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Adobe are bundling the Yahoo Toolbar with the new Acrobat Reader 7 for Windows, along with Photoshop Album SE and 7.2 MB of extra plugins. The Yahoo Toolbar then installs not only to IE, but also to the Reader itself. To hide it in Adobe Reader, you need to right-click its toolbar and untick "Search the Internet".

But they do at least offer you a choice: you can choose not to download any or all of these extras, by unticking a few boxes on the download page, which appear after you've chose Windows as the target OS. And they're not pushing this junk with their SVG viewer. Yet. :)

As noted above, this only affects users of MS Underpants Exploder for now. But I wonder if Adobe, Macromedia or other vendors will start offering Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox soon, and on other OSes? Linux and Mac versions of the Firefox Toolbar are reportedly on the way.

It's just one more good reason to use Free and OSS software whenever possible, like GPLFlash, Ghostscript and PDFcreator: no clueless marketing droids "adding value" unasked.

Adobe are bundling the Yahoo Toolbar with the new Acrobat Reader 7 for Windows, along with Photoshop Album SE and 7.2 MB of extra plugins. The Yahoo Toolbar then installs not only to IE, but also to the Reader itself. To hide it in Adobe Reader, you need to right-click its toolbar and untick "Search the Internet".

But they do at least offer you a choice: you can choose not to download any or all of these extras, by unticking a few boxes on the download page, which appear after you've chose Windows as the target OS. And they're not pushing this junk with their SVG viewer. Yet. :)

As noted above, this only affects users of MS Underpants Exploder for now. But I wonder if Adobe, Macromedia or other vendors will start offering Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox soon, and on other OSes? Linux and Mac versions of the Firefox Toolbar are reportedly on the way.

It's just one more good reason to use Free and OSS software whenever possible, like GPLFlash, Ghostscript and PDFcreator: no clueless marketing droids "adding value" unasked.

The Adobe version doesn't work in Mozilla 1.0+ and Firefox. It'll crash if you try and use it. The Mozilla developers blame Adobe. Adobe blames Mozilla. So nothing's been done on that. (Also, if you're using Mozilla/Firefox and turned HTTP pipelining on, it appears that Adobe's site really screws up. You'll need to set network.http.pipelining to false.)

There's an SVGViewer 6.0 beta that supposedly works with Mozilla.

SVG seems to have kind of died out, which is too bad, because it's a fairly nice technology. Unfortunately, the latest version on the Adobe site is 3.02 which was released November 2004, and the beta dates back to July 2003. 3.02 is a security update to the 3.0 SVGViewer which was released way back in November, 2001!

It's really annoying because four years ago in 2001, we decided to use SVG on a website because it looked to be a nice cross-platform solution that worked in all major browsers. Since then, it's effectively become IE-only, as the Adobe plugin has stopped working with Mozilla, and is underfeatures (specifically, doesn't support scripting) on most other platforms.

Hopefully it'll still come back, but right now, it really feels like SVG is dead in the water. And I'm speaking as a web developer who's used it for the past four years or so. It's just - not there yet.

There is an alternative. It's called Scalable Vector Graphics(SVG). It's a W3C recommendation, and adobe already has a free viewer on every important platform.

and when will all the browsers support it..
http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/main.html
the simple stuff already works with:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/
samples

how the hell is this interesting? mod this fucking troll down and read the overview for something interesting.

Heh, I think you may need to work on your Google skills. Try this (first result when I searched for "pdf specification", btw)

There is an example right in the introduction.

What does Eve do? I can answer that as i've used it myself. It's a component of an application framework.

Eve is a UI layout engine. Eve's input is a text file that contains a platform neutral expression of User Interface. It's output is a dialog platform resource on whatever platform you are using.

Eve is used to layout many modal and non modal dialogs in various Adobe applications.

Eve aids with UI design, tweaks, revisions, localization.

Read the "Introduction to Adam and Eve" and you will see.

http://opensource.adobe.com/group__asl__overview.h tml#asl_overview_intro_to_adam_and_eve

If only they'd fix Acrobat Reader for linux...

Simulated Partial Specialization for non-compliant C++ compilers. Allows a user to obtain many of the benefits of partial specialization of C++ templates without direct compiler support.

