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I was under a Non-disclosure agreement so couldn't say much about what I saw in Kuala Lumpur related to Acrobat 9, but the big emphasis with the next version of Acrobat (announced yesterday) is multimedia...without a doubt!

In particular, the digital ePortfolio functionality of their Acrobat Professional product is staggering...considering this is all delivered in a PDF...just writing that staggers me...I never saw PDF as a multimedia delivery platform at all.

I won't go into detail here, but instead point those interested to....

I think I've probably gone through 3 cheap scanners in my time as an OS X user. Not so much that I use a scanner a lot (the one next to me hasn't been turned on in over a year)...but because the fact that many of the previous scanners would only work up until a certain version of OS X.

So tonight I desperately needed to scan something. The drivers would only run in 10.3 and below...so the answer? Boot into Windows, where the drivers for this old scanner continue to be maintained and are available for XP. Phew!

And yes, the other way to look at it is that I basically had to go back to an old OS (XP) to run an old program.

One of the things I love about working on the Mac is how efficient the User Interface is, however it's far from perfect. There is one thing that irks me about UIs and it has to do with user interaction with the environment.

I'm right handed and I tend to have a visual path leaning to the right. My mouse is to the right of my keyboard as is most right handed people's mouse. This means to access things like the Devices or Folders on the Finder we have to travel a reasonable distance to get what we want which in turn makes the interface inefficient. To be productive you want to go as little out of your way to do something as possible and this is just something a computer's UI does not allow for on ANY platform let alone Mac OS X.

Currently the Finder looks like this:

Greetings from Singapore. I started this post on a fairly state-of-the-art bus just outside of Kuala Lumpur, with my laptop plugged in to the power adaptor provided at every seat...and am finishing it in a hotel in Singapore with free wi-fi access. Why is it that when you go to amazingly expensive hotels they charge you for broadband, but drop down to a cheaper location overseas and access is often free!?

I'm on a 5-day holiday in Singapore, after being invited to attend and present at the Adobe Education Leadership Forum in Kuala Lumpur. It was a real delight and honour to be invited to present and I was amazed by the conference. My thanks to Adobe.

It was a delight to meet so many people from the Asia-Pacific region, but even more so, to meet so many important people from Adobe. I'm not trying to patronising when I say that...the people I met from Adobe were people with significant roles in many of the applications that were being discussed, and we also got to see a sneak peek at Acrobat 9 (sorry, we had to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement so can't say much) and learn more about the next version of Adobe Connect and Adobe Presenter. My presentation was about these two functionalities (part of the Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional server system) that I introduced into Massey University and have responsibility for.

The effort they put in to entertaining us meant that we were very well looked after. Of course I had to take advantage of the shopping in KL and am now the proud owner of a completely fake and unnecessary Rolex that cost me around $28 NZ and three DVDs that cost around $2.40 each. One of the most amusing discussions was with a stall owner over what type of DVD I would like....I was offered a cheap version of a movie filmed by a camera in the cinema, a slightly better DVD quality version or the full featured DVD we'd mostly expect.

It wasn't until I got back to the hotel and looked at the cover of one of the DVDs that I cracked up. It is a very recent movie, but the cover states that Siskel and Ebert (famous Film Critics in the U.S.) gave the movie two thumbs up.....which is pretty amazing considering Siskel died in 1999!! I've not actually tried the discs as I think just the cost was hilarious, so I'm not overly concerned if I've been done.

Last night we visited a well-known plaza for IT gear and a chap from Adobe came with us.....we kept hassling him as to what he would do if he found illegal Adobe products on sale, and he commented he'd be even more surprised if it was a future release. As it was, software was scarce as it was all hardware.

I did see a number of authorised  Apple dealers selling genuine products, as well as a few iPhones for sale for about $740 NZ....I didn't buy one. But what surprised me the most was a few shops claiming to be an Apple resellers, with iPod lookalike products in their window. Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of them, but they looked like old and new Nanos, as well as shuffles...complete with the menu and click wheel layout.

I can't really go into detail on what we saw with regards Acrobat, but I'm thoroughly impressed with what is coming. PDFs are something that have always been on the periphery of my interest. I use them, make them...and even 4 years ago read a 500 page book about how you could use Acrobat. I was amazed....but hardly did much with the possible functionality beyond that point. That started to change recently when I started playing with the embedding of multimedia in to PDFs (yes, that's right...multimedia into PDFs) and things in that area are going to advance considerably in the next version.

