Jun 7, 2008 | blog
Just a quick weekend look at Adobe’s new "online office" product – Acrobat.com. At least, that’s how I found it referred to in some of the news bits today. Overall I was impressed with the first release of Adobe’s Acrobat.com efforts. With a slick, Flash based interface, it has good performance and is visually appealing.
They seem to be starting out with some good features, but are missing many. Zoho is closest to providing an online office suite that compares anywhere near Microsoft Office. Adobe is starting out with a word processor, document sharing ability with a generous 5GB of space, a document to PDF conversion tool, and a really nifty web conferencing application.
The word processor, called BuzzWord, is what you’d expect. It has the basics and is similar feature wise to Google Docs. PDF conversion is straight forward, you can upload a doc to convert and it saves the resulting file in the My Files applet. File sharing is accomplished from the drop-down context menu and provides the ability to embed the doc into a site.
The most impressive app included here is the web conferencing, called ConnectNow, which has features similar to WebEx. Adobe provides each user their own room, assigns a conference phone number to it, allows for desktop sharing, meeting notes, group & individual IM, and WebCasting with an optional web cam. Good stuff.
Just a couple bullet points:
- Look & Feel: Wow – the Flash based interface is impressive
- Consistency: Needs some work, changing applications launches too many windows
- Integration: Very little between "applications"
- Functionality: Depends on feature – some are quite rich, others very basic
- Features: Document sharing, Word Processor, PDF Conversion, Web Conferencing
Overall it’s a good start. There is a long way to go to compete evenly with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, but then Google doesn’t have a web conference tool. It’s not going to compete with MS Office, or any of the others for some time. With that said, however, if you want to convert some documents to PDF, host documents that you can link to in email or from a website, or a decent free web conferencing tool, it might be a good adjunct to your current solutions.
Feb 25, 2008 | blog
I’ve been enjoying some of the Adobe AIR apps during it’s development over the past year. Among several Twitter clients that have popped up in the last few months running on AIR, I’ve really enjoyed Twhirl.
Now, if you’re a Twitter user, you know that its a great way to share links and more. Works great – except when you’ve set a browser other than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the default web browser. I happen to be partial to Firefox, and use it constantly, so when an Adobe AIR based app launches IE when I click a shared link – it’s upsetting.
Luckily in the final version there is an Adobe KB article with instructions on how to fix that problem. Personally I think their reason that it doesn’t work in the first place is lame:
Windows Vista does not make the required additional registry entries correctly when a browser other than Internet Explorer is set as the default browser. When an attempt to load the URL is made, Adobe AIR uses Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) to connect to an open instance of the browser registered for URL requests. If that fails, Adobe AIR falls back on Shell Execution.
Other non-Microsoft (and Microsoft!) applications have consistently and successfully launched the correct browser for me. Why not AIR?
At any rate, here is how to fix the problem.
- Launch “Default Programs” off the Vista Start Menu
- Click on “Set Program Access And Computer Defaults” in the Default Programs dialog
- Select “Custom” from the list and choose your preferred browser from the list of recognized installed browsers.
- Click OK and your done.
Next time you launch your AIR app, you will be able to follow links and have them load in your preferred browser.
Feb 6, 2006 | blog
I’ve been trying to build an automated install of Macromedia Shockwave Player 10 for the past week or so without the success I need. The ability to script the Windows Installer (MSI) version works, but when pushed through Microsoft’s Systems Management Server 2003 (SMS), it fails. The failure is because the Shockwave MSI package requires a user profile to write some files to, and SMS uses the SYSTEM account to install distributed software – the SYSTEM account does not have a user profile, so the folders the Shockwave MSI package is looking for do not exist, and the install fails.
Perversly, Macromedia Flash Player 8 MSI package works fine through SMS, so its not like Macromedia doesn’t know how to build the package correctly. There’s even a thread on the Macromeda support forum which explicitly details the issue, but Macromedia has not responded to anyone (other than a forum moderator) to correc the problem.
Macromedia has great products, but need to support corporate customers better for mass automated deployments.
The word processor, called BuzzWord, is what you’d expect. It has the basics and is similar feature wise to Google Docs. PDF conversion is straight forward, you can upload a doc to convert and it saves the resulting file in the My Files applet. File sharing is accomplished from the drop-down context menu and provides the ability to embed the doc into a site.
The most impressive app included here is the web conferencing, called ConnectNow, which has features similar to WebEx. Adobe provides each user their own room, assigns a conference phone number to it, allows for desktop sharing, meeting notes, group & individual IM, and WebCasting with an optional web cam. Good stuff.
