Some thoughts on Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro Mobile

Adobe Acro­bat Con­nect Pro Mobile is a piece of soft­ware recently released for iPhone/iPod touch that is rather inter­est­ing for a num­ber of rea­sons. I noticed it because it largely over­laps with a prod­uct that we’ve been can­vass­ing sup­port for to release on the iPad (and likely still will), but there seems to be a lot more going on here!

Firstly, it’s worth not­ing that this free soft­ware is pub­lished by Adobe, devel­oped using Flash, and is fea­tured in the App Store.

For those who keep their head off the Internet/are apa­thetic towards Apple’s mobile plat­form pow­er­plays, let me just briefly note that Apple and Adobe are hardly best of friends. Accord­ingly, while the approval of a Flash-based appli­ca­tion is a lit­tle cheeky, the ele­va­tion of one to fea­tured app store sta­tus is straight up devious.

We can only spec­u­late as to whether prag­matic or polit­i­cal rea­sons moti­vated Adobe’s devel­op­ment in this way. Self-evidently, they have a lot of in-house com­pe­ten­cies around Flash devel­op­ment, but they would also love to get a prod­uct approved inso­far as it dri­ves adop­tion of their Con­nect plat­form (which, unlike the App Store app, is any­thing but free).

There are many less sneaky ways of build­ing a com­pelling tech demo. If I had to guess, I’d attribute the use of Flash to a sub­stan­tial exist­ing soft­ware invest­ment for web-based clients that was largely portable to the mobile con­text. The impact this has on user expe­ri­ence is likely to be min­i­mal, as they likely redesigned the fron­tend entirely — though obvi­ously other per­for­mance con­cerns may apply.

At any rate, this is the first I’ve noticed of approvals of overtly Flash-based appli­ca­tions. If pos­si­ble, this may open the App Store flood­gates even fur­ther, while pro­vid­ing hope to many for whom the bar­rier to entry in terms of rewrit­ing code was sim­ply too high.

We’re excited about this as cer­tain com­po­nent parts of soft­ware we’ve devel­oped depends strongly on Flash for data visu­al­iza­tion and report­ing. The prospect of being able to deploy this on the iPhone (and yes, the iPad) is a com­pelling oppor­tu­nity that is, plainly, freak­ing exciting.

# by Josh Street on March 13th, 2010 Tags: , , , , , ,
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Pasting from Word into InDesign

Bold/italic text is one of the few parts of Microsoft Word styling that design­ers actu­ally lament the loss of when trans­fer­ring con­tent from Word into InDe­sign. Word styles are gen­er­ally poorly used/abused, and accord­ingly the default is to throw them all out when import­ing text. Here’s how to avoid los­ing the baby with the bathwater.

In InDe­sign, press ⌘+K (Ctrl + K) to bring up the Pref­er­ences dia­log, then click through to the last pane, “Clip­board Han­dling”. At the bot­tom of this pane, under “When Past­ing Text and Tables from Other Appli­ca­tions”, set Paste to “All Infor­ma­tion (Index Mark­ers, Swatches, Styles, etc.)

Some Word styling will now import — watch care­fully to make sure noth­ing too stu­pid finds its way into your pris­tine InDe­sign document!

# by Josh Street on July 6th, 2009 Tags: , , , , , , ,
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Fireworks Auto-Kern bug: Vista issues

Adobe Fire­works is a pretty bril­liant pro­gram for rapidly devel­op­ing web lay­outs in a kind of best-of-both-worlds way that enjoys the ben­e­fits of both vec­tor and bitmap design, with­out all the frus­tra­tions that come along with smart objects. Its text han­dling is also superb, offer­ing a whole lot of cus­tomis­able set­tings that are very use­ful for mock­ing up web designs, not read­ily avail­able in either Pho­to­shop or Illustrator.

How­ever, it is not with­out its faults. On Vista, when typ­ing text in Fire­works things can occa­sion­ally go very, very wrong. The solu­tion at least ini­tially is to turn off the “Auto Kern” option in the Prop­er­ties dia­log — but this removes one of the big ben­e­fits of using Fire­works in the first place!

There are other options. The prob­lem will go away (some­times) when the file is closed and Fire­works is restarted — this is hit and miss. More per­ma­nently, dis­abling Vista’s fancy-pants Aero theme (the thing that makes all win­dow bor­ders trans­par­ent, gives that snazzy Start + Tab effect, etc.) will ensure you have a glitch-free Fire­works font experience.

The real solu­tion? Sneak into Adobe HQ and write a patch to fix the stu­pid thing!

# by Josh Street on June 18th, 2009 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Acrobat tip: Set Page Display in PDF files

Have you ever won­dered how to make your PDF files open in a par­tic­u­lar page dis­play lay­out? Sent a PDF of a book­let or mag­a­zine to some­one and won­dered how to make the title appear on its own page?

The “Ini­tial View” set­ting in Adobe Acro­bat is the answer. Sim­ply open Doc­u­ment Prop­er­ties (Ctrl+D on Win­dows, or ⌘+D in OS X) and click onto the “Ini­tial View” tab. Here, you can set the ini­tial page dis­play for­mat, open­ing page, zoom lev­els, and even what the title of the win­dow is.

Acrobat Initial View Document Properties

When you’re done, just close the Doc­u­ment Prop­er­ties win­dow and save your file. Easy!