Python action plug-in for Adobe Photoshop. Allows a user to write Photoshop action plug-ins using Python. Has Python interfaces to all the actions APIs.

Python plug-in for Adobe Illustrator. An Illustrator plug-in adapter that allows users to access the C level API from Python

Python plug-in for Adobe After Effects. An After Effects plug-in that allows users to access the C level API from Python.

Python module for Perforce SCM. A C coded Python module that provides access to all the calls in the Perforce source code management system SDK.

-Don

Simulated Partial Specialization for non-compliant C++ compilers. Allows a user to obtain many of the benefits of partial specialization of C++ templates without direct compiler support.

Python action plug-in for Adobe Photoshop. Allows a user to write Photoshop action plug-ins using Python. Has Python interfaces to all the actions APIs.

Python plug-in for Adobe Illustrator. An Illustrator plug-in adapter that allows users to access the C level API from Python

Python plug-in for Adobe After Effects. An After Effects plug-in that allows users to access the C level API from Python.

Python module for Perforce SCM. A C coded Python module that provides access to all the calls in the Perforce source code management system SDK.

-Don

If only they'd fix Acrobat Reader for linux...

We don't want Adobe Reader on Linux. For that matter, we don't want it on any platform.

Adobe, like a page from the Evil Corporation book, has taken it upon themselves to cash in on the success of Acrobat Reader. Currently, if you're a Windows Joe User who wants to download it, you'll wind up with all sorts of stuff. You'll get the Adobe Download Manager, the Yahoo Toolbar, Adobe Photoshop SE, and some mysterious Adobe Internet Printing that just appears in the start menu. Didja ever wonder why SO MANY people have the Yahoo toolbar even though they don't use Yahoo?

This is bullshit. While I realize that, in an ideal world, everyone would uncheck the little checkboxes and opt out of it but this isn't an ideal world. Adobe needs to be punished.

If some programming hero wanted to step up, it wouldn't be hard to knock a few hundred million dollars off of the value of Adobe's stock. Here's how:

1) Create free, open-source PDF writer and reader with none of the typical Evil attributes.
2) Distribute.

Adobe derives a significant amount of their revenue from their Acrobat Writer product. Most people simply want to create PDF files so they buy it. The company that I work for has thousands of licenses because they just want simple PDF creation functions. This is mind-boggling. They use none of the advanced features.

While we can all create PDFs in OpenOffice for free, I think that a set of PDF tools would devastate Adobe. This needs to happen if only for the simple fact that they've crossed the line.

PLEASE!?

You have the classic battle between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office.
After just Linux and OpenOffice installed, it will be evident the advantages are much greater than using Microsoft products, namely because of the price. If these guys are donating thousands of computers to schools, reducing software price from $200-300 per unit to $0 is going to enable them to construct out quite a bit more labs.

There are quite a few Gnome applications which would help in everyday usability. Of course, Gnome or KDE would probably be your desktop of choice, especially if the organization is coming off of Microsoft Explorer; keep it familiar to effectively show advantages.

You didn't specify what type of educational environment the labs target, but for programming Anjuta is a great alternative to Microsoft Visual C++.

A few other mentionable applications would include Mozilla Firefox (over Microsoft Internet Explorer), and The Gimp (over Photoshop).

For networking with existing Windows labs, Samba is an effective alternative.

PDFs are backward compatible. If you are using new features that weren't available you might need to upgrade your (free) reader. However you can print to PDF from any Mac application (I haven't tried the Linux alternatives) and the FDF Libraries are available for using for free from Adobe. Not too difficult if you ask me.

Adobe isn't the nicest company to deal with either but they are a hell of a lot better than MS.

Note: I'm an MSDN subscriber and I develop for Linux, Windows, Mac and *nix systems.

SVG was developed in a long process after Macromedia and Microsoft introduced VML whereas Adobe Systems and Sun Microsystems submitted a competing format known as PGML.

Q.
How does SVG relate to VML and PGML?

A.
Vector Markup Language (VML) and Precision Graphics Markup Language (PGML) were both submitted in 1998 as early proposals for beginning a W3C vector graphics standard. VML and PGML are more similar than they are different, but, in general, VML supports the constructs necessary for office graphics, while PGML was proposed to support richer graphics more suited to the professional design and publishing community.

