Adobe Releases Cross-Operating System Runtime

An anonymous reader writes to mention that Adobe released the first public version of their new cross-operating system runtime today nicknamed 'Apollo'. "The software relies on HTML, JavaScript, Flash, and Adobe Flex. The alpha version, which presently works on Windows and Macintosh, can be downloaded for free at http://www.adobe.com/go/apollo. Once the Apollo apps are created, users can launch them from their desktops, without using their browser or connecting online. An Apollo application can connect automatically to online data or services when an Internet connection is detected, with new components automatically downloaded and integrated. The user needs the Apollo runtime to run the apps, just as a Flash player is needed to run Flash animations."

Comments

Re:I beg to differ

[drinkypoo]

Actually, I quite like the Adobe Creative Suite. Did you ever try the real Acrobat, i.e. the full version, not the reader? It's an amazing tool: You can do reviews of texts among a group of people, including mere mortals. They will intuitively know how to use it, it does what they want, and it works

The interesting thing is that there is basically no backwards compatibility of anything beyond basic document display. For example, we have a fill-in form created in Acrobat 8 Pro. If you open it and fill it out in an earlier version, it seems to be filled in fine. You can close it, reopen it, and view its contents. But then I mailed that file (yes, I'm sure it was the right one) to the purchasing department and when they opened it in Acrobat 8 Pro, it was not filled in.

Incidentally, I have Adobe CS2 on a powermac to my right and it has been filled with the least reliable software I've had come out of Adobe yet. Illustrator and Indesign regularly crash. Photoshop is just slower than ever before.

They've also broken many elements of usability. For example in illustrator, things snap to the point from which you drag, not from other edges. As such I am forced to do a lot of things in InDesign just to have them come out in a reasonable period of time; but now I have to jump back and forth between illustrator tweaking graphics, and indesign to put them in a document, instead of just doing it all in illustrator.

Not to mention general stupidity - I had to buy a $75 plugin for InDesign just to be able to define my own text boxes on master pages and have text flow through them, as opposed to one big master text frame for the whole layout. What? This is such an obvious feature. This is the only efficient way to autonumber tickets, for example; In my case I use it to make numbered backstage passes, and to make numbered coupons for in-house use (cheaper to just laser print than to have them printed.)

You can actually open a pdf and do with it whatever you like. Move text, change single letters, add stuff, copy elements, whatever.

Yes and no. You can't copy graphical elements out of the PDF; you need Illustrator for that. But Illustrator doesn't work with embedded fonts, so you have to load a PDF, print it with all fonts converted to outlines, and then import THAT. Why won't the PDF import in illustrator just use Acrobat to do the import if it's installed, so you can have full PDF display/import capability? Oh yeah, because Adobe is lame.

Also, a lot of the time I find that Acrobat has turned a line of text into several disjointed lines of text which happen to have the same vertical level on the page. Sometimes this happens in the middle of a word, sometimes between words, but it happens an awful lot. I think it will do it any time you change a font, but it happens randomly as well. This text is simply not reasonably editable in acrobat.

InDesign is the perfect print preprocessing tool. (I'm not in the printing business, but I've written a few large documents in (pdf)LaTeX (with lots of (pdf) figures) and the odd fancy one-page flyer).

InDesign does not have autonumbering of elements, such as figures. You must get a plugin for this. InDesign does not autoflow through multiple master text frames; you can't in fact have multiples. You need a plugin for this. InDesign is missing more obvious functionality than I can even describe in one comment.

Now you're going to say: "Of course, it's because Adobe is the inventor of the stupid portable document format, so no wonder they know all the tricks."

No, what I'm going to say is that it's particularly pathetic that even Adobe can't get PDF right, since they invented it. Although to be fair, it's actually a bastardization of PostScript, which they also invented. And for which they charge exorbitant licensing fees, or used to.

It might be that their software us