Acrobat 9 and CS 3.3 Announced
For me, the Adobe/Macromedia merger has finally borne fruit today, with the announcement of Acrobat 9. While CS3 had a few nods to the fact that the two company’s programs would play together (barely), this new version of Acrobat makes it clear by integrating the Flash (SWF) format into the PDF viewer.
The demos I’ve seen of Acrobat 9 make it obvious to me that this will be a very important update for this technology — not just because of the rich interactive features, but because it feels more like a Creative Suite application and they’ve finally made a number of features usable that were hidden or overly-clunky before. For example, from their press release:
With the intelligent Overprint Preview feature, print professionals now can accurately view interactions between overlapping objects because Overprint Preview automatically toggles on and off in Acrobat 9 Pro and Adobe Reader 9. Print professionals also can reliably convert colors from one color space to another, switch RGB and CMYK blacks to solid black, and map one color to another color, including mapping colors to Pantone spot colors using built-in, industry-standard Pantone libraries. The Compare Documents feature identifies differences including changes to text, text formatting, images, line weights and backgrounds between versions of documents.
The overprint thing is awesome. No more telling your client, “Oh, wait, did you turn on overprint preview? Yeah, you have to do that or else that PDF won’t look right for you. Sorry.” And the new Compare Documents feature is scarily good.
As Adobe releases more information about those and other features, I’m sure we’ll be discussing them here. One thing which is very pleasing is that it does launch and respond much faster than it has in the past.
Acrobat is shipping mid-way through the Creative Suite upgrade cycle, of course, so Adobe is sneaking it into a (not-free) 3.3 upgrade to the Suite. From their press release:
Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced that the new Adobe® Acrobat® 9 Pro software will be integrated into Adobe Creative Suite® 3.3 Design Premium and Standard editions, Creative Suite 3.3 Web Premium and Creative Suite 3.3 Master Collection editions. Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium also includes Adobe Fireworks® CS3 as a special offering for designers who need to rapidly prototype and generate Web sites. This powerful update to Adobe’s industry-standard design and development software gives designers, Web professionals and print service providers new ways to create and deliver engaging content
They’re also sticking Fireworks into the Design Premium CS3 bundle, perhaps because someone found it on a shelf and said, “hey, anyone know what this is? No? Okay, let’s throw it in the box.” (Actually, Fireworks is a pretty cool program, but to me this move is just another indication of Adobe’s deep ambivalence around having separate Web and Design versions of the Suite. As far as I’m concerned, someone at Adobe just needs to get over their issues and merge the two products into one, once and for all. The distinction only gets in the way now.)
It appears that if you already have CS3 Design Premium, the upgrade will cost $159 in the US. (Given previous pricing, I assume that means the upgrade will be 2-3 times that of the US version, for no adequately-explained reason beyond “because we can.” Sorry… couldn’t help myself… I’m still angry about Adobe’s overseas pricing of the Suite.)
Alrighty then! I just love my learning curve…steep, very, very steep! The compare feature sounds like manna from heaven as does the RGB-CMYK-Black conversion feature.
Adobe really needs to trim down Acrobat, not add more bloat.
Acrobat Reader needs to be trimmed down.
Because Acrobat Pro is used for so many different things, I think they can just keep adding features to the Pro version.
An Acrobat for only prepress tasks would be cool.
Firworks in the Design Premium package, finally! I have repeatedly asked Adobe’s John Nack for this, so I feel I’ve been heard.
Of course, what we here really want to know news about is the new ID CS4!
I think the move to add Fireworks may be a sign that there won’t be a Web and Design suite next time out. It would certainly eliminate a lot of confusion.
I can dream, can’t I?
David: “I’m still angry about Adobe’s overseas pricing of the Suite.” Me too. Hence, I (being Norway-bound, where we have also 25% VAT on everything!) have for a dozen years bought ALL my software in the US. I order it online, sends it to a US friend, she takes out ONLY the CDs, trashes boxes and manuals, and snailmails the CDs here, in a slim letter which passes under the radar of our damn customs, where I *would* have been slapped with the 25& VAT if caught. So that’s a friendly tip also to other Euro-exploited software-buying folks. Most European countries only have 17-18 % VAT, but that’s pretty bad enough. (Yes, the VAT is a non-expense for a formal business operation, I’m not that, just a solitary graphics guy.) Of course, the European VATs alone do not fully account for the high prices on software here, there are other wallet-punishing factors involved here as well.
