Confused? It can only get moreso

I think I may be turning into a character from Private Eye. I know there was a journalist who took different points of view in every paragraph. So at least I will try to put several links into the same post, even if my objections are not that coherent.

Adobe have gone very Flash. Bandwidth must be excellent in San Jose so in tests I suppose the web pages load without any test of patience. Here in the UK things are a bit different. Previously my view was that people interested in Acrobat would prefer a more page analogy design. The case study choices flip past in a stream of graphics. I could follow a list of text options more like a contents page. But I now realise that Acrobat is meant by Adobe to be a Flash product, not much to do with PDF.

This is more obvious from the Acrobat Connect product announced a few days ago. Straight to video. There may be a white paper somewhere but not easy to find. It has almost nothing to do with Acrobat as a product people are used to. So it can be launched ahead of the next PDF creation whatever it turns out to be. The button on the menu in the last release was just an advert, there was no reason for it in terms of PDF.

I have done a PDF version to print out the comparison of prices for Connect options. Not very clear but the web version is not easy to follow or find.

Look at Brio on Adobe Labs. It could work without the rest of Acrobat. I noticed on the recent webcast that the PDF files used for presentations were hosted on another page completely. There is no way to save slides as PDF within Connect. The messages can be saved as text then converted to PDF, then added as pages to the PDF of the slides if you find it somewhere else. So that's alright then.

Meanwhile Victor Keegan in the Guardian is convinced that soon "all meetings will be virtual". Now Victor Keegan is a proper print journalist. He would not be writing this if there was not some basis for his views. Adobe probably have a point in the direction they are taking.

Today Printweek has a section on "pre-media" for drupa. Can't find anything about Adobe. Surely some mistake. Maybe I should look again. Print journalists are only able to rewrite what is sent in to them, after all. Has Adobe got no interest in what the Printweek audience has to think about?

What to do about GoLive? I have been doing most of my web pages with GoLive for a while now. Excellent links with PDF by the way. I think Dreamweaver is for people who like Flash and animation or lots of video. Obviously these are the people Adobe are happy with. But is it really fair to just close GoLive down? Maybe they should offer it to Quark or Global Graphics? People who still have an interest in flat documents and the paper style of design.

It seems to me that drupa may be completely confusing. Is "pre-media" about bits and pieces that could turn up on a printed page or online or in a video or whatever? When will Adobe tell anyone about MARS or the print engine or whatever they have in mind? Eventually there will be some sort of take on "communication" that makes sense more widely. The London College has still not got used to it as far as I know.

The bloggers don't help either. Jeff Jarvis recently wrote that "print sucks".
Comments to Buzzmachine, not here.