Sources say Adobe projects sales of 32 million seats of the new version, up from 25M of Acrobat 8 and 14.5M of version 7Adobe will unveil the next Acrobat — which will be called Acrobat 9 — Monday morning, sources say.
A new Windows version called "Pro Extended" will replace the high-end Acrobat 3D, adding more multimedia capabilities and other features beyond 3D mapping, while Standard and Pro remain the choices most Acrobat users will purchase. Mac users get Pro, and that's it.
The company estimates that it will license 32 million units of the new Acrobat, up from 25 million from the last version and almost tripling the 11 million units it sold of Acrobat 6, released five years ago.
Adobe shortened the "Professional" version's name to "Pro" on the Mac and Windows side for Acrobat 9; a Standard version, as with Acrobat 8, remains available to Windows users, and integrates AcroForms functions (form design previously reserved for Pro) as well as Reader-enabled forms, previously a Pro-only function that — prior to Acrobat 8 only was available as part of a $75,000 enterprise-class LiveCycle product.
Acrobat Windows Pro Extended rolls in functions from the previous Acrobat 3D, as well as video-to-Flash conversion. It also includes Adobe Presenter 7, an authoring tool for building Flash presentations that can stand alone, be exported to PDF, or be integrated with Adobe's online webinar app, Connect Pro.
Flash is also integrated into Acrobat Pro Extended in the form of the ability to include Flash widgets in PDFs that can go to the web or other sources to update the documents' information — charts, price lists, blog content, spreadsheets, etc. This feature can turn PDF files themselves into little rich-internet apps that channel content as the document author directs them. It also gives end users an ability to chat live as well as register real-time comment via a new Acrobat.com site.
As previously reported on PDFzone, this appears to be part of a larger Adobe online document sharing and revision/collaboration push. Adobe also makes a priority of streamlining forms creation in Acrobat 9, as well as adding rudimentary data collection and processing from forms created in Acrobat.
Also, in contrast to information previously leaked to PDFzone, the document compare feature in Acrobat 9 is upgraded considerably from previous versions — it works much like Microsoft Word's "Track Changes" revisions feature, except that it works pixel by pixel, not just word-by-word.
Sources also say that both Reader and Acrobat 9 will launch three times faster than version 8. Speeding up that process has been a priority for Adobe in the last few versions. Slow launch times were Acrobat's Achilles' heel earlier this decade, as plugins took interminable times to load. Adobe has worked around those issues by reducing plug-in issues as well as making interaction with Adobe's web site less frequent and obtrusive.
