A physical object these days, from a car to a camera, is more defined by software than hardware.  For instance the gas pedal in your car is not actually attached to the engine.  In the old days is was attached to a cable that controlled a valve in the carburetor – push is hard and the valve let in more gas and the engine ran faster.  How it functioned was defined by the hardware components and their mechanical adjustments.  Today your gas pedal controls a switch that feeds information into a computer which based on its programmed responses will tell different parts of the engine to react based on your input.   It is possible to change the programming to make your car super gas-efficient or a race-ready speed rocket – still within the larger limits of the engine and other components, but there can be a considerable range of software variability possible.  Other hardware has the same issues – for instance the shutter button on your camera isn’t actually attached to the camera shutter – again it triggers a stream of software cause and effect.

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Need to distribute a document?  Whether you are emailing it, adding it to a course site, or putting it on a web page, you should be using the Adobe Acrobat PDF (portable document format) file type.   Adobe gives their version of the viewer program for free, but charges for the full, professional version of Adobe Acrobat which allows the conversion of a document to the PDF format.  This professional version has a lot of powerful features, but if all you want to do is convert Word, Excel and other documents to the PDF format, the purchase cost is a little much.  One of these free alternatives may be just what you need:

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Do you still keep track of the how many kilobytes, or even megabytes, your web pages are delivering to the customer?  Back in the day of dial-up modems your minimized files sizes or perished.  But not that we all have speedy cable/dsl connections does it matter anymore?  I think so, and here’s why: Read the rest of this entry »

To meet a client’s needs I decided to give the Adobe Acrobat forms features a try.  With just a little bit of work you can build an interactive form which can be distributed to many users via email/website/etc.  And when the responses come back they all get collected into one master document.  It is very nice when technology works so well.

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I was a virtual attendee at a demonstration of  Acrobat 9 and Acrobat.com focusing on the new collaboration and interactivity aspects led by Robert McDaniels.  The session was hosted by the New Media Consortium, so it focused on educational uses of the products.  The session was held on-line utilizing Adobe’s Acrobat Connect technology.

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