Sometimes, a survey result comes along to shock those who deal with advanced technology on a daily basis into a more grounded answer to this question. Take a poll recently commissioned by software firm Nitro in conjunction with the release of the latest version of their Pro PDF reader. It found that nearly half (45.7 percent) of a representative sample of Americans are either only somewhat familiar with modest and ubiquitous PDFs or not at all familiar with them.

It’s a number that may surprise many tech pros and also shocked Gina O’Reilly, the COO of Nitro. Though when we spoke with her, she did offer a possible explanation for people’s ignorance of PDFs:

It was really surprising for us here at Nitro. Although it’s not that surprising when you think about how most people actually consume those PDF files.  Anyone who’s browsing the web these days has to have encountered a PDF file, and everyone has a free PDF viewer. Most people have Adobe reader. But what we think is that most people probably just see a PDF viewer as a web browser.

Besides being one of those head scratching, believe-it-or-not facts for the tech savvy, this general ignorance of PDFs might actually offer a wider lesson for managers and IT pros. Namely, don’t assume your team has the basics down. Quickly and accurately manipulating a PDF may seem like a no-brainer to you, but if your employees are creating low-tech work-arounds involving scanners, email or even, gasp!, fax machines for processes you took it for granted they understand, this lack of knowledge could be a real time waster for your team.

“We’ve done some very basic internal trials where we have literally timed people either printing out, signing, faxing, printing out, signing, scanning. The whole thing can take anywhere from 15 minutes to a few days depending on the process,” says O’Reilly.

So what’s the concrete takeaway, according to Nitro? Don’t assume; train. The best collaboration tech in the world won’t help your company in the slightest if people aren’t using it properly, so O’Reilly offers three tips for more effective training:

• Relevant. Training “needs to be very relevant,” according to O’Reilly. “For example, a product like Nitro Pro does a multitude of things, if I’m in the legal department of a company, [then] maybe I’m only interested in redaction and base numbering or whatever, [ao] training should be specific to those areas.”
• Compelling. She also stressed that, “users really need to see the value.”
• Internal certifications.  “Something we do internally here that works very well is we introduced sort of phony internal certifications,” says O’Reilly. “We recognize those publicly among all employees, so that also drives some peer pressure. If your colleague has achieved a certain certification and you haven’t, then you might want to do the same.”

Do you think the tech savvy often underestimate the average user’s understanding of even basic products and devices?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Ben+Sam.

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The ability to send audio and video files using the tool is available immediately. It’s surprising it wasn’t available previously, given many of Adobe’s customers are creatives who likely want to send large audio and video files to colleagues and clients, although perhaps Adobe was concerned the service would be abused, and used to send copyrighted materials.

The custom branding option is coming in June, and will be available to customers on the paid Basic and Professional plans. I think it’s the most interesting update to SendNow, as it will provide freelancers and small businesses with an inexpensive yet professional-looking way to send large files to clients with their own branding.Users will be able to upload their own logos and imagery to the service, then check a box to add that branding on their file download pages, as shown in the screenshot below.

The desktop client will, unsurprisingly, be an Adobe AIR app. It will be released in the third quarter, and should enable users to send files without having to open a browser. From the look of the early screenshots, it will simply replicate the website without providing any additional functionality.

There are three SendNow plans: Free allows for transfer of files up to 100MB in size and includes 500MB of storage; Basic allows for transfer of files up to a whopping 2 GB in size and includes 5 GB of storage, will include the branding option and costs $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year; Professional allows for 2 GB file transfers, custom branding and includes 20 GB of storage for $19.99 per month or $190 per year. SendNow isn’t the only cloud-based file transfer solution available, of course. Like YouSendIt, Minus and many other similar apps, SendNow facilitates simple transfer of larger files that are too big to send via email without having to mess about with tricky FTP clients. Adobe will hope that its integration with other Adobe products (it’s available via a menu option in Acrobat 10 and Reader 10, for example) and these new features will help give its service an edge.

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Once installed, Adobe Connect meeting hosts can access chat rooms (“text conferences”) hosted on an XMPP server by launching the extension in the “Share” pod during the meeting, then connecting to the server and choosing a  conference room to join.

