David Frith | June 10, 2008
COMPETITION is growing in the brave new world of cloud computing.
Adobe Systems, the company that has given us PageMaker, InDesign, PhotoShop, Illustrator and many more down-to-earth programs, is the latest to put its head in the clouds.
It has created Acrobat.com, a website that takes on Google Docs, ZoHo, ThinkFree and other players in this new growing world of online computing.
Cloud computing, in case you haven't caught up with the term, was originally an idea coined by IBM and others to convey the notion of delivering supercomputing power to academia and big business over the internet.
Increasingly, however, it has come to also cover pretty well any software accessed over the internet.
Some of the best-known examples are Google Apps and Docs, which deliver access to a free suite of office software to anyone with a web browser, much to the consternation of Microsoft.
They're now being used by millions of people around the world on a daily basis and many industry pundits think the writing is on the wall, or maybe in the sky, for the future of expensive boxed software suites such as Microsoft Office.
Adobe is just the latest to head for the clouds. Last year it purchased Virtual Ubiquity, a small US company that had been developing an online word processing service called Buzzword. Seven months later, Adobe has brushed up Buzzword, added collaborative tools, and built it into the on-demand service it calls Acrobat.com.
Buzzword turns out to be one of the most elegant word processors around. Documents look handsome, some might say gorgeous, either on-screen or printed out.
The interface is simple, clever and intuitive, compared with Microsoft's confusing ribbon: beautifully animated explanations and guides spring up as you mouse over buttons.
You can add footnotes and endnotes, import tables and images with great ease and check your spelling, although Buzzword won't auto-correct words as you type in the way Microsoft Word does.
Your documents can be stored online on Adobe's servers, you get 5GB free, or you can export them to your desktop as portable document format (PDF) files, a format Adobe invented, or as Word files including the latest .docx format.
Acrobat.com also includes Adobe's ConnectNow online conferencing system, which allows you to invite colleagues via email to share your document, either by viewing each other's screen, or via full-blown audio or videoconferencing using a webcam.
Most of us probably will never use this, but it's nice to know the service is there and free should the occasion arise.
Flaws? There are a few, although none seem serious. You need to set up an account and log in to create or access documents, and the time spent doing this can be mildly irritating. It's strictly a word processing application, with no spreadsheet or presentations software.
Acrobat.com at this stage appears to work only online. Google Docs, via its associated Gears technology, now allows users to continue working on their documents when offline: for instance, on a plane.
Overall, Acrobat.com is an example of cloud computing that's useful and fun. It's certainly worth a look at www.acrobat.com.
Designers of professional PDF documents might also want to run their eyes over Acrobat 9, the latest version of the full-blown Adobe packaged software for creating multimedia documents that can play on any computer.
Version 9, due on the shelves in July, allows designers to add Flash video files to their PDFs, and to combine PDFs, video, audio and other files into a single, easy-to-distribute document called a PDF Portfolio. Australian pricing has yet to be announced.
ALSO coming to Australia in July is a new mini-notebook PC from Acer that will compete with the hot-selling little Asus Eee.
Acer's new Aspire One, like the Eee, has an 8.9in screen, a full keyboard, a webcam, up to 1GB of memory, and choice of an 8GB solid-state drive or an 80GB hard drive.
It weighs almost under 1kg and buyers will have a choice of Linux or Windows XP operating systems, but so far Acer has not said if Linux choosers will be penalised with higher pricing. (In Australia, Asus is charging $50 extra for the Linux version of the Eee, at $649, but supplies a bigger solid-state drive with the Linux model).
Aspire One made its international debut at Taiwan's Computex show last week.
Acer's Australian office has confirmed a July launch here, but says local pricing has yet to be set.