon, or at least taken an “Adobe-centric” view; and AndrewS com­ments that Search Engine Optim­isa­tion (SEO) and Flash is bogus. Read­ing some of the posts from the Flash­For­ward Con­fer­ence, the cur­rent, mod­ern mech­an­ism is to use SWFOb­ject.

Con­firmed from Ali, at Adobe in this blog post. Adobe Acrobat 8.0 is Uni­ver­sal Bin­ary.

A part of the Acrobat 8 launch today, Cre­at­ive Suite Premium is get­ting a revamp.

And not just with Acrobat 8. Good­bye GoLive, hello Dream­weaver 8.

GoLive Sys­tems, a small Ham­burg Mac-only developer, was pur­chased by Adobe before the dot­com boom. Sadly, it might have been the boom’s first cas­u­alty as it lan­guished behind Dreamweaver.

No sur­prises here.

As I am no longer “inside the Adobe-loop”, I found out about the announce­ment cour­tesy of Robert Scoble’s post. Of all people!

My first ques­tion: where is the beta of the Reader? With Acrobat 7.0, the beta Reader shipped very close to the announce. Also, Intel Mac users; I am assum­ing its Uni­ver­sal bin­ary, as the sys­tem require­ments clearly men­tion “Intel” pro­cessors. There are still too many Windows-only fea­tures for a den­izen and poster-child for cross-platformness (read Forms Designer).

OK, onto the good stuff. Forms are the bane of everyone’s exist­ence. Even law­yers.

Every paper form that I have to fill out I cringe. Pur­posely, I filled in the last Census online.

All forms should be online/digital/electronic.

They should be smart, and know who I am. There have been some attempts at get­ting browsers to remem­ber data.

They don’t have to match prin­ted forms; if a phys­ical (or wet) sig­na­ture is required: I should be able to just print + sign. Smarter forms will let me fill in online and sub­mit online or via email. Securely.

Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Pro­fes­sional:

Enable advanced fea­tures in Adobe Reader

Enable any­one using free Adobe Reader soft­ware to par­ti­cip­ate in doc­u­ment reviews, fill and save elec­tronic forms off­line, and digit­ally sign documents.

If you are small organ­isa­tion, and just want to col­lect data quickly, it looks like Acrobat 8 (Pro­fes­sional) is going to help out. The Data­sheet has a foot­note “For ad-hoc forms dis­tri­bu­tion and data col­lec­tion for up to 500 people”

One of the most frus­trat­ing, and there­fore com­men­ted on miss­ing abil­it­ies has been for people to be able send out forms, and have any­one with the free Reader fill it in, and send it back. Pre­vi­ously, the only mech­an­ism has been to pur­chase a big block of code called “Adobe Live­Cycle Reader Exten­sion Server”

This lead to all sort of hocus-pocus Javas­cript lib­rar­ies, and server-hackeries. Thank­fully, soft­ware is mak­ing it sim­pler. Like it should be.

I note with interest that guys at PlanetPDF.com in Mel­bourne has missed this one as at 6:30pm AEST.

Watch­ing the Par­al­lels web site, I noted that the engin­eers had pos­ted some more info, and a later build. 1896.2 I don’t know what the .2 means; prob­ably that .1 wasn’t quite right.

Wait­ing for a bet­ter video driver (to use up the 256Mb of the Mac­Book Pro, without resort­ing to Boot Camp)

Any­way:

Is Vista RC1 build 5600 installed and launched OK. Office 2003 installed per­fectly on RC1; now I am hunt­ing down an installer for Office 2007. Dontcha just love software?

Beta Tech­nical Refresh 2 on Beta 2 on Release Can­did­ate 1 on build 2 of Release Can­did­ate 2 on MacOS 10.4.7. Schwar­zwaelder Kirschtorte.

Speak­ing of cakes, Acrobat 8.0 is announced. I don’t have Acrobat 8 in any form, so I can­not add the cherries.

Slightly hid­den fea­ture of Acrobat 7.0: RSS Feed Mon­itor into PDF.

Wel­come Adobe Acrobat 7.0. Acrobat 7.0 Print, Prepress Fea­tures. Most reques­ted fea­ture after demon­strat­ing Acrobat 3, 4, 5 and 6: Enable any­one with free Adobe Reader 7.0 soft­ware to use high­lighter, sticky note, pen, and other com­ment­ing tools.. Using Acrobat 7.0 Pro­fes­sional, you can enable this fea­ture in a PDF you send.

Wel­come to Acrobat 6.0. Over the past couple of weeks I have been work­ing on this doc­u­ment: Acrobat 6.0 Pro­fes­sional: Graph­ics, Print, Prepress Overview

On the Adobe web site, Acrobat Solu­tions for cre­at­ive pro­fes­sion­als is the area that con­tains print/prepress spe­cific features.

Adobe Acrobat Reader and Forms Data without Cus­tom CGI. This has been in pro­gress for a while — so its good to get this tech­nique published.