PDF May Embed Flash Content

Adobe announced that the next iteration of its Acrobat line of product, but may be taking the wrong direction by adding the ability to add Flash Content to PDFs.


Has Adobe Taken a Wrong Turn with Acrobat 9?
Niel McAllister

This week, Adobe announced details of the next iteration of its Acrobat line of products, due in late June or early July. Perhaps the most prominent new feature of Acrobat 9 will be the ability to embed live Flash animation and video directly into PDF documents.

But while this capability sounds appealing, I can't help but be skeptical. PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It seems to me that this new direction that Adobe is taking in some ways flies against the original idea of what PDF is all about.

For starters, adding Flash to PDF documents is instantly going to make them a whole lot less portable. Flash support is nearly ubiquitous on the Windows and Mac OS platforms, but Adobe's track record with Flash on Linux leaves something to be desired. Also, there are a whole lot of handhelds and other devices that can render PDF documents just fine, but lack the power to render video animation.

Second, if something is moving, dancing, and singing across the screen, is it still a "document"? Historically, PDF has been a way to deliver nicely formatted, graphically rich pages in an electronic way. One of the most popular uses of PDFs, in fact, is to print them out on plain, old-fashioned paper. What happens when you go to print a document with embedded video? If nothing else, the printout will not be an accurate representation of the original file.

One of PDF's strengths has been that it has been somewhat less of a moving target than online file formats, such as Flash. By wedding the two, Adobe risks lessening the value of one of its strongest properties.

What's more, if Adobe is now positioning PDF as primarily an online (or mixed-media) file format, what message does that send to the print publishing community, which has long relied on PDF to manage prepress workflows? Will Adobe continue to act with their best interests at heart?

Though the distinctions are subtle, the new features of Acrobat 9 seem likely to create confusion about PDF in the minds of customers. I wonder if, in its zeal to be viewed as a major player in the online content creation business, Adobe might be taking a wrong turn here.

Source: www.pcworld.com

Flash Player 10 Available for Public Testing

For those of you who love your cutting-edge Flash content, Adobe made a prerelease test version of the Flash 10 Player


Flash Player 10 Available for Public Testing

For those of you who really, really love your cutting-edge Flash content, Adobe made a prerelease test version of the Flash 10 Player available today. You can download an installer for Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux from the Adobe Labs Web site.

Because this is a testing version, you're not likely to see any content that requires the new player in the wild just yet. But if you design or maintain Web pages yourself, it might be a good idea to give them a whirl with the beta player, just to make sure that all your old content still renders the way it should with the new version.

Among the new features in this edition of Flash Player are support for new 3D rendering effects, Adobe Pixel Blender filters, new drawing APIs, and an advanced text rendering engine. What's more, Flash Player 10 has expanded use of hardware graphics acceleration, so Flash content should be a little snappier.

Don't expect it to be completely without bugs, though. In fact, it's safe to assume that not everything will work exactly as expected -- this is a public beta release, after all. When you do encounter abnormal behavior, be sure to submit feedback to Adobe and/or discuss your issues in the public forums.

As for when we can start authoring content for use with Flash Player 10, expect an announcement from Adobe regarding the next version of Creative Suite on May 27.

Photoshop Express Public Beta Update

Adobe Systems on Wednesday announced the pending release of an update to its Photoshop Express Web-based service for image editing.

Photoshop Express Public Beta Adds Flickr Support

Adobe Systems on Wednesday announced the pending release of an update to its Photoshop Express Web-based service for image editing. The update is expected to go live at 9:01 PM Pacific Time (12:01 AM Eastern Time).

Photoshop Express leverages Web 2.0 technologies like Adobe's own Flash software to provide users with an online service for store, sort, edit and show off digital photos. It's compatible with Safari, Firefox and other Web browsers. Adobe notes that more than 60,000 Web albums have been created using Photoshop Express during the first month of public operation. Users receive 2GB of online storage for free.

The enhancements to Photoshop Express include the ability to access to photos through the popular Flickr service. You can upload or download photos into Photoshop Express, edit and add effects then send them back to Flickr.

