Just announced ….

Acrobat 9 includes support for embedded Flash (SWF) content. The Flash content, as suggested by the AEC Product Manager here, could be video, audio, presentations, etc. It’s interesting to me that a file format that (maybe incorrectly on my part) always suggested, “WYSIWYG” no matter where you view it (screen to printer) may no longer offer this assurance; this is a reasonably large change.

From a non-purist standpoint, it’s a brilliant move to further the inroads Adobe is making on the desktop. From eliminating or reducing HTML in many web applications (Flash and Flex), to creating installable applications (Adobe AIR), now to truly rich interactive documents available on a wide variety of platforms.

I wonder if the other PDF Reader vendors (such as FoxIt Reader) will be able to compete? Although the PDF specification is open … it may be difficult to embed the Flash viewer (the license may explicitly forbid it), but from a technical perspective, it may be challenging.

What do you think about this? I can’t even recall if the XPS format and associated viewer in WPF could do something like this (anyone know?). What do you expect Microsoft’s reaction to this will be?

Interesting.

“Therefore, we’re looking at letting upcoming versions of Photoshop and–as far as I know–all Creative Suite applications be extended via SWF panels (palettes) created in Adobe Flash or Flex.”

There seems to be a lot of negative comments about usability, platform inconsistency, etc. However, I’d argue those are short-sited. At first, it may be true that plug-ins developed via this technique aren’t consistent, but I’d rather suffer through a little bit of pain for long term gain. The Flash platform is becoming more and more capable, and by providing extensibility through a simpler, widely adopted language, it should help vastly increase the number of available plug-ins.

Platforms are often rough in V1 — but give them a chance to grow and see what develops.