It means Connect hosts can now meet with users of many other XMPP-compatible chat clients, such as Jabber, iChat, Miranda-IM and Adium. Once a chat room is joined, the meeting participants can simply view the chat as guests without logging in (guest viewing can be disabled by the host), or participants can each log into the XMPP server with their own credentials to participate. Chat can continue seamlessly with other meeting activities such as video, audio and screen sharing.

Being able to access chat rooms with users of other software may sound like it’s no big deal  — after all, most Connect users will already have an XMPP chat client installed on their machines, or could always download one — but this extension should enhance Connect’s potential as a collaborative tool, as it can now integrate with a much wider ecosystem of apps. Additionally, meetings can now start out as simple chats rather than full-blown web conferences, and can then quickly be escalated to a full conference, if required.

The free XMPP Multi-User Chat extension can be downloaded here; documentation is included.

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• Automate routine, multi-step tasks with new guided Actions that can be shared with coworkers.
• Change how users interact with content and its context with PDF Portfolios using new layouts, visual themes and color palettes.
• Microsoft SharePoint integration. Check-in, check-out PDF files for reviewing and editing shared documents.
• A streamlined process for large organizations to deploy, configure and manage updates and conform to ISO standards, including support for Microsoft SCCM and SCUP.
• Updated user interface: Display the most commonly used tools all in one pane.

Reader X will introduce support for PDF documents that contain a much wider range of content types, including drawings, email messages, spreadsheets, videos and other multimedia elements. It also has new collaboration features: Users can make notes and share feedback by marking up PDF documents using the Sticky Notes and Highlighter tools. Other new features in Reader will include:

• Choose reading mode to fit more content on the screen, or two-up mode to view page spreads.
• Directly access online services at Acrobat.com from within Reader X. Perform common tasks such as creating PDF files, securely sharing and storing documents and screen sharing.
• Availability on additional mobile platforms, with support added for Android, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry Tablet OS.

Acrobat X is available to pre-order now; Reader X will be made available for download next month.

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PDF Viewers

The free Adobe Reader has been the de facto standard for viewing PDF files ever since it was introduced in 1993, but it has become bloated and vulnerable to malware attacks over the years. There are some free alternatives for viewing PDF files that are more streamlined and faster.

• Foxit PDF Reader is a lightweight PDF viewer for that is popular. (Windows)
• CoolPDF Reader is freeware that claims to be the smallest PDF reader available, at only 650kb. It can also convert PDF files to many different formats such as TXT, GIF, JPG and more. (Windows)
• PDF-XChange Viewer reads and edits PDF files for free. (Windows)
• Skim is an open-source PDF reader. (Mac)

Tools for Creating, Editing & Converting PDF Files

The good news is that just about every popular office application — including Microsoft Office 2007/2010, OpenOffice, Google Docs — now include built-in ways to save documents as PDF files. This means that many people no longer needs that expensive Adobe Acrobat license if all they need to do is create basic PDF files from documents. That said, there are also some useful standalone free tools for creating and editing PDF files:

• CutePDF Writer is my favorite free tool for creating PDF files outside of using the built-in PDF features of tools like Office and Google Docs. It installs a PDF printer that you send documents to in order to create them as PDF files. (Windows)
• PDF Creator creates PDF files for free, as well as converting them to other usable formats. (Windows)
• PrimoPDF is another free PDF writer for personal and commercial use. (Windows)
• HelloPDF converts PDF files to Microsoft Word document format, for free. (Windows)
• PDFill PDF Editor is the most robust free solution in this bunch, so don’t let its rather unimpressive website give you the wrong impression. It is chock full of features normally only found in premium PDF editors, such as the ability to merge files, convert files to multiple image formats, e-book options and more. (Windows)
• Skim, the open-source PDF reader I listed above, also includes some editing tools. (Mac)

e-Book Creation Tools

If you want to distribute your PDFs as e-books, you can use one of the free eBook publishing platforms.

