Recently in Adobe Category

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

It's been so long since I built a Debian Etch box, I had to find my own entry on Debian's decision to take the Flash Player Nonfree plugin out of Etch and restrict it to Debian Backports.

Besides Flash being a closed-source program, it's also a huge security risk (the executable nature of Flash data being a "vector" of entry to your system, if I have it right), I'm not surprised that the Debian project decided to do this. Developers don't like to "maintain" code they can't even see.

If you do want Flash (and many of us do need it, even if we don't always want it), there is a page on the Debian Wiki about how to use Backports solely for the purposes of installing the Flash player. That's if you don't use a lot of Backports (and I don't use any) and don't want to use that repository for anything other than Flash.

As I say in my previous entry, back when the Flash player was in the Debian Etch repositories, I could never get it to work, and instead I either used the .deb package from Adobe or compiled it from a .tar.gz file. Either one is easy to do. But that package isn't updated when you do an overall software update of your Linux system (if you're using a package manager like apt/Aptitude/Synaptic or RPM/Yum).

If you do want to get your Flash player directly from Adobe, besides the .tar.gz and the .deb package (which for some reason is recommended for "Ubuntu 8.04+" rather than all Debian-based architectures, there is an additional "APT package" specifically for "Ubuntu 8.04+." There are also RPM and Yum packages.

Of course, all of these are for i386 only.

If you have a PowerPC-based computer, you can use the Flash players that Adobe develops for OS 9 and OS X, but not for any of the Linux OSes that run on PowerPC (such as Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu 6.06, Yellow Dog) or even any BSD operating systems (where if you are running i386 you can generally use a Linux browser and Flash player, since Linux executables generally run on these OSes).

Yep, Adobe continues to develop Flash for PowerPC on OS 9, but it won't do it for PowerPC Linux and probably never will.

So my Power Mac G4/466 runs Debian Etch very well, but it won't display Flash content because the sole entity — Adobe — that controls this pervasive technology doesn't care to port it to anything but i386 for Linux.

That's why such closed-source, proprietary technologies can really fail a great many of us. I don't begin to know what the situation is for .mp3 audio, which isn't a free, open-source technology, but I can't think of a system that won't play .mp3 audio.

Especially when it comes to the ways we store, play and display content, being open is way better than the alternative. Can you imagine what would happen if HTML itself (or CSS, or even programming languages like C and Python) were proprietary technologies? We'd be in deep trouble, and there would be much less innovation and access to content than we currently enjoy.

Open-source audio technologies such as Ogg aren't used all that much, and they should be used more. Development is ongoing on Gnash, an open-source Flash alternative, and if it ever works, I'll be extremely grateful for it.

I don't claim to know exactly what Adobe AIR is all about, and from what I can tell, it's not ported to Linux yet, but it does promise that developers can use standard text editors and a freely distributed runtime (as free as the Flash player is, I imagine) to run whatever widgets/applications are created with it.

Not needing expensive proprietary tools to create software is a very good thing. But having the whole process, from coding to compiling, be free and open-source is another thing. And it is a way better one, too.

Disclaimer: I do use quite a bit of proprietary software, even in open-source operating systems.

There's a lot of work I have to do in Windows XP and in Mac's OS X.

I also run the Flash player on many of my Linux and OpenBSD installs.

I use the Opera Web browser, which is generally available in Linux and FreeBSD and OpenBSD (via the aforementioned Linux compatibility layer) because it enables me to do a few very critical tasks that are "restricted" to IE but which for some reason are doable in Opera. Opera is free but not open-source. It also is an excellent application.

The biggest problem I see right now with Linux is the lack of a stable video-editing solution that allows independent editing of audio and video (something that Kino can't do, if I understand the situation correctly). I mean an application that, like Kino, is part of the repositories of the major Linux and BSD distributions/projects and is not in perpetual beta.

(Disclaimers end here; sorry about all the ranting).

Adobe's Acrobat.com is the PDF/Flash/Photoshop maker's entry in the free-of-charge online office suite wars.

Biggest competitor: The also-free Google Docs.

Real competitor: The far-from-free Microsoft Office.

While I don't think Google Docs has anything to worry about at the moment, Acrobat.com sure does look nice.

It makes extensive use of Flash, which could be good or bad, depending on how you feel about Flash.

Adobe, as the owner of Flash (and PDF, for that matter) probably feels pretty damn good about it.

I'm just scratching the surface of Acrobat.com, but I managed to create an account and this document above in the Buzzword application. I also found out that users get 5GB of space for their documents and other files. There are some restrictions on what you can stow with Adobe, but 5GB is still a lot of space.

One thing I do like about Acrobat.com: You can print a document without first making a PDF, but you can, if you like export a PDF (or in Word's .doc, XML and newer .docx formats, Rich Text Format, zipped HTML -- why zipped, I don't know -- and plain ol' text).

One thing I don't like: Passwords are limited to 12 characters in length. I like a longer password (please hold .... your snide comments ... or don't).

Like Google Docs, Acrobat.com is all about collaboration on documents, something I've found very handy in Google Docs.

As I said, I'm not ready to throw Google Docs overboard, especially since I don't know all that much about Acrobat.com and its Buzzword app, and am not a particularly huge fan of Flash, but it's nice to see Adobe innovating and doing something that doesn't cost $800 for a copy.

And while Buzzword seems to be part of a whole suite, I don't see the other icons on the Acrobat.com screen as being much more than supporting players to Buzzword itself.

Click on the picture below for a bigger view of the Acrobat.com main screen:

All I can say is that Google now has somebody breathing down its neck ... and it sure isn't Yahoo ...

And everybody from students to professionals has another way to create, format and store documents without being hassled by the man (i.e. paying for office software).

More on Adobe's Acrobat.com (all from ZDNet):

• Adobe's Acrobat.com could be an Office killer; Will interface matter?
• Screenshots: Adobe's Acrobat.com office suite
• Adobe merging desktop and web with Acrobat 9 and Acrobat.com

And I almost forgot to mention Adobe's free online photo-editing program Photoshop Express, which doesn't do what I need it to do (namely size JPEGs by pixels) but might do what you want it to do.