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June 2, 2008 10:29 AM   Subscribe

Flash, PDF, two great tastes that go great together? And now you can use PDF flash movies to put videos in your powerpoint – er… what?
posted by Artw (37 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Adobe: Working Hard to Make the Web As Incovenient As Humanly Possible
posted by shmegegge at 10:32 AM on June 2, 2008 [12 favorites]


Woo. I guess this means that one of the most bloaty pieces of software going now becomes even more bloaty. Just what everyone needs.
posted by TheDonF at 10:35 AM on June 2, 2008


And now you can use PDF flash movies to put videos in your powerpoint – er… what?

Sounds like progress to me. Insofar as Powerpoint is horribly implemented on the Mac, being able to do cross-platform presentations with video-embedded PDF files seems a valuable alternative. If SVG could be extended similarly, presentations could be done through the web.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:36 AM on June 2, 2008


PDF != PPT

...or am I missing something here?
posted by JeffK at 10:43 AM on June 2, 2008


How many milliseconds before this is abused used to place Flash ads inside PDFs? Hooray for idiocy.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:47 AM on June 2, 2008


I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices cried out in terror.
posted by zippy at 10:50 AM on June 2, 2008


This is one case where two negatives don't make a positive.
posted by Dave Faris at 10:50 AM on June 2, 2008 [1 favorite]


I wonder if tying Flash to PDFs is an indication that Adobe really is as worried about the future of Flash as some are saying they are.
posted by middleclasstool at 10:51 AM on June 2, 2008


Jeffk - With a professional version of Acrobat 9, for example, users could package a Power Point presentation not just with images, but also with an audio of the presenter's voice.

"You can now send someone a presentation that speaks on its own all through a PDF," said Adobe spokesman Kevin M. Lynch, who is not related to the company's chief technology officer with the same name.


I'm going to embed that PPT in a HTML page.
posted by Artw at 10:51 AM on June 2, 2008


Now Acrobat can crash your ENTIRE computer - not just the browser! Joy!
posted by The Light Fantastic at 10:54 AM on June 2, 2008 [1 favorite]


Insofar as Powerpoint is horribly implemented on the Mac

I don't know about > Acrobat 7, but the difference between Acrobat 7 on the Mac and PC is huge - the Mac version is a horrible application missing many of the features that I need and would expect of a product with such a high version number.
posted by TheDonF at 10:57 AM on June 2, 2008


"You can now send someone a presentation that speaks on its own all through a PDF,"

Great, now there's a boss and a PDF yellin' at me.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:59 AM on June 2, 2008


Couldn't you at least have linked to the newly announced website or the brand-new product's page or a trade publication's better description of what was just announced or, for pete's sake, at least the full press release?
posted by ardgedee at 10:59 AM on June 2, 2008


You got manure on my junk mail!

You got junk mail all over my manure!
posted by The White Hat at 11:03 AM on June 2, 2008


I could have, but I pretty muich decided that Mefites knew what PDFs and Flash movies were.
posted by Artw at 11:04 AM on June 2, 2008


Okay.

First, the PPT thing is the inclusion of Adobe Presenter, which has been around for a while. Presenter lets you create Flash versions of Powerpoint presentations, which are much more web-friendly than Powerpoint itself. The new version of Presenter lets you package these as PDF as well, and Acrobat 9 simply lets you view them. The old version of Presenter let you package these for offline use, but not nearly so smoothly.

You can see some decent examples of Adobe Presenter content here and here.

Second, Acrobat 9 just installs Flash Player 9 (if you don't already have it) and allows you to include Flash content in a PDF, just like you've been able to include other multimedia content like Quicktime in a PDF for a while.

I wonder if tying Flash to PDFs is an indication that Adobe really is as worried about the future of Flash as some are saying they are.

No, I think it's the other way around, if anything.
posted by me & my monkey at 11:10 AM on June 2, 2008


Man, what I really want is to be able to embed some Java applets in my PDF files.
posted by Nelson at 11:29 AM on June 2, 2008 [2 favorites]


Nelson - well, they'll do javascript.
posted by Artw at 11:32 AM on June 2, 2008


Flash and Acrobat both fill very useful niches yet are also quite unnecessarily crappy, so they do go together.

Anyone tell me a good PDF reader for Firefox on Windows that doesn't have a 10% chance of hanging every time I load a PDF? It also has to render PDFs identically to Acrobat, not in the sort of half-assed way open source software often does that sort of thing.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 11:37 AM on June 2, 2008


Anyone tell me a good PDF reader for Firefox on Windows that doesn't have a 10% chance of hanging every time I load a PDF?