• Stanza has a powerful e-book publishing solution for Windows and Mac.
• Calibre provides a publishing platform for Windows, Mac and even Linux.

Online PDF Tools

There are some free online tools that do the same things as the desktop tools listed above. Some let you edit PDF files, some convert them and others merge them. Here are some of the most popular solutions.

• PDFescape lets you create PDF files online; you don’t even need to register without even registering. However, if you do register (for free) then you can do other things such as save the PDF files online in your own secure account. There’s also a free PDF reader. You can create PDF files with up to 50 pages and up to 2 MB in size for free. Commercial use is acceptable, and there is no watermarked logo on any of the PDF pages. You can also password protect your PDF files.
• PDF to Word Convert PDF files to Word format with Nitro PDF’s online tool. The only catch is that it might take a little while to get the converted file.
• Nitro PDFHammer allows you to edit PDF files online and convert them to other formats.
• PDF2Word Online is another tool for converting PDF files to Word documents.
• Free OCR is a useful online service for extracting the text from PDF and image files. The one caveat is that it will only scan one-page PDF files or the first page of a multi-page PDF for free (although, of course, you could convert multiple page PDF files to images first, before uploading them to Free OCR).

Let us know your favorite free PDF tools in the comments.

Photo credit: cohdra

You can purchase and download CS5 directly from the Adobe website. These are professional-grade tools, however, which means they come at a professional price. The top-of-the-range Master Collection, which includes all of the tools in the CS5 family, retails for a hefty $2,599, while the cheapest edition, Design Standard, which includes Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat, costs $1,299. You can also purchase the tools separately — Photoshop CS5, for example, retails for $699. Tiered upgrade pricing from previous versions of the software is available — Adobe provides a tool to show upgrade paths and prices.

Are you upgrading to CS5?

Adobe Ideas is a brand new free iPhone and iPad app, one that’s intended as a general purpose creative notebook, integrating sketches, images and a pretty amazing color scheming tool that can use either photos taken from the iPhone’s camera or any images in your library as its source.

User Interface

I wanted to start off by saying that this app has one of the best UIs I’ve ever come across in an iPhone app. And, surprisingly, it manages to achieve this using an interface that doesn’t feel very “Apple.”

Flat buttons and sliding menus make everything about this app feel smooth as butter and oh-so-responsive. I found myself eager to create new ideas, organize them, and then delete them just for the pleasure of interacting with the app’s various menus and buttons. Other developers should take note; doing something original like Adobe’s done here can pay off hugely in terms of differentiating your application from thousands of copy-cats.

Usefulness

Enough crowing about how great the interface is. Just how usable is the app in actual real-world situations? Well, it’s honestly not really much more than an embellished drawing app, but it’s great at that. It has changeable brush sizes and opacity, a color picker, and the ability to add photo layers underneath your existing drawings, or to draw on top of existing photos. It doesn’t have some of the bells and whistles of some dedicated drawing apps, but you can export your work as PDF files via email, which is really all you should need on a mobile platform.

There’s also that color scheme generator, which graphic designers should go ga-ga for. It’s especially handy with the iPhone, since you can take a photo of literally anything you run across in your travels and the app will break it down to a five-color palette you can then use in print or web design. My only problem with this tool is that you can’t export the image, to be used with a color picker on your desktop, for example.

Bottom line: The Adobe Ideas app is free, it works for both iPhone and the iPad, and it’s a genuine pleasure to use. Grab it now if you do any kind of creative work.

Let us know what you think of Adobe Ideas in the comments.

The latest versions of the software have 64-bit support and some neat new productivity-boosting features. In particular, the new content-aware fill available in Photoshop CS5 looks very impressive. Check out this video showing it in action:

The Creative Suite of tools is an impressive collection of professional-grade software, but that quality does come at a price. The top-of-the-range Master Collection, which includes all of the tools in the CS5 family, retails at a hefty $2,599, while the cheapest edition, Design Standard, which includes Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat, costs $1,299. Tiered upgrade pricing from previous versions of the software is available.

Will you be upgrading to CS5?