As a result of these and other proposals, the W3C assembled the SVG Working Group. SVG is the culmination of these efforts to fill the need for a standardized vector format that incorporates the best features of both VML and PGML.

You mean the Adobe Reader 7 (Linux) Beta that Adobe pulled off their website?

The reality is that almost no other commercial software vendor will provide you with updates if you aren't current on maintenance, let alone pirated the software in the first place.

Ehh, what? Seems like a CLEAR MANDATE to me!

For those you interested you can check the PDF Reference.

Google is your friend. The complete PDF specification is available for download from Adobe's website.

Its not just a contract outlining use and preventing piracy. It also outlines the companies legal repsponsibility reguarding replacment of media, loss of data (or money?) due to bugs and their responsibility reguarding technical support among other things.

I honestly don't think you could make commercial software for instance if companies were responsible for things like loss of data/money because of bugs. And how else do you communicate this responsibility? Debian does it every time you log in by default. Auto manufacturers put this information in the book that comes with the car, but reading this I'll bet most people didn't know that.

I work in technical support and I've been on the recieving end of a "loss of money" bug. Customer was livid and they wanted blood, but we wouldn't make software if the risks were that high. If you've ever done customer support (like technical support) you'll see why license agreements exist very quickly.

Ever review a license agreement called the GPL? It gives you no warrenty specifically. It largely deals with contributions and copying. Can you imagine Linux if the license agreement it comes with wasn't enforcable or didn't exist?

Books are somewhat different - like apples and orange really. There's no automation bugs that are going to stop charging taxes on invoices, or corrupt long documents, and books rarely deliver anything against what the product manual claims they do. And also if you order a book and its damaged they'll replace it (just like software). Its also illegal to make copies of books and sell them.

Also - on the Photoshop note. It is fully possible to transfer the license of a copy you sold on Ebay to another user.

That is to say that license agreements don't over-reach, but I think they are a necessary part of the software industry. I don't think they are that impractical either. Adobe's EULA for instance actually outlines all the really important stuff right at the opening and highlights important stuff in bold text. Its not that hard to read and if its of concern to you - you should take the time and at least glance over it. And long before any lawsuits arrived Adobe has put sticker the opening that say something along the lines of "note - this product subject to the license agreement found at such and such a website"

Because I got the link from Adobe's download site.

In my capacity as a web developer, here are the software packages that I feel you should have a firm understanding of:

1. XHTML - not just 'HTML', XHTML has a few changes that you should get used to (such as closing all tags, even <img src="..."/> and <br/> tags, and all tags being lowercase). For the upcoming specifications, such as XHTML 2.0, which will be very different (you can apply an href="..." property to ANY object, instead of having to wrap it in an <a href=..."> tag), it never hurts to be prepared.
2. CSS3 - May as well read up now, it's going to be relevant in not too long.
3. Photoshop - Use The GIMP if you must, but I find Photoshop generally does what I need it to with less hassle.
4. PHP, ASP, Coldfusion, and J2EE - You don't have to learn how to program in each one, but learn about these solutions, if for no other reason than to make compelling arguments against them if the bosses ever ask you about them (or worse, fail to ask you about them)
5. Apache and IIS - for the same reasons as listed above; also, a lot of things in Apache (mod_rewrite, for example) can help you solve problems down the road. Good things to know.
6. A good editor. I use ViM myself, but what you use is up to you. What you'll want is syntax highlighting, auto-indenting, and a powerful (preferably regex) search/replace. Learn to use your editor and you will save hours of work with seconds of typing.

And now for some soft skills. First, you'll need to learn to give effective presentations. You could use Powerpoint for this, or Keynote or Impress or just print them on transparencies and put them on an overhead projector. How you do it is up to you. Will you ever need to give presentations? Not really, but effective presentations require a lot of soft skills - eye contact, graphic design, pacing, speech tones, body language - that to be skilled in presentations in general means to be skilled in a lot of other areas.

