There’s going to be an ActionScript conference in Singapore coming October 19.
It would be cool to see what Adobe has for the developers. It cost 60 bucks to attend but if you’re real lucky and are amongst the first 10 to put the above badge up, you might be in for a little discount. And yeah, I am kinda eying for some discount, haha…
PDF is now an ISO Standard:
PDF Now ISO Standard
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has approved the PDF as a standard format for electronic documents. ISO has christened version 1.7 of PDF, the current working version, ISO 32000-1. (Source: RedDevNews)
Okay, the rest of the article is just a long read so let’s stop after my full stop.
Adobe Reader 9 is full of crap. It comes with embedded Flash support, bundled with Adobe AIR and some crap Safari extension or something that didn’t work too well.
Adobe Reader 5 or 6 is probably the best Adobe Reader. Subsequent Adobe Readers are merely products to keep Adobe engineers busy so that they won’t get fired just because they have nothing to program on.
The install process take farking bloody long and is powered by iNOSSO. Since when does ads creep into installers. Is Adobe that in need of money?
Then they attempt to bundle the eBay desktop program, please don’t install that crap. The last thing you ever need is to install more crap after installing crap.
Adobe Reader even asks you to restart your computer after installation. I NEVER restart my Windows Vista after an installation. Get real. It runs for 10 days straight and I’m not going to restart it till the next Windows Update.
Adobe Reader 9
(includes Acrobat.com on Adobe AIR)
It’s bigger, it’s crappier and all it does is to read some documents. It doesn’t edit, it just displays the file. What’s up with the file size increase, the AIR inclusion and the bad install experience. It installed Adobe Help Viewer 1.1 and install another version of Adobe Update just because the new one can’t be compatible with CS3.
I recall installing Office 2007, it lets you select what you want, have a good customizable installation experience. And it doesn’t even ask you to restart your system.
Flash developers would be pleased on this one - Google has now learnt to crawl the text within the Flash files.
Google learns to crawl Flash
Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.
In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.
Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration. (Source: Google Blog)
This should have been done a long time ago. But it’s great news for ActionScript lovers. You text are not left out any more.
But! But!! But!!! Honestly, given a choice I much prefer see JavaScript if Flash is not really need. If you just want to create some rollovers or an image gallery, consider JavaScript. For one, it just works out-of-the-box. JavaScript libraries have cool effects that you can achieve with Flash too.
Take a look at the preferences:
I wish they come out with Acrobat Reader Lite or something. Acrobat Reader is just filled with crap I don’t want at all.
Adobe Reader actually feels slower and slower these days. I just want something to read my documents with, I don’t want to fill in form, don’t want 3D, don’t want JavaScript, don’t want collaboration tools, don’t want read aloud tools and all those additional navigation tools.
Acrobat Reader is in this stage where they have nothing to add in the software any more and the program managers just have to get creative in order to keep everyone’s jobs. All the additional fanciful tools just serve maybe 1% of your customers. The rest of 99% are totally clueless why a bunch of text take so long to load.