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Printing is still an important part of every web worker’s workflow, and though it’s quite arcane, much of our communication and documentation is still conducted via a paper trail. Not only does this leave piles of paper to manage, there’s the economic cost of all of that ink and paper and, importantly, there’s also an environmental cost involved with printing that we all bear as a society.

In a recent issue of Wired UK, Thomas Counsell from the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing speculated that up to two percent of greenhouse gases are a result of paper consumption, largely driven by the production and disposal of new and used printed paper.

Counsell’s research is focused on technologies that use a combination of ultrasound and chemical solvents to remove toner from printed documents, enabling paper to reused. Though Counsell’s research is still very much in the labs and somewhat fantastical, there are alternatives, available today, that can help us make environmental and financial judgments about the paper and ink that we use.

The Paper-Less Alliance‘s web site not only provides handy advice on how to reduce paper consumption, but also provides free software, in collaboration with PaperCut, to help individuals and companies visualize their paper consumption in terms of a carbon footprint, trees, energy use and financial impact.

GreenPrint offers an inexpensive software solution that adds a new printer profile to Macs and PCs. As documents are sent to the “virtual” GreenPrint printer, they’re analyzed, and attention is drawn to wasteful or unnecessary areas, which users can then choose to remove from the final printout.

For example, many documents often have a page with just a few words or lines on the last page; GreenPrint automates the discovery of such inefficiencies.

Adobe’s Tools for Sustainable Design are yet to be released, but were previewed by Adobe’s CTO, Kevin Lynch last Spring at ETech 2009. Lynch demonstrated some great demos, including:

• optimizing a box pattern to use less paper
• tools that show the toxicity and chemical impact of various ink colors
• embedded guidelines from organizations such as Greenpeace
• calculating the number of trees or soy plants required for a print job
• suggesting digital rather than hard copy outputs

More recently, designer Matthew Robinson conducted a somewhat unscientific project entitled “Measuring Type,” which explored how much ink commonly utilized typefaces tended to use. Robinson discovered that Garamond had the highest ink efficiency.

Though I tend not to print much anyway, preferring the flexibility of digital documents, these four initiatives have forced me to understand the true cost of printing and show that software can help us make value judgments about environmental issues.

A year ago we saw controversy and ridicule around one researcher’s carbon calculation of a Google search, yet our various applications and tools still aren’t doing a great job of reporting their environmental impact to users. As we see software emerge to help us understand the environmental impact of printing, I hope we’ll start to see other categories of software and hardware reveal their environmental impact and cost.

Coincidentally, the Daily Beast just published a great article on the advantages and disadvantages of going paper-free, entitled “My Paperless Life.”

Are you mindful of the environmental impact of your printing? Which strategies do you employ to reduce waste?

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Do you avoid AIR apps because they are so resource-hungry?

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Adobe Acrobat includes a number of electronic review tools. In this post, I’m going to show how you can use them to make online editorial comments.  While this post was based on Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, many of these review tools can also be found in Adobe Acrobat going back a couple of versions. Note that these tools are only available in the full version of Adobe Acrobat, not Acrobat Reader.

Comment & Markup Tools

Acrobat’s Comment & Markup tools offer a number of powerful tools for marking up PDF documents. Adobe has done a good job on the usability of these tools by including using many analogues of traditional paper-based review tools.

Comment & Markup Toolbar. You can think of the tools present on this toolbar as a substitute for a pencil, sticky notes and a highlighter. Launch the Comment & Markup toolbar by choosing it from the “Comments” menu. This toolbar includes Sticky Notes, the Text Editing tool (new in Acrobat 9), the Stamp menu (analogous to print stamps of old), the Text Highlighter, a Callout tool for drawing attention to graphics and text, and there also a number of shape tools for drawing arrows and other shapes.

Comment Menu. The Comment menu includes options for comment display. You can also choose “Attach for Email Review” to send the PDF out to other team members via email, or “Send for Shared Review,” which uses Acrobat.com or a corporate server for hosting shared document reviews.