You should also familiarize yourself with colour. Learn about Pantone, just so that you know about it. Learn how colours play off each other, which colors look good on which backgrounds. Learn about bordering, whitespace, balance, and form. Consider the Pantone Guide to Communicating with Color - out of 61 reader reviews, it got 4.5/5 stars, and is a good place to start.

Learn about logos. How companies make logos, and why. What goes into making a logo, subconscious suggestions from logos (there's a reason Playboy picked a bunny for their logo, and it's not obvious). This will help in your graphic design and page layout.

Learn about accessibility and colour-blindness.

I'm probably missing a ton of important stuff, but if you do it right and are willing to learn (and posting on slashdot seems to imply that), you'll probably learn what you need to know as you go. If not, just come back and post another Ask Slashdot.

...released in a proprietary format.

At least it's not a format that is DRMed up the ass or non-readable on other OSes.

XML embedded in a standard PDF file would allow any application with support for the creator's XML tagset to import the file, and at the very least those without any similar application could view and print the file.

For a more pure XML solution, it'd be better to embed domain-specific XML data in an SVG document, which Adobe's SVG viewer can display and print. In fact, it might even be possible to XSLT the XML into SVG.

I'd like to know where he got Photoshop for $45 as academic pricing for Photoshop CS is $299.

I think the GIMP would be a lot better if it looked like this: GIMP.

You may want to consider Photoshop Elements, which costs about $100 or less if you wait for a rebate. It's a surprisingly big subset of Photoshop, missing mainly the pre-press tools that are useful to professionals. It's also a useful training tool if you plan to move up to Photoshop one day.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/eula.mspx

I'm sure there are other places online you can find the EULA for other MS product.

I think most slashdot readers know that I'm far from being an M$ fan but come on. What do you guys care, it's not like you "paid" for the products anyway. This crap about the EULA and not being able to return the product to the store if you don't agree with the EULA is an intellectual argument anyway for those who complain the most about it considering they are not paying customers to begin with and acquired the software through other means than a store.

Here is one for Adobe acrobat reader: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrviewer/eula.html

Now that you know what an EULA looks like, you should not be surprised when you next see one considering they are mostly identical to each other in wording for the most part unless you purchase through a volume license agreement.

My department, for instance, bought two licenses for CS so that we could crop and size some photos, and do some very basic web graphics.

If your boss insisted on using PS, why didn't they buy Photoshop Elements? It seems sufficent for this kind of work, and costs a fraction of CS.

The GIMP is a very powerful tool that I love, but even I will admit that Photoshop was a lot easier to learn and has many more options. However, there is one benefit of The GIMP that I am surprised more people don't point out:

The GIMP: Free
Photoshop: $650

Yes you can get the cracked version all over the web but to truly compare the two you need to compare the legit versions. I for one will take TheGIMP and $650 in my pocket anyday.

Ah ha! It is selectable but isn't searchable. I've tried searching for my whole name, my last name, even my first name. The only hits on any of them came from the text at the end of the page 2 (the readable stuff). I've found my name anyway (who'd have thought it was in alphabetical order? ;-) ). However I can't search for it.

First of all, the format specification is freely available. Second of all, what do you mean by "third-party viewers"? Do you think PDF support should be integrated into the OS?

A super versatile goodie.
Here's some explanation:

2D Web Graphics: SVG by I.Herman, W3C, Head of Offices.

Introduction to SVG

svgx.org

SVG.org

What is SVG

Yahoo svg-developers group

Those still aren't terribly compelling reasons to re-invent the portable document format. You can view the spec for the PDF online at Adobe's site. It's terms of use are quite reasonable.

Point 2a makes me think that you should contribute to OO.o in the form making PDF output better. However, point 2b is a little bit too tin-foil hatty for my tastes. There are reasons that PDF has version numbers: feature freeze.

you may need to update your adobe reader

Download Adobe's SVG Viewer here: http://download.adobe.com/pub/adobe/magic/svgviewe r/win/3.x/3.02/en/SVGView.exe
I could not get it work in Firefox, even with the plugin, but IE works fine.

