Recently in Adobe Category

Adobe's Acrobat.com: Newest free online office suite competes with Google Docs ... and that other huge not-so-free office suite

| | Comments (1) |

buzzword.jpg

(Click above for a bigger image)

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:
acrobat.jpg

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):

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.

Tech Talk column

Steven Rosenberg's weekly Tech Talk column, which appears Saturdays in the Los Angeles Daily News, is now available on the Daily News Technology page.

About this blog

Comments are back: Comments have returned to Click, but due to the thousands of spam comments clogging up the system each day, commenters must now log in. To comment, either create a Movable Type account when prompted, or create and use a Typekey account. Movable Type, as configured on this blog, allows commenters to create a Movable Type account, verify it via e-mail and then sign in to comment. Other methods of verification are OpenID, Live Journal and Vox.




Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.



About this Archive

This page is a archive of recent entries in the Adobe category.

Amazon is the next category.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Recent Comments

Steven Rosenberg on Things I like about Slackware: There's a whole lot to love in Wolvix, to be sure. I should try again ...

arochester on Debian-News.net &mdash a great source for ... just what the URL says ... plus more new Debian links: I clicked on your link for Debian-News.net and thought for an instant ...

mjjzf.myopenid.com on Things I like about Slackware: Having used it on Wolvix, I have become partial to Medit. It is a very ...

Steven Rosenberg on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS still No. 1 for my laptop: A lot of hardware seems to run very well under Ubuntu. The requiremen ...

Steven Rosenberg on iPhone 3G: $199 price is good, $60 monthly bill not so much: AT&T must be kicking a lot of that money back to Apple and trying to m ...

Steven Rosenberg on Do you ever pay for 'shareware'?: Thanks for leaving the comment about PC-Write. I've been trying to rem ...

Tom Gapen on iPhone 3G: $199 price is good, $60 monthly bill not so much: Don't expect any other carriers to be competing with ATT to offer iPho ...

apswartz.myopenid.com on Do you ever pay for 'shareware'?: Way back in the 80s and early 90s I used and paid for PC-Write (word p ...

Mikey on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS still No. 1 for my laptop: I could not agree more about Ubuntu and how well it runs on my old lap ...

Steven Rosenberg on iPhone 3G: $199 price is good, $60 monthly bill not so much: Most of the cell-phone service plans seem to start at $40 for voice (n ...

Adobe: Monthly Archives

Powered by Movable Type 4.1