Acrobatics

News from Adobe today, heading in the direction they were talking about last year for PDF and Flash. PDF is an open standard. I don't know how that spec-wise matches what it takes for Adobe to incorporate SWFs into Reader, techno-wise, and stuff...

Two big announcements today. One, we’re announcing Reader 9 which includes the ability to render SWF content inside of your PDF. That means you can actually put Flash/Flex content directly into created PDFs. That opens up a lot of very, very interesting use cases like exposing form entry applications right inside of the document or starting to use a lot of video content inside of your PDFs. I think this is one of the more interesting things to happen with the Adobe/Macromedia merger. With PDF’s right’s management built in, this also provides you a way to protect your SWF content from being decompiled.

The second announcement, my favorite of the day, is that we’re rolling out Acrobat.com. You’ve seen a lot of the services in different parts of the web, but we’re finally bringing them together under one umbrella brand with one account and a lot of functionality. You get Buzzword, “Share”, and “Brio” all as part of Acrobat.com and the line between the online software and the desktop software is starting to blur. For instance right from the Adobe Reader menus you can create a new Buzzword document or start a collaborative meeting in “Brio” which as been named Connect Now. Your Buzzword documents can now export to PDF and you can use Share to both create PDFs from documents as well as make it easy to send them to friends or embed them on your blog. There’s even an Acrobat.com AIR widget that lets you drag and drop files and create PDFs from them.

I think it's cool. And another set of signs that Adobe "gets" some things competitors either don't get or have not figured out how to execute on successfully. This is all good news for "the office" and multiple offices working together over the internets. Not to mention education, entertainment, and everything else.

Also, via Mike Chambers today, a bunch of useful reference guide stuff from Adobe re: RIA and ActionScript.

I don't know. Maybe I am just an Adobe "fan boy" so to speak. I think they're doing a lot of things well.