PDF *is* one of the formats for commercial ebooks. As a matter of fact, Adobe is one of the early entrants into ebook technology and standards. They are one of the founders of the Open eBook Forum, the main ebook industry organization. The PDFs are DRM'd with Adobe's own standard, but it's a very common format.

manybooks.net has ereader-ized most of Gutenberg, and ereader.com and ebooks.com have lots of modern stuff, so there's lots to read.

Adobe's PDF format is one that has simply been reverse-engineered instead of replaced.

The PDF Reference is available for all to see. No need to RE it.

But this gives weight to your argument. Adobe has been remarkable successful with PDF simply by encouraging others to use it. They happen to sell the most full featured PDF creation tools, but others have been able to take advantage with still more success.

I've been a big fan of Adobe Photoshop Album since it came out a couple of years ago. Like FlickR it uses tags to organize photos, and multiple tags can be assigned to the same picture. Lookups are incredible fast, and there are customizable templates for web posting. Since I 'blog' I like to keep stuff on my site so I can earn some Google ad revenues.

Most impressive is the amount of logging data it keeps. The program keeps track of when each photo was imported (by session as well as date) into the system so you can make adjustments at a later time to a certain import run.

It integrates fairly seamlessly with photoshop and always backs up the original photograph before you start mangling it :).

Sadly it's Windows only. Not sure if it works on WINE, but I'd highly recommend it to somebody who stores a boatload of photos like me.

I'd been thinking about looking into it just to see how well it works. I use Gallery on my hosting account, and run Gallery Remote to upload images.

I also use Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 (as does my Mom), and am looking into running a perl script that will allow me to upload albums directly from PS Album to my Gallery Installation.

Thanks for the tip on Picasa. She might prefer it over PS Album.

What *BASIC* features does audacity lack exactly? You're comparing an audio editor not with it's obvious counterpart (soundforge) but some Adobe prosumer targeted wankathon wannabe, all-encompasing sound package.

Audacity/GIMP UI's are by no means perfect but if you think this is an improvement then you obviously haven't done enough late night sessions!

You can use SVG with IE today with an SVG plugin. Why wouldn't that be a solution for an enterprise that needs SVG support?

Adobe's SVG plugin is a good solution and plenty of enterprises use it. Native support in Mozilla would be a more complete solution because

• no plug-in install/admin/load time required for Windows
• Mozilla is cross platform
• Native support would allow in-line coding of SVG. We could write a HTML, SVG, MathML, all in-line however required. That isn't possible with IE.

I don't think it's reasonable to ask them to open source their implementation. The Postscript standard is specified in detail, everyone is free to implement their own interpreter (like Ghostscript).

You mean like the G5 hack? ;-)

Try Adobe SVG plugin. Works fine for me on Firefox 1.0PR, both Windows and Linux.

Nah, vi is modal, Raskin hates that (THE is pseudo-modal). In addition, THE commands are English words, not (generally) esoteric control-sequences.

I believe Raskin's approach also differs in that once the command pseudo-mode is entered, a list of available operations is presented, a feature I can't say vi would be worse off to implement. (I might be wrong about this, I don't have Classic installed right now to run THE and apparently he isn't offering it for download anymore...?)

I admit that I wish someone like Raskin could get funding from some entity like Apple (or Google?) to develop a truly revolutionary, next-generation operating system. But I've used THE, and it really doesn't seem like that is it. I couldn't get any real work done with it; I found its behavior very esoteric and unpredictable at times (the dual cursors were tricky, as was the behavior of selections).

It also doesn't seem to me that THE would be very amenable to extension to more common modern computer tasks than text-editing and running snippets of Python. Imagine trying to cut a home video or organize 30 gigs of music or build sophisticated bitmap and vector art with shift-space and a small library of universal commands.

Monotonous and limited interfaces like THE, it seems, are good for monotnous, mostly single-purpose devices (the Canon Cat, the iPod, to some extent the original Mac). But it seems impossible, to me, to build a system that has the power to do everything that a modern computer does without getting a little unwelcome complexity and inconsistency. Of course, I disagree with Raskin that OSX is just as bad as Windows in this respect--why he would say something like that really is beyond me.

I would be very surprised if Google Desktop Search doesn't have this functionality by the time Tiger is released. Are there other ways in which Spotlight goes "WAY beyond"?