Acrobat 11 announced, still questions re buzz and pricing
There is an announcement about a new Acrobat, and a blog by Kevin Lynch
but I still think there is not much investment in promoting PDF. I continue to post on the Cross Media Live group on LinkedIn. The actual event was only a few weeks ago but there was nothing there about the new release of Acrobat or new features. There may be an expectation that corporate sites will upgrade anyway. Kevin Lynch is doing a lot more for HTML5 which may have a larger future.
Kevin Lynch recently spoke about HTML5 and there is support for developers.
The MARS project appears to be discontinued so there is no development for the PDF format. Perhaps the routes to and from XML are good enough so far.
The graphic is from Topsy and may explain a lot. I will try the same query over the next few months. So far Acrobat 11 is making no impression at all on HTML5 buzz.
It sometimes happens that software gets cheaper as it matures. The price for Acrobat 11 seems to be much the same. Meanwhile the Creative Suite is on a cloud subscription. Photoshop and Premiere are both available in Elements guise at consumer level prices. Acrobat continues as a desktop product that can only be afforded by corporate budgets. Several new features are aimed at ease of support for IT departments. There are cloud services but they seem to be quite limited, I will look at this in more detail later.
There is now support for touch screens on tablets but I am not sure PDF will be used in that context. So far it seems that most of the new features are slight improvements.
At least the presentation is based on what PDF offers. Previously with Acrobat 9 there was an emphasis on video conferencing as a good use for Flash. Acrobat 10 featured Portfolios as a Flash menu level. I don't think Portfolios are widely used. It appears that with 11 you can combine PDF and have a PDF opening page so you don't have to use Flash if your design is from a PDF world.
There is some interesting research on offer as background for Acrobat 11
But there are loads of questions around this. If Acrobat continues at current price PDF will continue as a niche format. The content will also be available in formats designed for mobile devices and cloud services. The situations IDC describes will use a mix of Acrobat and other software. So this blog will try to look at choices.