Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Jim Willeke — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 06:06:25 -0000

Nuance "PDF Converter Pro" however offers no free support. You must pay for every support incident even if the product will not run.

I have Vista and on launch, it says program has stopped working and crashes.

Customer service is equally unaccommodating.

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

driveby — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 10:12:44 -0000

It was considered a bad thing when microsoft tried to cram all things into one application- or OS. Now Adobe wants to do the same. Why does Breeze have to be crammed into the Acrobat product?

I think it is interesting that microsoft is moving away from pdf to embrace XPS.

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Slasher — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 16:44:56 -0000

The "slow to launch" comments tell me that these folks never even tried Acrobat 7 (which brought the launch times down to something reasonable).

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Andy King — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 14:52:49 -0000

Robert,

We reviewed the new Acrobat 8 Pro (pre-release) at

http://www.websiteoptimizat...

We review Adobe's new Acrobat 8 Professional (pre-release) for performance against PDF Enhancer 3.1. The new Acrobat features faster operations, smaller PDFs, a new interface, and the ability to combine different types of files into one PDF.

- andy

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Derek K. Miller — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 15:48:27 -0000

I'm hesitant to approach the new Acrobat 8 because the installation experience for the Acrobat 7 Reader (reader!) is so unpleasant it's scaring me away. It's nearly as bad an experience as Joel Spolsky's phone, in fact.

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Thomas Tallyce — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 11:06:01 -0000

Robert, Acrobat is simply not cool. It's basically just a pain that we have to put up with. It's slow to start up and seems to use a rather large amount of memory for what it actually does. Searching a PDF often fails. There are about four different ways to convert a document to PDF, and literally half the time, some ways don't work. Conversion back to Word is pathetic. And it doesn't shut down properly. Paying hundreds for such a product is just a joke. You should use your respected position to raise these problems with Adobe, not complain that people aren't talking about it much.

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

John C. Welch — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 11:02:04 -0000

Here's where this writer is on the new Acrobat:

http://www.bynkii.com/archi...

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Michael Kenward — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:40:25 -0000

I see from the proposed pricing that Adobe continues to rip off the planet.

Like too many North American software houses, Adobe wants me to give them £1 to match the $1 required of American customers.

I have news for Adobe, the dollar is sick. (Maybe all the money they owe to foreigners.) I can buy around $1.8 for £1.

And given that upgrades start at a high enough price as it is, there is little incentive to buy into their escalator.

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Brian Sullivan — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 13:42:54 -0000

I am struggling to find what most of the "new" features in Acrobat have to do with PDF format or anything that is traditionally thought of as Acrobat.

It seems like a cheap trick to me -- essentially they seem to have taken what used to be called Breeze(which if I remember correctly was also a collection of stuff rebranded as Breeze that had nothing to do with the original Breeze) and renamed it Acrobat 8 Connect in order to capitalize on the Acrobat "brand". I guess it worked though -- it got you to provide free promotion (or sort of --as your disclaimer indicates they do pay indirectly don't they?). Most of the other new features seem like more of the same -- incremental improvements to standard Acrobat.

I guess this is par for the course for Adobe - marketing and product development by sleight of hand. Of course Microsoft tends to do the same -- look at the list of "new" products that have names chosen from Live, Office, Windows that have nothing to do with Windows, Office and an are in no way Live.

All negativism aside though it looks like "Acrobat" Connect could actually be useful - if it didn't cost an arm and leg to use (as it apparently does).

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Zaine Ridling — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 07:10:13 -0000

Marc Orchant nails it — it's not the features that sell software, it's the benefits. With apps like FinePrint's pdf Factory Pro or as Marc mentioned, the $99 ScanSoft PDF Converter Pro from Nuance, there's really no reason to patronize Adobe anymore. I've registered and used every (Pro) version since 3.0, and 7 was the best, however, nowadays I mainly use it to create printable versions of Word docs, period. And for that, I'll never need Adobe. Besides, it seems like Adobe is just upgrading to make another billion, not to really improve PDF.

They have long been the forerunners of bloatware, refusing to scale back Adobe Reader, which quickly lost its free market to Foxit Reader. In this day, people don't tolerate this crap from megacorps anymore.

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

bananasfk — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 06:09:00 -0000

Robert Adobe like to do nasty things to foriegn programmers under the dcma.

I don't like Adobe and nor will I continue not use there tools just in case - who cares.

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Kunal — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 03:16:14 -0000

some coverage of the event is here: http://labnol.blogspot.com/...
and here: http://labnol.blogspot.com/...

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

neath — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 02:42:31 -0000

Acrobat, well, the good thing is that you can search them but for the most part they are huge slow clunky things to be avoided. I am not a tech person but possibly speaking for the gabillions of "readers" out there, quite simply, Acrobat sucks!

The only way I could get excited about it would be if I hit online pdf pages that don't try to crash my browser then I might eventually think, "it's about time they fixed that up"

Dull, and more of a piss off that they have probably "improved" it without making surfing one iota more easy.

Neath

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

ralphg — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 23:17:34 -0000

Another reason for the initial lack of coverage: their PR people told me the press embargo ended Monday.

I initially set my blog item to live Monday at 8am, but Sunday afternoon I happened to notice the Adobe press release was already posted to Yahoo Business, so I changed my blog item to "Publish Now."

As well, Adobe PR never did send the promised PPT file and other details. No excuse, but Adobe has taken on a new PR firm (Edelman?) and maybe the staff isn't up to speed yet.

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Dominic Jones — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:50:19 -0000

Adobe lost sight of why most people use the product.

Acrobat is mostly used by people who are too lazy to use HTML to publish content online. I said mostly, ok?

Now why would these both to do anything else with the software? They won't and Adobe can't make them.

