Adobe continues to tread the path of online services with its latest offering Acrobat.com. With the launch of the online tools, Adobe also launched a tightly integrated version of Adobe Reader 9.0 that works seamlessly with the internet. With the latest offering, I feel Adobe is taking small but significant steps in the online office arena.

Weather or not it can defeat Google, Microsoft in this threeway fight is the big question?

Well Acrobat.com is a mini portal of sorts. It is the combination of their online meetings tool – Adobe Brio, online Word Processor – Adobe Buzzword and online file sharing – Adobe Share. Most importantly Adobe Acrobat 9 now comes with Flash built into the PDF experience.

I’ve been playing around with Acrobat.com for the past couple of hours, so here are personal opinions on each of the offerings…

• Adobe Buzzword

Adobe Buzzword is the word processor of this suite. What strikes most about Buzzword is its lovely gorgeous UI, that just oozes beauty into the experience in using it. Adobe has made the interface so striking that, whether you have a small screen or a big cinema display, the UI is equally friendly.

Well accomplished Adobe on this one!! Also Buzzword is the only Online Word Processor at the moment that supports the Office 2007 file format (.docx) which is an added bonus.

There are other features as well, small but really useful like commenting, pagination among many more. Overall I feel that Buzzword is the most complete product of the suite.

My Gripes about Buzzword,

• Lack of search feature, makes life difficult if you plan to use Buzzword regularly.
• A nifty file preview feature allows you to preview office files in the browser, but the only problem is that everything is rendered in flash, meaning you cannot copy paste or manipulate the text in any way.

• Adobe Connect

Acrobat.com has Connect which is probably the thinned down version of Acrobat Connect codenamed Brio. You can have online meetings with 3 people for free with screen sharing, desktop video, video conferencing, chat etc.

Being platform neutral it works amazingly well on both OSX and Windows.

• Adobe Share

As the name says Adobe Share allows you to share files with others over the internet. Just like any other file sharing platform, Adobe Share allows you to share large files instead of emailing them. You get full control over your documents like deciding who gets to see the file, and what kind of rights they have on the document in question.

The handy document viewer allows to preview PDF files and image files without needing to open the required desktop application. Neat eh!@!

With all said, Adobe has done a brilliant job for Acrobat.com. Its been quite some time since I last saw a web app that was so functional and beautiful at launch. There are some features they need to work on, and here are a few of my suggestions for the Adobe team, I hope they are listening..

• Remove the limit on PDF conversions from 5. Make it unlimited, since all the competitors like Google, Zoho allow unlimited conversions.
• Add Mobile sharing features. Since Flash doesn’t work well with most mobile phones a stand alone HTML version of the site will be useful for mobile users.
• Add Search features both within the documents and throughout the interface to locate a particular file.
• Add support for some kind of content organization like tagging, labels etc..

Having said that, Adobe has done a brilliant job with Acrobat.com, and I believe it is going to be a serious competition to Google, Zoho etc…

Let us know what you feel about Adobe’s latest offerings in the comments…

For those of you who are big fans of Google Reader, here’s an app that you must check out. You’ll love this new Adobe AIR app called ReadAIR that completely syncs with Google Reader and has the same basic layout as Google Reader, so you should have no problems starting out.

You could be easily be fooled into thinking that this app was developed by Google because it is that well polished. It features full synchronization with your Google Reader account and requires you to log in with your credentials the first time you use it.  The viewing panes can be resized but the columns in the list view can’t. It also has a search feature for going through all of those feeds and you can use tags as well as add or delete subscriptions. Sounds cool eh!

The interface of ReadAIR has been designed keeping OSX in mind, but it surely does look good on Windows machines as well. The UI is simple and effective and is a joy to use. There are some important features missing at the moment, but the developer plans to add it as soon as possible. Here’s what the developer has in the pipeline :

• Offline mode
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Windows XP/Vista and custom themes
• Unread count in Mac doc icon

I can’t wait for keyboard shortcuts to be a part of ReadAIR. I found myself using J for next item and S for starring it while playing around with ReadAIR, such is the striking resemblances between Google Reader and ReadAIR.. For the first release ReadAIR looks promising indeed. I suggest you all to give it a try.

