ie8 fix

adobe

Snackr drenches your computer in a river of news

Marshall Kirkpatrick, over at ReadWriteWeb, turned me on to Snackr with a post from earlier today. Snackr describes itself as being an RSS ticker. It provides a constant river of news on your screen. Built with Adobe AIR, it is compatible across all platforms and looks really slick.

Snackr sits on one of the four sides of your screen and scrolls through recent posts from sites which are input either by hand or by loading an OPML file. A nice added touch is that if there is an image in the post, it is included in the scrolling entry. There … Read more

Converting an Adobe Acrobat PDF file into a Word document

The May 15th issue of the Support Alert newsletter has an interesting article on converting PDF files into Word documents. Initially, the newsletter author, Ian Richards, tested a couple free online conversion services, then he got readers with seven different commercial products to convert his sample document.

He called the results "fascinating" and found that "the products varied markedly". The most expensive product produced one the worst conversions. Overall, he likes Zamzar, a free web-based conversion service, saying "Most users who have only a casual need to convert PDFs to DOC should save their pennies … Read more

Adobe taps a Java-heavy CTO

Sun just lost the CTO of its desktop division, Hans Muller. Not to worry, though, the open-source world gets to keep him as he's heading down the road to increasingly open-source friendly Adobe to work on Flex. Muller apparently wasn't part of the Sun layoffs, and remained a good employee to the last, clearing up loose ends in the very same breath that he announced his resignation.

What does this mean for Adobe? A great new technical lead for open-source Flex. And for Sun? Probably not much, but I'm sure Sun would have preferred to keep Muller.… Read more

ReadAir delivers GoogleReader newsfeeds to the desktop

I've been looking at quite a few good desktop applications built on Adobe AIR (such as eBay Desktop and Twhirl), and am pleased to report that ReadAir, a spin-off of Google Reader that was released on Thursday and is coded to run on Adobe's cross-platform solution, ranks among them.

ReadAir mirrors Google Reader's functionality with a cleaner interface and the deliberate adoption of the Mac OS X look. The left sidebar sorts items by the total harvest, starred favorites, and shared stories, with your tags directly below. In the top-right pane, elements such as story titles, sources, … Read more

Adobe set to test new Flash Player

Adobe on Thursday is expected to launch a beta test program for the latest version of its Flash Player software.

Flash Player 10, developed under the code name Astro, includes better support for 3D animation and video hardware acceleration, among other improvements.

Adobe said that Flash Player 10 will now support custom visual effects, created with Adobe's free Pixel Bender tools. Developers can write code to create effects that can be rendered by Flash Player at runtime.

Developers can also now target code to render through graphics processors, speeding up performance and freeing CPU bandwidth, Adobe says.

The beta … Read more

Adobe releases DNG codec for Vista, updates spec

Today, Adobe made several announcements relating to its Digital Negative format (DNG) including the availability of the 32-bit Vista codec. You can download it here.

Adobe positions DNG, which is actually a flavor of TIFF, as a nonproprietary alternative to the variety of camera raw formats used by most of the major dSLR manufacturers, including Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Olympus. Later-to-market entrants, like Samsung's GX models and Casio's Exilim Pro EX-F1, have embraced DNG. As Stephen Shankland alluded in a previous post, according to Kevin Connor, Adobe's director of product management for Professional Digital Imaging, Adobe has … Read more

No more lives for GoLive

Registered users of Adobe software received the following note today in their in-boxes:

Please take note that Adobe has discontinued development and sales of Adobe GoLive Web authoring software. This decision--effective April 28, 2008--was made so we can focus our development efforts and sales resources on Adobe Dreamweaver software, our Web design and development application. Dreamweaver plays a pivotal role in the Web and cross-media workflows supported by Adobe Creative Suite, as well as in Adobe's platform for Rich Internet Applications, including Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR. Concentrating on Dreamweaver will enable us to better serve the needs of … Read more

Adobe says Photoshop Express glitch fixed

Adobe Systems said on Friday that it has fixed a bug that delayed a planned update of its Photoshop Express program this week. The software maker said in a statement that the updated version of the free, Web-based photo editing program is now available.

"We're happy to report we have successfully fixed the bug that slightly delayed our newest feature update for the Photoshop Express beta," Adobe said in a statement. "New updates are now publicly available. We appreciate your patience as we focus on delivering a quality experience for our users."

Adobe had planned … Read more

Aviary's creative suite is more than a pretty Flash app

I finally got a chance to catch up with Avi Muchnick, the CEO of Flash software maker Aviary and of the art contest site it spun out of, Worth1000 (a Webware 100 winner).

Aviary is an ambitious project to create a full suite of online applications for creative professionals. The first application, the image editor Phoenix, is now in private beta (read to the end of this post to get an early invitation). The second, pattern maker called Peacock, was recently added.

Coming up after these applications will be Toucan, a color swatch program for designers (like Kuler on steroids), … Read more

The Foxit PDF Reader - fast, free, portable and new

The big claim to fame for the Foxit PDF Reader has always been speed - it opens PDF files much faster than Adobe's own Acrobat Reader. Then too, it's free and much smaller than the Adobe Reader. Plus, people just like it. At download.com, the CNET review gave it 5 stars out of 5.

But there is another big advantage, the Foxit Reader is portable.

Portable applications are those that can be run without being installed. I'm a huge fan of portable applications and use them whenever possible, running them both off the C disk and … Read more