www.nickhodge.com

Hav­ing presen­ted for Adobe over the past 8 years, I get a little touchy when someone attacks tech­nical presenters. It’s like being a part of a fra­tern­ity. Round up the wagons!

Demon­strat­ing soft­ware: the col­lec­tion of skillz are not taught by Toast­mas­ters. Nor most Present­a­tion Train­ers. It is a set of unique tech­niques, that are gen­er­ally nutured and passed on from mas­ter to trainee; gen­er­a­tion to generation.

You need to have your eye and ear on the audi­ence; the setup for the next joke is on your mind; you need to be “on mes­sage”, the soft­ware needs to be work­ing: and most import­antly, what you are show­ing is get­ting through. In these days of instant blog­ging, everything you say is pub­lic property.

So, Eric’s com­ments on the Acrobat 8 road­show in Can­berra are inter­est­ing. Mark, the Adobe presenter has respon­ded.

Some­times to com­mu­nic­ate a story, words and phrases are used that may be a little too com­bat­ive. Yeah, I’ve dissed non-Adobe soft­ware vendors in present­a­tions: usu­ally to sell a point or get an emo­tional response from an audi­ence. This style only works with medium sized audi­ences. My favour­ite was play­fully diss­ing Microsoft whilst present­ing at Microsoft.
Onto the Facts.

1. XML does NOT magic­ally equal a smal­ler file size; in fact the reverse is prob­ably true. In the case of PPT in PDF, the file size bene­fits of PDF accrue from image com­pres­sion (includ­ing gradients/blends and reused ele­ments). Other bene­fits are cross-platform pack­aging (espe­cially typefaces) and secur­ity (ensur­ing people can­not change the presentation)If you were send­ing a doc­u­ment to people expect­ing changes, PDF is not the answer.
2. Out­look PSTs suck in a cross-platform world. And let’s face it; in the future no mat­ter what plat­form you are on, everything is a leg­acy platform.I have 6.5Gb of email locked up in PST files con­tain­ing 6+ years of email his­tory. Search­ing these involves launch­ing Out­look, load­ing the PST and doing a slow search. Thank good­ness for Google Desktop search if you are a Win­dows per­son. You’re stuffed if you spend most of your time out­side the mono-culture. Put­ting emails into a stand­ard pub­lished and open file format, say PDF/A, for future ref­er­ence is some­thing many people care about.
3. Mark covered this Fact in his blog. There is a law of entropy work­ing here. Once data is squeezed out in PDF, get­ting back a fully work­ing, semantic­ally rich doc­u­ment is going to be dif­fi­cult. In the case of Office applic­a­tions, PDF is not an edit­able exchange format. The get­ting data back out of a PDF is best a util­ity; and included in Acrobat 6, 7 and 8.
4. Launch Acrobat 6 and compare/contrast the Acrobat 7 and 8 launch times; even the Reader. There is a world of dif­fer­ence even without Win­dows cach­ing the applic­a­tion in RAM (some­thing you can turn off with a few Registry entries on Win­dows). Adobe has dra­mat­ic­ally improved the launch time from a woe­ful Acrobat 6 (launch times sucked)

I didn’t attend the Can­berra launch; only the morn­ing ses­sion of the Sydney Acrobat 8 launch. Split­ting the group into two “halves” is a recog­ni­tion that Acrobat has two large audi­ences: one cre­at­ive and the other stand­ard office style users. Can­berra has always been a tough demo­graphic to get right audience-wise for Adobe. I agree with Eric: 20 people is not good: the whole tone of the present­a­tion changes with less than 50 people.

Also, in the mod­ern highly con­nec­ted world — it is my opin­ion that “Launch” style present­a­tions with too much sales hype are a thing of the past. People need con­tent, and lots of it. Con­ver­sa­tions such as blog­ging post con­fer­ence are excel­lent mech­an­isms of mak­ing the con­tent more relevant.

A com­ment from Dan on Dis­til­ler 7 vs. 8 Per­form­ance over on Accel­er­ate your Mac! To sum­mar­ise: a 463Mb .ps file Dis­tills in a third of the time.

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.