PC and Mac apps get a face lift, while Adobe announces a partnership with FedEx Kinko's.Acrobat Standard, Professional and Reader received the Windows Vista treatment this week with a new 8.1 update, Adobe announced June 6. The
8.1 update features new hooks into Office 2007, too.
"Customers running Vista have an expectation about how applications will look and behave in the Vista environment," says Marion Melani, group product marketing manager for Acrobat. "Acrobat 8.1 will meet their expectations."
Melani says Vista's new wrinkles enabled features in Acrobat and Reader 8.1 such as right-clicking to create PDFs from within Office apps, as well as richer previews of PDF files. Acrobat and Reader both insert themselves into Office 2007's "ribbon" interface, which organizes buttons and features into a new-but-familiar tabs scheme.
Adobe will distribute the update both via auto-updater calls from user desktops as well as via downloads at Adobe.com. Melani says that means Adobe has to be ready for millions of downloads once it goes live with software crossing multiple platforms and Windows versions.
"We definitely anticipate and are prepared for a spike in demand when we release an update like Acrobat 8.1," she says.
Lori DeFurio, manager of Customer & Field Enablement for Adobe's Knowledge Worker Solutions group, wrote in her blog Wednesday that the Vista update makes Acrobat and Reader "first-class citizens in these environments."
She showed the update in action, including a robust preview pane in Outlook—allowing multipage looks at a document without launching Reader. Certainly only developers will care that this comes courtesy of something called the Vista Preview Handler, but anyone who needs to more quickly sort through the morning's mountain of PDF e-mail attachments will appreciate that feature in particular.
While previous versions of Acrobat 8 could run on Vista and with Office 2007, they didn't fully support all the new apps' interface wrinkles, or 64-bit computing. The 8.1 update does, including XP 64-bit edition; Windows 2003 64-bit edition; and Windows Vista 32-bit and 64-bit editions. Already, Microsoft released a patch for 64-bit Vista that solves a printer issue with the new 8.1 update.
The company also included Mac users in its 8.1 update, too.
"The update addresses bugs discovered after the initial product release," Melani says. "So, we think it's beneficial for all customers to install the 8.1 update, even if they're not running Vista."
Other feature highlights making their debut in Acrobat and Reader 8.1:
- PDF printer driver in Vista supports improved PDF creation.
- PDFMaker updated for Office 2007
- Option to create "Quick and Simple PDFs" from Word 2007
- Mac OS X version now includes Flash MPP, which improves support for Flash files with multimedia on Mac OS
- InDesign Plug-In update supports communication with InDesign for Creative Suites 3
- Direct render of dynamic forms
- Update integrates online FedEx Kinko's PDF printing
Both the Acrobat and Reader 8.1 updates enable online print-on-demand of PDF documents with one click from Acrobat and Reader. A joint project Adobe developed in conjunction with FedEx Kinko's, the "Send to FedEx Kinko's" button in Acrobat and Reader connects to the FedEx Kinko's Print Online app, which sets up online uploads for printing and shipping documents online. The company also will make "Send to FedEx Kinko's" a choice in the File menu later in June.
The FedEx Kinko's software is a print-on-demand job manager that enables combining multiple files into one job; customizing jobs with tabs and inserts; previewing orders; tracking job status; shipping/pickup; and payment options at any U.S. Kinko's Office and Print Center the user chooses. For now, the service is supported in English only.
