Adobe has released new betas of AIR 2 and Flash 10.1, James over at jkOnTheRun reports. Both products now support multitouch, but most interesting for me in this news is that AIR 2 promises to be less memory-hungry than the previous version. I’ve shied away from many useful desktop apps that rely on AIR (TweetDeck, for example) because they hog so much memory — hopefully this new release will have much more reasonable usage of my computer’s resources.
Do you avoid AIR apps because they are so resource-hungry?
Online document reviews have become a part of life for web workers creating technical documentation because they because are more economical and faster than having to fax, scan, or ship review documents around by FedEx. PDFs offer a bandwidth-friendly format for sending large documents back and forth amongst a geographically dispersed project team.
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.
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Google has recently announced that it can index external files called from Flash sites. While I understand why Google wants to do this — it has been working on indexing Flash content for over a year — I hope the news doesn’t tempt web developers to increase their dependence on Flash.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Editor’s note: With this post we welcome Thursday Bram to the WebWorkerDaily team. Thursday is a full-time writer who has written on topics ranging from small business to kitchen appliances — and yes, that includes the kitchen sink. She’s based in Laurel, Maryland and focuses most of her writing online.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Nearly everyone working on the web uses PDF files from time to time. If you use Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader to view those PDF files, be warned that Adobe yesterday issued a security bulletin about a critical vulnerability affecting its software.
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)
When working on the web, an aggravating task is working with images. There are image manipulation software tools, but most are costly and poorly-implemented. Today, Adobe has released a tool that will ease frustration when it comes to working with, sharing, and storing images.
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.
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What better way to start your week than by getting a few good tips on how to save some time as your workweek becomes reality?
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
