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.

google moth­er­load: Google Advanced Search Oper­at­ors. Just like “pho­toshop­ping” images, googling for inform­a­tion is almost a verb.

There are two major applic­a­tions I live in: Excel and Out­look. Lookout is a plugin/extension to Out­look that per­mits very fast, intel­li­gent search­ing across your Out­look folders. This saves me many minutes per day.

Another recent addi­tion to the gad­get list is a Pocket PC. Being able to browse the web and mail from a very small handheld.