# by Josh Street on June 17th, 2009 Tags: , , , ,
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Some numbers from Vista’s crash reporting

Win­dows Vista ships with a delight­ful tool by the aid of which it reg­u­larly digs itself a grave. Here are some find­ings after three months of use, sorted by num­ber of crashes.

Microsoft Inter­net Explorer 92
Win­dows Prob­lem Reporting 52
Appli­ca­tion Launcher 17
Win­dows Explorer 12
Adobe Pho­to­shop CS3 8
Microsoft Out­look 6
Microsoft Zune 4
Mobile Net­work­ing Wizard 4
Skype 4
Win­dows Media Player 4
Adobe Bridge CS3 3
Adobe Illus­tra­tor CS3 3
Adobe Dreamweaver 8 3
Fire­fox 3
Sync man­ager 3
Win­dows Task Manager 3
Adobe Pre­miere Pro CS3 2
Eclipse 2
Gephex 2
Win­dows Live Messenger 2
Adobe OnLo­ca­tion CS3 1
Adobe Pho­to­shop CS2 1
Dri­ver soft­ware installation 1
Filezilla client 1
Microsoft Pow­er­point 1
VLC 1

By ven­dor, that con­sti­tutes 176 crashes/hangs/‘not-respondings’ of Microsoft soft­ware to 21 of Adobe soft­ware over the same period. Now, it feels like I’m cheat­ing the num­bers here by report­ing Win­dows Prob­lem Report­ing itself, because prob­a­bly 90% of its crashes occur when report­ing on Inter­net Explorer, but hey — these are the num­bers Microsoft’s soft­ware itself gave me, so who’s complaining?

In case you think this isn’t a fair com­par­i­son for rea­sons of time spent using var­i­ous pro­grammes, exclude Prob­lem Report­ing crashes (though you shouldn’t) and the Microsoft stat comes down to 124. That is, lots.

I can’t think of a day since own­ing this com­puter I wouldn’t have used at least one piece of Adobe soft­ware, most com­monly more. To be fair, Adobe soft­ware is more likely to do weird things (like, ya know, refus­ing to save) caus­ing me to restart the appli­ca­tion rather than let­ting it ‘crash’ per se… but Microsoft’s junk is vastly less likely to give me any sort of warn­ing before flak­ing out.

These crashes are reported over a three-month period span­ning Novem­ber 26 until Jan­u­ary 25.

Vista SP1 con­tin­ues to be eagerly awaited.

# by Josh Street on January 25th, 2008 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Adobe Bridge CS3

It does a lot of things right. CS2 was good in its inte­gra­tion but pretty mediocre in thumb­nail­ing and meta­data sup­port, but this is finally an app worth hav­ing. The fil­ter (bot­tom left) is mag­i­cal; the thumb­nail­ing isn’t hor­rif­i­cally com­pressed like it used to be; resiz­ing using the slider is a lot faster; there are three dif­fer­ent immensely-useful views built in…

It’s just good. And lots lots lots faster to use than CS2 is (load time is sim­i­lar, but once you’re actu­ally using it… pure gold).

# by Josh Street on May 3rd, 2007 Tags:
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Adobe Production Studio. Just breathe.

Okay.

For what­ever rea­son, I wasn’t pay­ing atten­tion when I bought CS2.

I some­how failed to realise that Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio Pro has nearly all the same things (ex. DTP stuff that I don’t really have much of a use for, but it’s nice hav­ing any­way) and more (Pre­miere, After­Ef­fects) for… not a lot more money at all.

*breathes deeply*

On the plus side, Cre­ative Suite 3 is launch­ing later this month though I don’t know if that means the next ver­sion of Pre­miere just yet. So I’ll wait til that’s an option before pur­chas­ing Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio, which means I get CS3 ver­sions of the stuff I actu­ally use — Pho­to­shop & Illus­tra­tor — and still have CS2 of non-essentials, like InDe­sign, GoLive, etc. Acro­bat is going to be alright for a while coz I’ve already got Acro­bat 8 because of relatively-late acqui­si­tion of CS2. Dreamweaver… I don’t par­tic­u­larly care about, though I’ve hap­pily used it for var­i­ous things.

And yeah, I’m still going to uni and doing all that sorta thing, so it’s cheaper. I’m just vaguely annoyed I didn’t drop $200 more for Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio when I could’ve if I’d read a bit more, but it’s done now. Hope­fully they’ll launch a new ver­sion of that along with CS3 so I can pick it up soon after the end of this month.

One day I might even make a decent amount of money out of this :P My rea­son­ing is that liv­ing at home & study­ing = good time for doing loss-running, skill– and network-building, moderately-expensive-but-just-within-means geeky things.

At the minute I’m not los­ing money on it, but it’s not some­thing I’d be able to afford to do if I were depen­dent on reg­u­lar income for rent, or what­ever. Speak­ing of reg­u­lar­ity, John C & I ran job inter­views yes­ter­day and decided to get one of the appli­cants onboard for CYIADA! So now that enters the build phase & we’re actu­ally going to be Mak­ingStuff™ that’ll become more directed and sta­ble — not in a finan­cial sense, but just in a number-of-hours-a-week kinda way. At the minute my hours have fluc­tu­ated a bit depend­ing on what I’ve been able to think of/motivated to get done, but that’ll obvi­ously sta­bilise a lot as I move back to cut­ting code and actu­ally see­ing it develop!

Any­way. Can’t wait.

# by Josh Street on March 22nd, 2007 Tags: , , , ,
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