Adobe today announced the new Acrobat 8 line up! You’ll be hearing quite a lot over the next few weeks / months about the new features etc and i’ll be writing a few articles as well.

For Forms focused people, stay tuned for a whole bunch of articles from me as i focus on  the “whats new”, including a focus on the new “LiveCycle Designer 8″ that is bundled with Acrobat Professional .
For Australian / New Zealand readers we have already planned the Acrobat 8 roadshow and we’ll be covering Auckland, Wellington, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney & Brisbane towards the end of October / early November. I’ll post the dates soon!

Spent some time onthe weekend installing Windows Vista RC1 onto my new Dell 9150. This time round the installation process was quite painless, compared to beta 2 which didn’t get past the boot screen. I went from first boot with the DVD in the drive to desktop in just under 25 minutes.

So at first glance what is new?  Well, the rolling grassy hills are gone in favour of a rocky mountain scene, some news sounds and some interesting effects.. but has muched else changed? I’m sure it has but the main thing, performance, isn’t there yet.

I tried running World of Warcraft but without luck – it runs, but the sounds all play at the wrong speed and it was jittery. I tried playing audio through Media Center while watching photos transition every 2 seconds but the audio became distorted through the fades.  Since both these “real world” things work nicely in Win XP I wont be switching over to Vista full time just yet, but its nice to see things are improving.

On the Adobe front, I got as far as installing Reader 7.08 which behaves as expected, and loaded up a few sites in IE7 with Flash Player 9. Good to know some things “just work”.

Adobe Australia have just announced a series of online seminars to introduce new users to Adobe Flex 2.0 as well as how Flex integrates with ColdFusion. I’ll be presenting a couple of them along with FlexDaddy Andrew Spaulding and ColdFusion guru Ben Forta

Intro to Flex 2
Flex enables enterprises to create personalized, multimedia-rich applications that dramatically enhance user experience.

Wed 20 Sept ­ 11am AEST (Australian Eastern Standard Time)
Wed 27 Sept – 11am AEST

Intro to Flex Data Services
In this seminar learn how Flex Data Services is a powerful services environment that enables Flex developers to rapidly deliver data-intensive Flex applications.

Wed 18 Oct, 11am AEST

Building Rich Internet Applications using ColdFusion & Flex
Come listen to Ben Forta, Adobe Technology Evangelist long time ColdFusion sage and rich internet application fanatic discusses why experience matters and how to create magnetic applications that look great, empower users and work hard to achieve your business objectives

Wed 22 Nov, 11am AEST

To register for these Breeze online seminars go to http://events.adobe.co.uk/events/cgi/main.cgi?country=pa

If you have not tried Flex 2 yet click here for your free 30 day trial:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=flex

It’s been well overdue for some time now, but i finally got around to throwing away my old PHP code that i built the original site in and using the almost ubiquitous WordPress.

There are still a few “fixups” to do over the next few days but the bulk of the content has been moved across.

If you are interested in using WordPress, let me share the fact that the installation took less than 5 minutes, another 2-3 minutes was spent choosing a default theme. There rest of the time was taken tweaking the styles and migrating the data, but thats the fun bit!

Thanks to Andrew & Nick for the encouragement and gentle nudge