With the launch earlier today of its new Acrobat X platform, Adobe is naturally keen to highlight the strengths of its Acrobat authoring applications. With new capabilities such as action-based automation and enhanced portfolio handling, the new Acrobat X Pro (see full review) is certainly a decent upgrade.

By contrast, the new Acrobat X Standard (see full review) offers comparatively little. As many programs now offer their own in-built PDF authoring capabilities, and third-party alternatives such as Nitro and the more powerful Nuance offer similar office-focused PDF-based power (including OCR-based archiving and rich Word export), the one thing that Acrobat X Standard is crying out for, and that Adobe has again failed to deliver, is a major price cut.

Overall however I’d still call the new Acrobat X platform a major release, thanks primarily to the changes made to the free Reader X program.

Since its first launch back in 1993 and its first free release in 1996, the basic Reader has changed dramatically behind-the-scenes as Adobe has added support for new types of rich content such as 3D, maps, audio, video and interactive content. During this time however, the front-of-house Reader experience has changed relatively little and the program has increasingly come to seem antiquated, bloated and underpowered; a relic from the dawn of computing.

With Acrobat X, Adobe has finally realised just how central Reader is to the whole platform. As the full Adobe Reader X review discusses, there are a number of important new capabilities such as the streamlined interface, the ability to annotate your PDFs with sticky note and highlighting tools and, if the PDF was unlocked in Acrobat X Pro, the ability to use all annotation tools and view comments in Reader X’s new Comments pane.

The biggest advances are apparent when it comes to viewing PDF content on the web, including intelligent support for the host browser’s keyboard shortcuts and improved sandboxing. The most significant change of all is that when you open a PDF in your browser, it automatically opens in Reader X’s enhanced Reading mode in which the entire Reader interface is hidden and the end user can concentrate purely on the content.

On one level the new focus on Reading mode is just a cosmetic tweak, but I’d argue that it actually represents a fundamental shift on two fronts. Firstly, Adobe has finally recognised that its pre-internet dream of the paperless office built around Acrobat has lost, that the web has won and that Reader’s future therefore lies in supporting and extending the HTML-based browser as seamlessly as possible.

Second, Adobe has finally learned that Reader’s main job isn’t to highlight the benefits of Adobe’s PDF paid-for authoring tools, but to allow the end user to view and engage with content (the clue was in the title).

It’s taken ten releases and 17 years, but it looks like Adobe has finally got the message: Adobe Reader isn’t a cut-down loss-leader to the real paid-for Acrobat platform; rather, as the Acrobat runtime, Reader X is the platform.

Two money-saving opportunities have come to my attention today for software that I have recently reviewed and recommended. As they just might save you £1,500, I thought I should pass them on…

The first is a very significant saving of 50% on Maxon Cinema 4D from Maxon itself. Cinema 4D has long been the PC Pro recommended choice for accessible high-end 3D and, as my Cinema 4D 11 review shows, the program continues to push back the boundaries in terms of ease of use and 3D power.

In fact, Cinema 4D’s unique BodyPaint 3D painting and new ProjectionMan matte painting capabilities are each well worth the core version’s discounted price of £324.50 (exc VAT). And, if you’re very serious about your 3D, then here’s your chance to buy Cinema 4D 11 complete with all add-on modules (see Cinema 4D 11 Studio Bundle review) for “just” £1,424.50 (exc VAT).

A couple of caveats: you need to have proof of purchase of a qualifying third-party 3D app and I’m afraid that, as the offer finishes at the end of the month, you only have a couple of days left to take advantage.

The other special offer price is an over 40% saving on Nitro PDF Professional bringing it down to the princely sum of $49.95.

It’s not clear from the Avanquest site how long this “limited time offer” lasts nor if it’s for the latest version 6 (I’m assuming it is as they emphasise speed, but on the other hand the current RRP is actually $99). In a way though that’s not the point. The real comparison here is less against previous versions or the current RRP, than against Nitro PDF Professional’s real target: Adobe Acrobat Standard.

As I say in my Nitro PDF Professional review : “Nitro PDF Professional doesn’t offer leading-edge, let alone bleeding-edge support for PDF, but … for its target audience Nitro PDF Professional offers the most important selling point of all: value. With a price of $99, Nitro PDF Professional is designed to offer 90% of Acrobat Standard’s functionality at a third of its $299 price.”