A new "Save As" feature has been added. It allows you to save multiple versions of an image. An embeddable player can now be used to post slideshows to Facebook MySpace and other social networking Web sites.

Microsoft's Answer to Adobe Flash

Microsoft has developed its own Flash a few months ago. Silverlight was Microsoft's answer to the ever popular Adobe Flash, providing a new foundation for web content.


Silverlight versus Flash

Adobe's Flash has been around for years, and many of the popular websites enrich their content and experience by adding Flash. Not only does it provide a way to create animation, it also provides interactivity and unique interface. But it looks like Microsoft's entry into the industry will shake things up. Adobe's Flash may have a serious rival on the business.

Microsoft's Silverlight is, according to Wikipedia, "a runtime for browser-based Rich Internet Applications, providing a subset of the animation, vector graphics, and video playback capabilities of Windows Presentation Foundation". The fact that it can be written in any language using the .NET framework means it inherits the robustness and flexibility of the framework.

To be fair, Adobe's Flash is currently used by the majority of web developers. For one thing, all modern operating systems support it, and has been the de facto for web interactive controls. Developers know how to create interactive content using Flash's own scripting language, and are confident to know they only have to write the code once for different platforms.

Silverlight's entry should shake things up, with its promising feature - the ability to program it using the .NET language. Developers who are skilled in .NET programming language could easily code interactive content for Silverlight. In effect, they can create localized version and a web version of their application using the same code. The flexibility and power of the .NET framework should draw more developers into writing Silverlight applications.

Microsoft's entry into the business is late, and will take a lot of effort to race ahead of Adobe's Flash. However, Adobe has to do its own part as well.

"The biggest thing Adobe needs to bring FlexBuilder up to date with modern developer tools," said Greg DeMichillie, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "I would say they are two years behind Visual Studio."

"The other thing not to underestimate is the value of Microsoft's programming languages," he added. "C# and VB -- they are real programming languages," he said. "[Adobe's] ActionScript has certainly grown up in the last year or two, but you won't find people building industrial-strength applications with it."

While a wealth of smaller companies and startups have crowded the RIA platform space, DeMichillie said he expects only Adobe and Microsoft will emerge as true players.

"When you build a platform you need so many pieces," he said. "The other player trying to do this is Sun [with its JavaFX platform], but I don't think they have all the pieces."

Microsoft Internet Explorer Flaw

Microsoft acknowledges that there is a vulnerability with Internet Explorer 7 and rushes out fix


Microsoft IE7 to Patch
Microsoft went to work to fix a vulnerability with Windows Internet Explorer and its URI, or Uniform Resource Identifier. The fix is to address the problem in the way Internet Explorer 7 interacts with other programs. But with no fix available at the time, using IE7 on Windows XP machines is risky business.

The vulnerability of IE 7 lies in how it interacts, via the URI handler, with products such as Adobe's Acrobat Reader or Mozilla's Firefox. Before, Microsoft pointed fingers to Firefox. Then, the company, after acknowledging that the problem was its own, went to a slow work on a fix because no known exploit existed at the time. But it went on a frenzy when a Trojan horse attack started infecting machines in October.

The Trojan horse attack, which a user receives as an infected PDF, brings an old social-engineerin ploy, which malware filters usually don't vet. It tricks you into clicking the link by carrying a subject line such as "invoice" or "bill".

Adobe patched Reader, but that only covers one end of the worm home. Microsoft's patch has been in testing for quite a while, and may remain in that state for some time. As of now, try to avoid using Windows Internet Explorer 7 to browse sites that are suspicious. Try other alternatives, such as Firfox version 2.0.0.6 and up, which already has a patch for the URI vulnerability.

Opening e-mail attachements is growing riskier. A Microsoft report found that the first half of 2007 saw a 150 rcent increase in phishing scams and a 500 percent increase in malicous payloads.

Obtain a patch of Adobe Reader fix at the Adobe's site if you don't have the PDF fix yet.