As I said in my recent review, the launch of Acrobat 9 is the most important release in years. Naturally most of the attention has been on the incorporation of the Flash player into the Adobe Reader with all that this means in terms of media handling and interactivity.

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

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Now that the dust has cleared on the launch of Acrobat 9 thoughts naturally turn to Adobe’s next major release Creative Suite 4. So what might we expect to see?

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…

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I’m still waiting for my review copy of the new QuarkXPress but of course I’ve read the press release and explored the Quark site - so how does it look on paper?

 The slogan that Quark has picked for the new release is “Revolutionizing Publishing. Again.” Certainly sounds good, but what does it actually mean?

Putting aside the new “Designer-Driven Typography”– and on the basis that this seems to boil down to settings for managing hanging punctuation that seems sensible – there are two new features that Quark is pushing that could live up to the revolutionary hype: the new interface and the new interactive design capabilities.

Again it’s easy to be sceptical…

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Yesterday Adobe officially announced the launch of its latest Acrobat 9 so what are my first impressions?

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?

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When a Corsair rep turned up at Dennis Towers yesterday he told us he’d brought something pretty special to show off. We were therefore distinctly underwhelmed when he said it was…a flash drive.

But this flash drive needs seeing to be believed. It’s been passed all round the office, where it’s invariably been greeted with ooohs and aaaahs of grinning appreciation, and it’s already been suggested that we buy up a job lot of them to use in the Labs.

The reason for all the fuss?

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