When the comparison is made between Nitro PDF Professional’s discounted price of $50 and a dollar conversion of Adobe’s rip-off UK pricing of £275 that means that you can actually buy around nine copies of Nitro PDF Professional for every copy of Acrobat Standard. And that’s excluding VAT.

Well worth investigating.

So is Adobe likely to be any more successful this time around? The recent press briefing, given by product manager Eric Larsen and hosted within Acrobat.com itself, was certainly interesting…

As I’ve written previously,  I was seriously impressed by the Acrobat.com beta service which offered central document storage, a powerful online word processor, PDF conversion and even small-scale web conferencing. If nothing else, it was worth joining just to post large PDFs centrally rather than sending them as email attachments that might not get through.

Now the service is going to be expanded with an online presentations package and an online spreadsheet meaning that you have the same core office apps as provided by Google Docs, but with a lot more power and a far superior user interface and experience.

Even more important strategically are Adobe’s announcements regarding the immediate availability of new APIs designed to let developers integrate Acrobat.com into their own custom apps and especially the imminent launch of a mobile service aimed at smartphones such as the iPhone.

Despite these announcements, my initial response to the briefing was sceptical based on three major areas of concern:

The first of these – the question of security and uptime – is generic and applies to any cloud-based service. Erik tried to play down these issues but I wasn’t convinced by his argument that cloud-based services are inherently more secure than “notebooks walking out of the door” and statistically less likely to crash or be unavailable than desktop apps (the point is that these are local risks that we’re responsible for).

Other doubts were specific to Acrobat.com. In particular the new suite still lacks the most important productivity app of all, and the one that best demonstrates the advantages of a univerally-accessible centralized cloud-based approach: an email inbox. When this point was raised early on, Erik tried to play down the importance of email promising that he would show how Acrobat.com could “do it better” but that sounded hollow.

The biggest concern of all is a potential show-stopper. Acrobat.com is currently gaining over 100,000 new users every week but that’s because it is free. I’d assumed that that’s how the service would continue, but the focus of the briefing was on the fact that Acrobat.com is now to be a subscription service starting at $15 a month for US users. Worse, based on Adobe’s grossly unfair UK pricing, that probably means close on £15 a month when European availability is delivered in due course. You’d need to add a lot more than an online spreadsheet to justify that.

During the briefing however, each of these doubts was largely addressed and largely allayed.

Regarding security and uptime, every organization will make its own decisions but as Erik put it, the move to cloud-based computing is a “mega trend” ie the advantages are such that it will happen, the only question is how. Moreover Adobe could have a major strength on this front.  When I asked about AIR-based access to Acrobat.com, Erik revealed that, while this will only be online to begin with (ie outside the browser), Adobe is working hard on a system to enable offline storage and access to documents – essential both for local backup and to avoid downtime. Providing these offline capabilities is not easy because Acrobat.com is designed to enable multiple users to work on the same central document, but it is in the pipeline.

Regarding the email issue, Erik pointed out that you can email colleagues from within the app but that this is largely unnecessary. Indeed the whole point of Acrobat.com is to get away from the inefficiencies of the email round-robin. Instead Erik showed how his team had worked together to produce the launch paper and presentation, with everyone always working on the latest, up-to-date, centrally-hosted version. Particularly impressive was the ability to drag back on a timeline and see how the document had changed over time and Erik talked about how Adobe is working on a system whereby those few emails associated with a project are automatically attached as metadata within this timeline.

By this stage it was clear that Acrobat.com should not be seen as an essentially standalone online suite but rather as a collaborative tool – more Google Wave than Google Docs.

Such collaboration is the key to Acrobat.com and, crucially, it turns out that it’s only if you’re taking advantage of its workgroup capabilities that you are expected to pay (Adobe’s message on this front is hopelessly garbled and gives the impression that the main benefit you are paying for is PDF conversion!).

In other words the service will still be available for free to individual users including basic collaboration and web conferencing to give a taster of what’s possible. Even better – and a real lesson learned from PDF-based workflows – you aren’t expected to pay if you’re invited to collaborate on a project. It’s only the initiator that needs to be a subscriber.

In this new light I have to say that the new Acrobat.com looks a lot more attractive. I’m not sure that it’s got what it takes to seize the average office especially as Microsoft and Google are clearly working on their own similar solutions. However, Acrobat.com will certainly attract Adobe’s existing design-focused userbase especially as we can expect tighter integration with the CS apps in future.