Text Edits and Acrobat PDFs. The PDF format had gained a reputation for document security because users could not modify text — especially useful for important documents like contracts and invoices — but with Acrobat 9, you can make text edits to PDFs, including inserting, deleting and replacing text. However, the text editing tools in Adobe Acrobat aren’t as robust as those in, say, Microsoft Word, and are only really useful for making very minor edits.

Review Approvals. Depending on the formality of your project team, there should be some sort of review signoff. While you can take the easy road with a simple email signoff, recent versions of Adobe Acrobat include an electronic signature feature that you can use for this purpose. In Acrobat 9, choose “Sign,” and then “Sign Document.” A dialog box appears. Click “Sign” and follow the prompts that appear.

Manage the Document Review

Before embarking on your first Adobe Acrobat-based document review with your team, I recommend the following:

• Ensure that all team members have a full license for Adobe Acrobat. The review tools in this post are only available in the full version of Acrobat, not in Acrobat Reader.
• Discuss the need for standardization of how all the team members will use the review and comment tools (if you already use a standardized markup, it should be fairly easy to transfer this to a PDF review system).
• Document any standard document review procedures as an aid for reviewers, especially those who aren’t frequent Adobe Acrobat users. The procedure should have a provision for final document approval by the reviewer, whether by electronic signature or by email approval.
• Make the review process accessible to the team for future reference.

Do you use Acrobat for document reviews? Share your tips in the comments.

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Don’t get me wrong: Flash is fine when used for specific purposes, such as video playback and animation. But it can be overused. There was a fad for Flash-based web site introduction screens several years ago. We quickly found that just about everybody was clicking the “skip intro” link. (There was even a site dedicated to Flash usability called “Skip Intro.”) As a result, Flash introductions are much rarer these days. Still, Flash is ubiquitous, and that can cause problems.

• There are too many Flash sites that are one big SWF file. This can mean that site visitors must wait for the whole file to load before links become clickable. And, of course, in such sites the browser’s back button is disabled, or will take visitors completely away from the site (unless the file was displayed in a popup window, and I’m sure everyone realizes the problems that that causes).
• Despite the Google improvements, Flash sites are not as search-engine friendly as text-based sites. See SEO expert Josh Freedman’s Ten Tips for a Better Website.
• As of a year ago, Flash had not yet achieved 40 percent penetration of the cell phone market.
• Adobe claims that “Flash content reaches 99 percent of Internet viewers,” but this figure only applies to the U.S., Canada, the UK, France, Germany and Japan. What about the rest of the world?
• Because of the file sizes involved, Flash sites don’t work well for folks with limited-bandwidth connections.
• Flash sites can be made accessible to those with disabilities, but require special techniques that are not widely used.

I’m sure that Flash enthusiasts will have lots of ways to get around these limitations. But really, why build a site that requires such workarounds, when you can make an appealing site with no, or limited, use of Flash?

When do you use Flash, and what alternatives have you found for creating visual appeal on your sites?

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Adobe is adding to options for working in the cloud with Acrobat.com. About a year ago, Acrobat.com went online, competing with Google Docs and Zoho with word processing, collaboration options and tools to work with PDFs. Since then, Adobe had also added Presentations to the mix.

The news at Acrobat.com is twofold. First of all, Adobe has added a new spreadsheet tool, bringing its suite of online tools in line with those offered by Google and making it far more useful to a web worker who wants to handle all of the basic office file types in the cloud. Second, Adobe has announced that Acrobat.com is leaving beta, which, in turn, has led to the announcement that business subscriptions for these tools are going live.

The new developments at Acrobat.com make for some changes that actually appeal to anyone who works online for a living. Google Docs has been a long-time favorite for managing personal files or even handling certain projects, but it has some shortfalls when it comes to managing business files over the long term. Even the simple ability to save a PDF can make a big difference for users that handle the majority of their daily work online. But Adobe will be taking the usefulness of its online tools a step further. It has already announced plans to launch a desktop AIR application that unifies its online tools and offers a way to work offline — and you’ll be able to share workspaces through the application. All these developments make it clear that Adobe is targeting professional web workers far more than Google Docs does.

