Posted February 10, 2010

 

Is Adobe Flash and Acrobat becoming ancient history?

You may remember that recently Apple's Steve Jobs recanted Google for their aggressive behavior toward the iPhone, and Google's supposedly "Don't be evil." slogan. What was not as widely advertised was Steve's comments that Adobe's Flash was a dying technology and that was why Apple would not support it on the iPhone or iPad. Steve believes that HTML5 technologies will quickly supplant Flash as the move escalates to web based broadcasting (think TV and Hulu.) Read more on HTML5 fully grasp the next evolution of HTML Mashups and the expansion of Web 2.0.

The reason I think this may be the case, is that overall Adobe seems to be blind to the reality of it's popularity, or its responsibility. The TUAW bug, for example, was reported by Programmer Mathew Dempsky more than 16 months ago, yet Adobe insisted that Flash was bug free, until recently when Adobe finally admitted that the bug existed.  Can Flash be saved? There are a number of computer pundits, myself included, that believe that Adobe needs to take Flash open source. Yes, Flash has better than a 98% adoption rate and is on billions of systems, but there are no guarantees in technology that just because you are the King today, you will be kind forever. Remember the IBM PC?

Adobe has reacted similarly to bugs in it popular Acrobat solution and has failed to fix these in a timely basis.

Here is my prediction. I agree with Steve that Flash, as it is today, is not a future technology. I is dying and other video platforms will quickly replace it. Do a little research on HTML5 when you get a moment. Adobe Acrobat may be headed in the same direction. As a business professional I have tried for several years to get Adobe to listen to me and they consistently came back that they had their own direction. So be it, but most accountants and business professionals do not need a bloated overpriced PDF solution. There are a number of great alternatives out today starting a low as $49 that will allows us to create, edit, annotate, and apply tick marks (stamps) to PDFs. All of these provide tools to create and complete forms, and again - at a much better price. I have not seen any reliable rumors on Adobe Acrobat 10, but I hope that Adobe sees the light, before the last one out the door turns it off.

The alternatives are many and the price is less than the lowest pricing for Acrobat Standard. All of these provide free trail downloads to test the product before you buy. Nearly all have very low multi-user license fees. Nearly all have specific versions at lower costs with fewer features so you can purchase just what you need. Most have a free reader, and some of the free readers will let users review an even annotate the document. Here are a few of the best for you to sample from;

• www.nuance.com PDF Creator 6 $99.99

• http://www.foxitsoftware.com/  Foxit Phantom PDF Suite $129

• www.cutepdf.com CutePDF Pro 3.6 $49.95

• www.nitropdf.com Nitro PDF Professional 6   $99

• www.abby.com FineReader 10  $99.99

If you have another choice I have missed, let me know. If there is something you don't like with one of these, let me know (but, please make sure you are running the most current version.)