Moreover by raising the design bar, Acrobat.com will be a hard act for anyone to follow. Crucially, unlike Google Docs, Acrobat.com feels like a polished desktop app so you quickly forget that you are working online.

Most importantly, by shifting away from today’s  workgroup collaboration built on the email exchange of multiple fixed standalone PDFs towards a single live document shared online, Acrobat.com does indeed make a credible pitch at “doing it better.”

Ultimately Acrobat.com’s biggest strength as a cloud-based platform for the future comes from Adobe’s past experience with Acrobat on the desktop – it has learned how not to do it.

In my last digital design column in the latest issue of the magazine I take a look at the long history of “iPaper”. It’s essentially the story of the holy grail for designers: a format that manages to combine the design strengths and reading experience of paper with the unbeatable advantages offered by the internet – universal, instant and effectively free publishing and delivery.

Back in my first column, 150 issues previously, I had thought it was obvious what format would come to fill this role: the web-optimised PDF. And, as the most common document format on the web after HTML and with semi-integrated playback in most browsers, to an extent it does. Generally though, despite all its other strengths, PDF has failed miserably in its web ambitions. 

So is there an alternative?

One of the most interesting new takes on the longstanding iPaper dream comes from Scribd.com and is called… “iPaper”. Scribd is generating quite a bit of interest at the moment as a site where users can upload and share their written work. Just two years on from launch and with over 15 billion words in its public library, over 50,000 new uploads every day and over 50 million visitors a month, Scribd is well on track to establish itself as the “YouTube for writers”.

This file sharing is interesting enough especially as – again like YouTube – you can embed the iPaper content and reader into your own pages with a short snippet of code – something I’ve taken advantage of recently to enable quick posting of brochures to a web 2.0 user-generated site (there’s even a nice Drupal iPaper module to make this even easier).

What’s particularly interesting though is how Scribd has chosen to implement the site. You can upload files in a number of formats – DOC, OpenOffice, PPT etc – and these are then automatically and rapidly converted into both PDF and into Flash SWF. It’s the latter which is the main format used for display.

The beauty of this dual approach is that you don’t need the baggage of Adobe Reader to just quickly view and navigate the design rich SWF file (including search and print) which is all that most user want to do 99% of the time. For those rare occasions when you do want more, it’s simple to download the PDF version for offline reading, commenting, archiving etc. 

With the iPaper player “about a 1/1000th of the size of Reader” and the SWF content files smaller than their PDF equivalents, Scribd cruelly exposes the inherent bloat and semi-detached nature of the supposedly “web-optimised” PDF. 

Adobe is clearly well aware of both the problem and the solution. Indeed it has largely copied the Scribd model for its own Flash-based handling of hosted PDFs at Acrobat.com.

I wonder though whether this could be the herald of deeper integration. Now that Adobe owns both PDF and SWF formats and their respective players wouldn’t it make sense to spread iPaper-style benefits beyond these cloud-based server solutions? 

What I’m imagining is a truly web-optimised flavour of PDF with its own associated Flash wrapper. This Flash version of the document would enable fast and truly integrated online display within the browser either full-screen or embedded via a dedicated lightweight document reader incorporated directly into the ubiquitous Flash player. If you like the look of it, simply right-click and download the underlying PDF into Adobe Reader for offline viewing, printing, archiving and so on.

It certainly wouldn’t be the holy grail – as I discuss in my article – but it would be a major step towards it.

However it’s possible that the associated launch of Acrobat.com will eventually prove even more significant.

Acrobat.com is great for users of Adobe’s Acrobat software – Standard, Pro and Pro Extended – as it provides 5GB of free storage to which you can post PDFs for centralized commenting and form filling rather than going through the traditional hassle of an email round robin.

That’s useful enough but it’s only the beginning. I assumed that Acrobat.com would act simply as online storage for PDFs that would be downloaded for viewing in the Acrobat apps or free Adobe Reader – but that’s only the case if you need those advanced capabilities such as commenting and form filling or want an offline copy.

If all you want to do is share your PDFs with others then Acrobat.com does it itself online! Click through to this sample file and you’ll see what I mean.

When I first saw this I wasn’t sure what I was seeing – was it a JPEG version of my uploaded PDF? And, if so, why was it fully scalable and so fast? Eventually it dawned on me – Acrobat.com is automatically converting all uploaded PDFs to Flash and displaying them online!

