Adobe just released Acrobat 8 and last week I got an exclusive look at it through my camera lens when Rick Brown, Director of Product Management of the Knowledge Worker business unit gave me a demo. I really liked the forms handling and collaboration features. It’s best to download the video and watch it off of your hard drive. I did two videos for PodTech News. One, the above demo, and two, an interview with Rick where we talk about the state of Acrobat.

The official press release is here.
Another press release is here on the Adobe Connect collaboration family of products.

The official Acrobat 8 site is here. The player isn’t updated yet (coming in November), I’ll watch for when that comes online, should be linked off of this site when it’s ready.

I originally planned these videos to be part of my new show, but my site isn’t quite ready yet, so we’re running these on PodTech’s news channel.

Things that caught my eye about the new Acrobat? The new forms engine. It kicks ass. You put in a document with a form layout on it (like what we used to do in Pagemaker for Thunder Lizard — a brochure with a form on it). It looks like something that you’d get in the mail. But then you stick it through Acrobat and it puts a form on it that you can fill out from your computer.

Also, this is where we see a good integration of the stuff Macromedia was working on (the collaboration pieces) with something Adobe was working on (Acrobat).

Is this important? Well, Adobe makes quite a bit of profit off of the Acrobat line and Microsoft is gunning for that profit big time.

This might not get on TechMeme but Acrobat/PDF technology is used all over the Web, so this is important news for all of us to pay attention to.

Update: actually it is on TechMeme and there are a few news articles over on Google News about Acrobat 8 too.

Eddie Codel sent this one to me: Amanda Congdon across America. He said it wasn’t supposed to get out until Tuesday. Hmmm! Hey, Amanda, you are welcome to end up in Half Moon Bay at the Ritz! 🙂

For the two people in the world who don’t know who Amanda is, she was the first host (and 49% owner) of Rocketboom.

Click to Play

Here’s another simple videoblog. Done with our Nikon S1 camera. Less than $300 according to Google. Anyway, this is in the Half Moon Bay grocery Maryam and I shop in, just wanted to show you the meat selection and demonstrate that you can do a video blog post with a very simple camera without much of anything to say.

Now, all you “anti-video” people, please write a post where you explain to someone who hasn’t been part of our society for, say, 20 years, all about the meat selection Maryam had to choose from this afternoon when she was buying her meat. It’d take you thousands of words to explain what this short little video clip can say (and, it still wouldn’t get close).

Note that she didn’t say anything. That this video post doesn’t make a point. It just is what her shopping experience looked like this afternoon. Does this matter to my audience? Not really. But why do you need an audience for everything you do?