Adobe is making an update to Acrobat (which will mean an update to PDFs). Being a Mac user I love PDFs because people can’t complain about different formats and “I can’t open that Word document because you used a Mac.” (“No, it’s because you don’t know how to open e-mail attachments.”)
Check out the version 9 page. You can now add Flash.
Do you realize what this means?
- Keynote (PowerPoint, but smoother) presentations can be narrated and someone can open my PDF and have it talk them through my presentation, guaranteed (or close enough) to synchronize the way I want the presentation to flow. Keep in mind that Jobs designed Keynote so he could present in all of his black T-shirted glory. (I like how he said, “Zhoom” at this most recent MacWorld.)
- YouTube (you may have heard of it) uses Flash-encoding to distribute videos. Imagine what you can do with documents that have video encoded easily into them. “Here’s our Christmas letter…blah blah…take a look for yourself.”
- Flash applications in a PDF. Imagine if I put my capstone, with the Grammar Ninja, into a PDF resume. (Instead of, say, Brianland, my brother’s birthday game, or Booyortovich embedded. That would be silly. )
- Comics that are published (or RPG sourcebooks, for that matter) will have sweeter interfaces and searchability. (Imagine the Star Wars rulebook where you could actually run the algorithm for ship combat inside the PDF document to speed up the math.)(Or a Batman comic that made the OOF! ZOWEE! noises.)
Like any cool technology, somebody’s gonna mess it up. But there is a lot of potential. I just hope that PDFs don’t become Websense blocked.
“Because sometimes the connected world is too confident.”
Yeah thanks, Websense. Way to boost my feeling of confidence and security. The workplace is all warm and fuzzy because of you.
The Haiku
With video PDFs
there’s less imagination -
need librarians
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