I like the Download PDF plugin from Nitro Software in Firefox. I still use Acrobat, but not from within Firefox directly.
posted by me & my monkey at 12:04 PM on June 2, 2008


Why all the hate for Flash? Its uses range from awful (ads, website UIs in Flash) to great (YouTube, BBC iPlayer) but that's a sign of its power, no? And I'm an accessibility guy...

Although, come to think of it, I don't make the same reasoned argument for PDF, which I loathe with a stomach-clenching rage...
posted by alasdair at 12:37 PM on June 2, 2008 [1 favorite]


Nelson: Man, what I really want is to be able to embed some Java applets in my PDF files.

Pfft. People have been doing this for years. There are a good dozen Java applets on page twelve of this .pdf.

Of course, it should be pointed out that you're making a common confusion between Java and Javascript. See, Javascript is a web scripting language popular for writing little web programs and such; they chose the name "Javascript" to capitalize on the popularity of the real Java.

The real Java is an island of cannibals who will cut off your head, roast you over an open flame, and consume you before enjoying a nice cup of strong coffee. They seem to be afraid of pythons, however.
posted by koeselitz at 1:07 PM on June 2, 2008 [1 favorite]


This doesn't seem like news to me. All digital authoring tools tend to support more and more embedded media types as they evolve. I mean, Acrobat hasn't even reached Letts Law yet... Flash on the other hand...
posted by gwint at 1:09 PM on June 2, 2008


The article I get when I click on your link is "Time Warner Cable tries metering Internet use". I don't know what that has to do with Adobe, PDFs, or Flash.
posted by desjardins at 1:45 PM on June 2, 2008


Well that's annoying. FWIW ardgedees links still work.
posted by Artw at 1:54 PM on June 2, 2008


Flash sucks
posted by finite at 2:06 PM on June 2, 2008


AP link
posted by Artw at 2:15 PM on June 2, 2008


Insofar as Powerpoint is horribly implemented on the Mac

And Acrobat is horribly implemented on both the Mac and the PC!
posted by gyc at 2:26 PM on June 2, 2008


I just use Preview on the Mac to look at acrobat files, and I never have any trouble at all. I can't imagine using the browser-side Acrobat plugins, though.
posted by MythMaker at 2:47 PM on June 2, 2008


On the Net:

null

null

posted by swift at 2:54 PM on June 2, 2008


Oh no.
No no no no no no God no.
Now I'll have 1st year design students and administrative assistants insisting that I print their lovingly-crafted business cards that they've deigned in a web-based Flash program and distilled to PDF using "limited free conversion of documents." This is going to make me long for the good-old days of MS Publisher.
Shoot me please.
posted by lekvar at 3:03 PM on June 2, 2008


Is the link in the post supposed to go to a story about AT&T?
posted by teraflop at 4:11 PM on June 2, 2008


No. LA Times flipped it. See above.
posted by Artw at 4:12 PM on June 2, 2008


And Acrobat is horribly implemented on both the Mac and the PC!

I agree! But it does full-screen, and it embeds fonts into the document, which Powerpoint does not do. So as a platform for multimedia presentations, it works much better now.

In fact, I can't wait for Adobe to add Flash-driven transitions between PDF pages. We really need a Powerpoint-killer, and while Apple's Keynote is miles ahead of Powerpoint, its potential use is limited by its market share.

At least PDF is everywhere — including Linux. I'm honestly surprised at the naysayers, for that last reason alone.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:41 PM on June 2, 2008


Yeah, it's now on the third tech story at that same URL. Hey LA Times, are you telling us never to link to your stories? It's your ad revenue ...
posted by intermod at 6:08 PM on June 2, 2008


Hey LA Times, are you telling us never to link to your stories?

They're just tired of the "Metafilter effect" crashing their servers.
posted by lukemeister at 6:32 PM on June 2, 2008


MythMaker writes "I can't imagine using the browser-side Acrobat plugins, though."

Well, if you're on a Mac and don't like Safari, Adobe helpfully ensured that there are no browser-side plugins. Pisses me off, they support Firefox on every other platform. I do NOT want to have to download a PDF file to my desktop to open it. I want to open it within the browser cache. Let the damn program do the clean-up for me. Stupid Adobe. Since they bought Macromedia they have had no real competition - and thus no real reason to pay attention to customer demands.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:49 AM on June 3, 2008


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