Download ReadAIR from here

If you have been a long time reader of DailyApps you must have read my previous review of Adobe Media Player here. It has finally come out of beta and Adobe has shipped the 1.0 release of Adobe Media Player.

In a nutshell Adobe Media Player is a slick desktop app built on Adobe AIR, that allows you to watch streaming and download videos from site like Revision3, BlipTV, MTV etc.. Pretty similar to what Miro already does in my opinion.

Adobe Media Player has the slickest interface I’ve probably seen in any media player to date. Adobe has put a lot of work and its clearly evident. The Video playback is no longer choppy and unlike the last time around the content library is full of high quality content. Check out my earlier review for some screenshots.

Here are some features of Adobe Media Player that are worth mentioning :

• Support for high-quality audio and video.
• Manage your videos
• View shows online or offline
• Simple, content-centric user interface
• Subscriptions to your favorite shows

Coinciding with the launch of Adobe Media Player Adobe has also launched Adobe TV, which is basically a web site filled with tutorials and other information about Adobe related products. You can either watch Adobe TV videos from the web or using Adobe Media Player.

I suggest you give Adobe Media Player a try and let me know what you feel about it.. Adobe Media Player is available for both Windows and OSX, but you need to have Adobe AIR installed before.

Installing Adobe Media Player is a breeze. You Need to install the latest beta of Adobe AIR and click a few buttons here and there to install Adobe Media Player and you are set. But here comes the sad part. For most part, Adobe Media Player is slow and unresponsive. It has a choppy playback, so for the time being I would stick to Miro.

What left me impressed was the amazing user Interface that the Media Player has. The UI of Adobe Media Player is one of the best and is fun and easy to use. There are not many shows pre programmed into the Media Player, so you have to manually add all your Favorite shows. Let me stop my rant here and show some screenshots of Adobe Media Player in Action.

For a Beta product, Adobe Media Player is not bad. I would like to see a lot more speedier and responsive Adobe Media Player in the future, to convince myself to dump Miro in favor of Adobe Media Player.

If you are willing to try out Adobe Media Player then visit Adobe Labs. Remember you also need Adobe AIR Beta 2 Installed Before you can use Adobe Media Player.

Through its Interface you will be able to post :

• Text
• Pictures
• Sound (mp3)
• Video (flv)
• Webcam streaming (directly from AirPress!!)
• Webcam snapshot
• Flash animation (alpha version)

Here are some screenshots of AirPress in action :

So if you are impressed by AirPress and are a blogging freak, then I suggest you try out AirPress. On a sidenote I posted this post straight from AirPress. Though it took me more time, than Live Writer would normally take, but all in all I was awed by this wonderful App.

Try Out AirPress today. Note : You Need the Adobe Runtime Environment to be installed before you can use AirPress. 

AirTalkr has a very slick interface and is pretty fast and responsive from my basic testing. The chats seem to be fine, but there are some missing features like File Transfers, Smilies etc.. Apart from the IM capabilities AirTalkr also has support for popular Social networks like Myspace, Facebook, Flickr etc with functionality that is dubbed as AirCard.

All in all AirTalkr looks like a cool app to have. Though not feature rich like Pidgin or Trillian it definitely is the easiest to use, that should help not so technically advanced users. While it won’t replace Pidgin for me but I would definitely use when I get bored.

Thanks to Sindhu, Shankar Ganesh

While not much is known about Photoshop Express right now John Nack from Adobe has posted a screenshot of the Photoshop Express and from what I can see it does really look like a promising product. What does this mean to other online Image Editors like Picnic and Fauxto.. They might find the going tough to compete with a biggie like Adobe. Afterall Photoshop is a household name for image editors and the brand is going to help Adobe in a big way.

Well here is the screenshot that I promised to give you :

Via John Nack’s Blog

• Download and install the application from the AIR file.
• Once you have installed and launched the application, enter the flickr account ID of the account that you want to download the images from.
• Note that this is the Flickr account ID and not the account user name.
• You can find a user id for a specific account here.

Once you have specified the flickr user id, then you can optionally specify the folder that the images will be downloaded into. By default, images will be downloaded into a directory named flump on the desktop.

Here is a screenshot of flump :

So go ahead and download flump today. Before installing make sure you have Adobe Runtime (AIR) Installled.