What really impressed me with the Adobe staff was their enthusiasm for their products and the understanding of the education needs of the institutions that were present...and their absolute willingness to listen. This perhaps couldn't  have been highlighted to me any more significantly by being asked by someone heavily involved with the development of Adobe Presenter (a PC only plugin to PowerPoint that enhances presentations significantly) to sit and chat for 45 minutes at the end of the conference on what I would like to see come out in the version after the next (the next version about to come out soon).

Do you get the significance of that? That's the equivalent of someone at Apple asking me to sit down and spend 45 minutes saying what changes I'd like to see in Keynote!

The depth of organisational detail and the desire of the Adobe staff to communicate, chat and debate their software in an open, friendly, fun and professionally rewarding way, was worth the trip alone.

So thank you Adobe. The invite, the organisation, the conference, the company, the food, the fun, the contacts I hope will be established and the valuable discussions all just staggered me.

Wow Adobe.....keep up the amazing good work. I'm looking forward to what you're bringing out next!!

If you've been reading the news about Apple you'd know that over the last few years Apple has been hit with numerous court cases regarding patent disputes. Apple has in fact settled on some, most notably the Creative case where Creative reckoned it had the patent on the iPod's menu system.

You may remember during the launch of the iPhone Steve Jobs said Apple had patented the hell out of it. It's an interesting situation because up until this Apple hadn't really taken out a lot of patents on account of the fact that they like to just get on with the job of developing great tools (and a Mac is a tool on account of the fact it allows us to do work as opposed to a PC running Windows which tries its damnedest to prevent us from doing work). But the patent system of America has rewarded morons the ability to take Apple to court to try and milk it for money these morons don't deserve.

Some drongo managed to pass a bill in the late 90's that allowed people to patent ideas and software. While I can sort of understand the idea of patenting software the ideas thing irritates me because the very idea that someone would never have the same idea as you is somewhat arrogant in nature. Okay, I admit that I'm pretty sure no one has had the same idea as me with regards to how Hannibal Lecter's face wearing tendencies could benefit society but I come from a planet called Kashyyyk so I have a certain degree of leeway on that. But humans by nature have a tendency to invent, it's what made New Zealand a great nation in the past (although thanks to globalisation I believe we're losing those skills), and because humans are the only creatures that have the ability to think on many planes it stands to reason that two people will have the same idea as to how to achieve something. So the very idea of patenting an idea with nothing to prove the idea is dubious at best.

 

The MacBook Air is an interesting development. Sure it's been done before but the thing that is interesting more than what the MacBook Air has is what it has left out. The DVD drive.

 

OK, Darryn and I have been having a bit of a discussion about iMovie 08 and Final Cut Express within the blog area. I wanted (through the use of state-of-the-art images...I joke!) explain what I mean about the issue related to the way of working (note - I had a habit of saying 'anology' when I should have said 'metaphor' in my last post).

There's one phrase in Darryn's reply that really struck a chord. And for me, it sums up my surprise and concern at what Apple has done....

"iMovie has about as much to do with Final Cut (Express) as tomatoe sauce has to do with a rock."

I'll come back to that comment later, but first there are some things that I want to respond to that I disagree with in Darryn's comments. Most notably, the issue of timeline use in iMovie.

My comments were going to be too long for the comment system so I decided to make a blog post in reply to Phil's post here:

The timeline does matter - to me and Apple!?

When Apple released iMovie '08 this year it caused one of the most vocal attacks that has ever happened in Apple history. Why? Well, Apple changed its interface so vastly it took people by surprise. It seems not many people like surprises. But is iMovie's lack of timeline really a problem and should Apple carried iMovie's interface to Final Cut Express if this is their new thinking?

I'm only just starting to get to play with the copy of Final Cut Express 4 that Apple recently sent me. I decided to start by taking a quick look at the Apple site to find out what had changed, and one page really caught my eye. Take a look at this page...

http://www.apple.com/finalcutexpress/

On the page about what is new is a movie showing how you can import iMovie '08 projects into FCE. Take a good look at it and what struck me the most was how different the "way of working" (for want of a better term) is between these two applications.

So you've got yourself a beast of a machine, all ready for the latest and greatest games. Or you've got the PS3 or XBox 360 and you're going to play the latest and greatest games. Pity then you're a dupe suckered in by a superficial industry who thinks that games are all about the graphics all the while forgetting the one thing that gaming is all about... playing games.

While the graphics are being pushed the actual game itself is being left behind. Gone are the days where the story was the game, or the emphasis was on playability. With all the computing power we have