While Acrobat.com is adding paid subscriptions to the site, there will still be free accounts available. The subscription choices — Basic for $14.99, and Plus for $39 — primarily offer the opportunity to share web meetings with more participants and other collaboration options, and offer more support. Proper support can make Acrobat.com’s tools more appealing to many businesses than its competitors. While Google Apps remains an alternative, tools like the desktop application may be more than enough to lead some users to make the switch.

The interfaces for each of Acrobat.com’s tools could be enough to convince a person to switch all on their own. The simple fact is that most online applications have interfaces that mimic their offline counterparts to some extent. More than a few word processing options have a definite similarity to Microsoft Word, for example. Acrobat.com’s options, however, offer interfaces that appeal to users that have long since tired of that appearance. The interface for Presentations, for instance, is slick and intuitive — there is a learning curve when you make the switch from another application, but it’s fairly shallow. It’s almost as if Adobe created Presentations with a few of its other users in mind, like those already using the company’s design software.

Acrobat.com reports that it already has 5 million accounts registered, and is picking up 100,000 users each week. With Adobe’s focus on professional users already working online, it’s likely that number will continue to grow. The tools offered on Acrobat.com are sturdy enough for business use, with an interface that is enjoyable to use.

Do you use Acrobat.com? Let us know your thoughts on the service in the comments.

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A buffer overflow exploit has been discovered that could render your computer vulnerable to attack; a malicious party could potentially use the exploit to take control of your machine. All versions of Acrobat and Reader from 7 onwards on all platforms are vulnerable to attack.  Patches to these products will not be available until March 11th. Until Adobe issue an update, it may be advisable to switch to an alternative PDF reader (Foxit works well for Windows), and, as always, it would be a good idea to make sure that your antivirus software is up-to-date and exercise extreme caution when opening files from untrusted sources.

(via DownloadSquad)

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Daniel Akst says I Once was Chic, but Now I’m Cheap as he goes back to PC (via Execupundit).

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Nick Lewis shares his Web Development Warchest.

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What interesting finds do you have in your cache? Share them in the comments.

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In a long awaited move, Adobe opened the door for mass use of their Adobe Photoshop Express online tool. This web based tool is a diluted version of the very popular (and expensive) Adobe Photoshop application that is the defacto standard for image manipulation. This “cloud based application” allows users a simple way to enhance, share, and store photos.

After completing the sign-up process, users begin their journey in the MyPhotos gallery of their images. To start, Adobe grants 2GB of online storage for your photos. You can use MyPhotos to upload, rate, organize, and caption your photos. From within MyPhotos, you can easily rotate, email, embed, and download photos. As a very welcome feature, Ssearch is supported as well.

Double clicking on a photo will bring up the editing menu. Users of photo tools will recognize the main features including Crop and Rotate, Auto Correct, Exposure Fix, Red-Eye Removal, and so on. There are even ways to distort the image, apply pop colors, and adjust the hue, for the more advanced photo editors.

It is apparent that Adobe created Photoshop Express with usability as a main focus. The developers built in appealing transitions when interfacing with windows and application features. The application, even through it’s running in Flash, is very responsive and snappy.

Adobe has built relationships with third-parties as well, adding to Photoshop Express’ appeal. Currently the partners include Facebook, Google’s Picasa, and Photobucket. For example, you can open your Facebook photos from within Photoshop Express, edit them, and save them back. Adobe is planning on releasing an API, which will only add more usefulness to the application going forward.

Keep in mind Adobe Photoshop Express requires Adobe Flash 9 to run. Adobe is said to be working on an Adobe AIR application that will allow for Photoshop Express use outside of a browser in multiple operating systems. Currently, Photoshop Express only works with .jpg files, but additional image file format support is in the works along with support for audio and other media.

Adobe’s intent in releasing a free version of the very popular Photoshop is to enable upsell of their traditional products including Photoshop Elements which is currently priced at $99. Additionally, Adobe will charge for premium features and additional storage.

Adobe’s Photoshop Express gives a great impression to potential Photoshop users. It’s ease of use, easy storage capability, and sharing functionality make it a winner in the online photo editor market.

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