Just a waste of R&D if you ask me.

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

ralphg — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:17:11 -0000

My overview was posted Sunday at http://worldcadaccess.typep... , although it took a different slant, because of WorldCAD Access's interest in 3D: "Adobe Adds 2nd 3D Format to Acrobat"

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Michael Kenward — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 18:10:57 -0000

Comment by Joe Clark

"Michel (sic) Kenward, “the last version” did not “create a new file format.” Acrobat and PDF versions are two different things"

Forgive me, but Acrobat 7 was the first version to give us PDF1.6, prompting lots of people to climb on the bandwagon and write software that offered no backward compatibility.

Why is that compatibility important, because people still running on old version of Reader have problems with the new format.

PDF and Acrobat are not the same thing. But someone should tell Adobe that.

But back to Robert's first message:

http://acrobatusers.com/blogs/

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Robin Capper — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 17:51:58 -0000

I've posted a link to your videos (see post link on this comment) but to be honest didn't see much to excite about 8 as a CAD user other than the ability to merge files which is nice.

When they added 3d PDF generated quite a bit of "blog'tivity" in the CAD world but this one doesn't seem to offer much for the sort of uses I have for PDF.

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

nogg3r5 — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:56:23 -0000

its all about Foxit. Adobe reader takes to long to do anything...Download, Install, boot etc..

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

John Dodds — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:09:56 -0000

This is called Stockholm syndrome!!

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

engtech — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 15:28:01 -0000

I'm in the FoxIt camp as well.

Acrobat Reader is a bloated piece of dung I gave up on a long time ago. I don't want a PDF reader that tries to install toolbars, crashes my browser, and takes up 30+ MB of ram to read a 250kb file.

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

macbeach — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 15:14:24 -0000

#22 saved me a lot of venting. *whew* But I still have more...

So I'll just add that in the distant past I was a fan of Windows. In the less distant past I was a fan of all things Apple, and in the less distant netherworld of unreleased betas I was a fan of Adobe too.

At some point the future of all of these companies was in doubt and they worked hard to survive. But then, to a greater or lesser extent they all achieved the ability to draw residuals on their past successes. The iPod has remade Apple. So much so that I wonder if they even want to be in the computer business any more. MS still makes tons off of Windows and Office, but predictions of the eventual decline on those revenue streams are almost universal. Adobe, long a one-trick pony, after MS pulled the font rug out from under them, Acrobat made a lot more sense as a “perpetual” revenue generator and they dis a great job of promulgating the format to just about everywhere from Linux, Apple's OS and even to Palm pilots and such. Small companies could of course survive for decades on these income streams, but these aren't' small companies, so they have to find ways to get larger streams to flow out of these existing products. This is almost never good for existing users, who are in many cases completely happy with what they have. All they need is for that existing capability to keep up with OS upgrades (most of which they don't need either but are forced into). And so the march of “improved” technology goes on.

I was a beta tester for an Adobe product called Atmosphere back in, oh, 2000 or so (maybe earlier). Way back then they already had a system that would allow you to set up a 3D chat room on any ordinary web page, complete with customizable avatars, sound, etc. Not quite the full experience of Second Life, but for what content creation involved (a few hours of tinkering) quite impressive. Someone skilled in the tool could produce a 3D landscape that was breathtaking and approached a photo-realism that I haven't seen anywhere else. the only problem was that the code was buggy as heck. After two years of delays it seemed to have gotten worse rather than better. they changed the scope from being a separate program with a plug-in for web work to only a plug-in and no separate viewer. The plug-in only worked with IE, and many of the beta testers (like me) had already switched to Mozilla. FINALLY they announced the production product, as if they had given up on fixing the bugs. Ahhh, but they had promised all beta testera a copy of the production product. I got mine. Shortly thereafter the product was unceremoniously discontinued, and the production team made to vanish. The next version of Acrobat had some sort of 3D capabilities built-in, which I've never seen operate as I had already begun my migration away from Windows and I suspect that's the only place it will work (if it does work).

Call it bloat, or featuritis, the unfortunate requirement of being a publicly traded company impels these companies to abandon common sense and make former things of beauty into eyesores while they scurry to discover something new. A poor user has to hope against hope that these new endeavors such as Xbox and iPod will be such runaway sucesses that the companies will leave the old stuff alone, but that doesn't seem to be the normal course of events does it?

Sickening.

PS: Unless I'm missing something, your pointer to the Acrobat video points to a page that requires you to have Flash version 8 (not available for Linux yet), nevertheless less, it automatically directs me to a product update page which doesn't exist, although the script doing this never discloses that fact and instead just waits for something to happen that isn't going to happen. Finally I discover that the actual video, on Podtech, is in a Quicktime format that I could have even played on my Linux machine. I cringe that they pay people to put this stuff together. It's probably just as well for Adobe that I don't spend much time blogging about them.

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Russ Henry — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 15:08:03 -0000

Yes the new bat is cool. Can they allow the full (paid for) version to allow you to automatically pull out all of the stuff you don't select out of the PDF?
How about an auto credits tag so we can make it easier for the DOCS to publish Biblio's?

That function would be great for researchers and analysts who don’t want to re-read / highlight focus zones in massive dissertations and technical journals. What do you think? Just a thought, thinking outcloud. #; ) I'll get back in the box now... sorry.

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Ted Padova — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 14:58:59 -0000

Robert,

Adobe made public the Acrobat 8 forthcoming revision and lifted the NDA at 12:00AM EST on Sepetember 18. At precisely 12:01AM on September 18 several blogs were posted at http://www.acrobatusers.com....

ted

Re: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?

Kurt Foss — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 14:19:46 -0000

Bloggers discussing Acrobat 8 -->

http://www.acrobatusers.com...