Previously online viewing of PDFs was semi-detached from the web and required a fast desktop system capable of running Adobe Reader – and the quicker the better for rendering performance. Now, thanks to Acrobat.com, PDFs can be made quickly viewable directly in the browser by any system capable of running the Flash player (think next-generation handheld).

In other words Acrobat.com brings yesterday’s slow, semi-detached, page-based, offline, email-oriented PDFs into today’s fast-paced, streamlined, screen-based, online, web-centred world – by turning them into Flash!

And you don’t even have to use Adobe’s Acrobat software to take advantage of Acrobat.com’s Flash-based online sharing. The 5GB of free space is open to everyone. I strongly recommend checking it out.

Well the launch of Acrobat 9 might well give us a very strong clue. The Acrobat applications are focussed on the business/office productivity market, but the introduction of new PDF capabilities gives the CS teams something to work with. And with Acrobat 9 that’s an understatement…

The first key is the merging of the Flash player into the free Adobe Reader. This enables traditionally static PDF ePaper documents to become fully interactive multimedia extravaganzas. InDesign already offers some electronic publishing capabilities but now the platform is in place to take this far further – and with the latest QuarkXPress 8 adding comprehensive Flash authoring capabilities the pressure is really on. For more graphics-intensive short-publication work this could also give the multi-page, Flash-oriented Fireworks CS4 a real – and well-deserved – central role.

The merger of Flash/PDF shouldn’t just benefit the page-oriented apps. The big limitation of the Flash platform at the moment is that you need to be online and in the browser to take advantage of it. By outputting Flash projects to PDF rather than SWF, Flash CS4 Professional would open up an important new offline delivery route (effectively a Flash document would be a projector without the hassle of EXE-based delivery).

The potential is even more exciting for the media-focused CS apps. Currently these seem semi-detached from the publishing apps but if Premiere Pro CS4, After Effects CS4, Soundbooth CS4 and Encore CS4 all add PDF output they would become full members of Adobe’s universal Acrobat strategy at a stroke. By wrapping the all-important FLV video format in a PDF wrapper you also get simple offline cross-platform playback.

And the merger of Flash/PDF was only one aspect of the Acrobat 9 launch – perhaps even more important was the launch of Acrobat.com with its free 5GB hosting and services. This isn’t just personal file storage – Acrobat.com creates a Flash version of each PDF for online display and sharing. The potential for integration with CS4 is mouth-watering.

What else? How about multiple page support for Illustrator at last (maybe not if Fireworks takes on this role)? The bundling of Flex? Live Color for InDesign? Photoshop makes your tea?

Of course this is all speculation and the truth might be very different. However I can’t help feeling excited about the prospects for CS4.

I was invited down to London a month or so ago to the press briefing and it was clear that Adobe considers this a major release. And after the pitiful version 8 it really can’t help but shine.

The feature that Adobe was stressing is the new ability to handle Flash – but just how significant is this development? And come to that – just how new is it? And how welcome?

After all Acrobat already supports Flash and has done so since version 6. If you don’t believe me, select the Movie tool (hidden away in version 8 under Tools > Advanced Editing), drag on your page and then see which files formats are supported. There, lurking among the AVIs, MOVs and WMVs, is SWF.

The first big difference is that with version 9, the Flash player is actually built in to Adobe Reader. Previously you had to rely on the end user having independently installed the Flash player to ensure reliable playback – now it’s an absolute given. It’s part of the platform.

The second major difference is that Acrobat 9 now supports Flash video (FLV) not just SWF. And with the new Acrobat Pro Extended it can automatically convert all those AVI, MOV and WMV files to FLV for efficient web-delivery and playback. Effectively this means that PDF has now moved on from its static ePaper roots to become a universal dynamic multimedia format.

So how welcome is this? Already there are those Flash-phobics that are bemoaning the despoiling of their apparently safely static format (though see above).

I have to say that I don’t agree. Yes there undoubtedly will be some horrid design excesses and download times, but you have to blame the designer for that not the platform. And when it is used sensibly and subtly, Flash’s multimedia handling can take efficient design work onto an entirely new level.

More to the point even in everyday use, audio and video is just becoming a natural part of computing life. In particular, with the spread of webcams and movie-enabled digital cameras and camera phones, video is now becoming ubiquitous and, as a universal file exchange format, PDF needs to reflect that.

Imagine you’re buying a property and download the PDF schedule. Now thanks to Acrobat 9 alongside the text, photos and drawings you’ll be able to see a video walkthrough. Surely that has to be a good thing?