Acrobat finds a new home on the Web

Remember when hardly a week went by in the early months of 2008 without some sort of Apple product announcement? The past few weeks, Adobe has been doing its best Apple imitation, with a slew of product news aimed at creative professionals.

Following last week's debut of a trio of public betas for the CS4 versions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Soundbooth, Adobe kicked off this week by introducing Acrobat 9 Pro. The new version of the PDF creation and editing tool should arrive in July, and Adobe has said that it will integrate Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro into Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium and Standard editions, Creative Suite 3.3 Web Premium and Creative Suite 3.3 Master Collection editions. CS3 owners can upgrade for $159. Pricing for full versions, as well as a host of optional upgrade paths can be found at the Creative Suite page on Adobe's Web site.

Macworld has already carried profiles of Acrobat 9 and Acrobat.com this week. But I thought it would be a good idea to look at Monday's announcements from a creative pro perspective.

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Remember when hardly a week went by in the early months of 2008 without some sort of Apple product announcement? The past few weeks, Adobe has been doing its best Apple imitation, with a slew of product news aimed at creative professionals.

Following last week's debut of a trio of public betas for the CS4 versions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Soundbooth, Adobe kicked off this week by introducing Acrobat 9 Pro. The new version of the PDF creation and editing tool should arrive in July, and Adobe has said that it will integrate Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro into Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium and Standard editions, Creative Suite 3.3 Web Premium and Creative Suite 3.3 Master Collection editions. CS3 owners can upgrade for $159. Pricing for full versions, as well as a host of optional upgrade paths can be found at the Creative Suite page on Adobe's Web site.

Macworld has already carried profiles of Acrobat 9 and Acrobat.com this week. But I thought it would be a good idea to look at Monday's announcements from a creative pro perspective.

With Acrobat 9 Pro, designers can combine PDF files, video, audio, and other documents into easy-to-distribute PDF Portfolios, which are simple to browse using customizable interactive navigation designed in Adobe Flash. Designers also can include Adobe Flash Player-compatible video and application files in their PDF files and then play back this content in Acrobat 9 Pro and Adobe Reader 9.

Users of Adobe Acrobat Packages in previous versions of Acrobat will see some minor updates and a name change to PDF Portfolios. The OCR scanning engine has seen a minor update, among several other features already available in Acrobat 8.

Overall, I don't see any huge changes for most print designers, which is actually a good thing in our industry. Instead, the bigger news this week was the unveiling of Acrobat.com. If Acrobat's primary home is on the user's desktop, you might say that this the application adds a condo on the beach in the form of this Web based-component.

Much like the recent move by Adobe to put Photoshop in the hands of Web users with Photoshop Express, the company does the same thing with Acrobat.com, which includes Web-based file sharing and storage, PDF-creation services, on-line web conferencing and screen sharing, and more. Here are some of the highlights: 

The newly unveiled Acrobat.com online service Buzzword Adobe.com's Flash-based word-processor, Buzzword offers all the basic word-processor tools you expect from an online tool, including collaboration. You can share your documents with others, and any comments or changes are seen in real-time by everyone. You can set one of three roles to the people you invite to share your document, giving them read-only, comment-only and full writing privileges.

With Buzzword, you can import documents from Microsoft Word as well as regular or rich text format files for editing. When you're done, you can export your document to .doc, .docX, text, rich text, HTML, and of course, PDF formats. In my initial tests, though, exporting as PDF simply did not work. I kept getting damaged file errors.

For more Mac news, visit Macworld. Story copyright Mac Publishing, LLC.