And Adobe keeps up the confusing numerical numbering of Acrobat, instead of using the much more sensible, non-version-confusing CSX designation. What’s up with that?
Klaus, well, it’s always important to remember that the primary market for Acrobat is not us. Creative professionals make up a small percentage of Acrobat’s demographic, so there’s little reason for them to align that closely with CS.
David, you mean that the primary market for Acrobat is the business & government market? Oh, maybe that’s right — in which case, those folks have a lot of features (e.e., pre-press) in their Acrobats which is pure bloatstuff to them. Two versions of Acrobat might be preferable: the Business and the Graphics Edition, it would reduce bloat for us all!
Thank you from Ireland for being angry about the overseas pricing. If more people like you spoke up, they might be shamed into charging the same amount worldwide!
I’ve discovered many “bloatful” features in Adobe products by watching the great Lynda.com training videos (thanks David!). I had no idea I needed ‘em until I learned about ‘em. Memory is cheap.
Klaus, two workspaces would be enough for me (I think Dreamweaver has a few ways to set it up prompted at first opening). A “Print” and “Web and Home”…
I wonder if InDesign will now automatically changed the transparency blend space when exporting to PDF. That frustrates me to no end.
David, do you know if Acrobat Reader/Pro for the Mac will finally support Flash animations? The support docs on Adobe’s site are once again unclear on this distinction and all their marketing tutorials are in Windows.
It’s embarrassing that Mac support for Acrobat still relies on Quicktime for video playback (at least in the current version).
Joel, yes this is one of the most important aspects of Acrobat 9 (both Reader and Pro)… seems like they built the entire Flash player into Acrobat.
It is interesting the pricing for the software. Even the downloads are the same price, no packaging or delivery and it’s still way up over the price in the US.
And even if it was down to the packaging and delivery it still wouldn’t make a difference, because I know a guy who prints the packaging for adobe products in Ireland and the software is packaged here and distributed, so I’m lead to believe.
It really is mad how much it costs extra. I once got a very disturbing answer from Adobe why it was so more expensive and the reason I was given was because they have to keep Adobe offices throughout Europe, which I don’t buy at all.
I’m sure if the price was to reduce to the price in the US then you would see an explosion of sales within Europe.
I’ll keep my out on the new versions and I’ll have to try out Acro 9 for the comparison of documents as I do that sort of thing a lot.
Oh-oh for iPhone for reading PDFs that have Flash embedded. Isn’t the problem with Flash on the iPhone due to no existing lite-enough version that consumes less processor power/battery life? Perhaps we’ll see a new Flash player in the iPhone next week. If that is true, you heard it here first. And if not true, I wonder if the rest of the PDF will display?
Great news about Acrobat! I can hardly wait.
On the other hand - and I do not know if this a a real world scenario because there is not enough information yet - just how pee-ed off will everyone be if CS3.3 fixes the ongoing issues with InDesign and Leopard and *we have to pay for it*!
It’s € 189 ex VAT (19% in Holland) + € 8 shipping — using the Adobe Store — and I’m really not sure if it’s worth it. Acrobat Pro 8 works fine for me as it is, and I’ve quit making websites a long time ago so Fireworks would be just as useless as Dreamweaver and Flash to me.
Any ideas or just plain ol’ wild guesses about when CS4 will be out? I know they’ve got some betas “out there” already. Would it make more sense to just wait for CS4?
CS3 shipped about 5 months after Acrobat 8. If that holds this time, we’d be looking at a fall launch of CS4.
I see some sites already have their training cds and dvds out and ready to ship, are these legit? I doubt it.
Eugene, I’m not sure where you’re looking, but it is true that Lynda.com has videos on the beta versions of Dreamweaver CS4, Fireworks CS4, and Soundbooth CS4. Plus, they’re free!
Lynda.com works closely with Adobe to be able to get these out as quickly as possible, partly as a service to users, and partly to get people aware of lynda.com.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I saw today a training CD/DVD for InDesign CS4.
Oh! No, that must be false. Let me know (offlist, by mail) who that was. I’m curious!
Thanks for the reply, David. I have a client that will be very happy to hear that. No more Flash converted to QT for their PDFs.
Thanks, Bob. If Adobe follows their “usual” 18-24 month cycle, it’ll be sometime between Oct. 08 and April 09. I was just wondering if anyone here had any extra insight.
Adobe CS is getting so bloated. At some point, Adobe might as well release an IDE for CS X.
Imagine Adobe Creative Suite X Visual Studio Master Collection ++.