Note: This is a repost of an article published in Australian Personal Computer (APC Mag) in January 2010

Adobe Acrobat Professional can do much than just create static PDFs. The Professional version creates interactive forms that collect data.

To start creating your form, open up Acrobat and select the Forms->Start Forms Wizard then choose between one of the options:

An existing electronic document – Converts a Word, Excel or other file types to PDF, then automatically detects & creates interactive form fields based on the existing artwork. You can then modify or add extra fields.

A paper form – Acrobat will use your connected scanner to scan a paper document, recognise the text with OCR, then recognize and creates interactive form fields based on the existing artwork.

No existing form – Windows users can open the bundled LiveCycle Designer application. LiveCycle Designer allows you to either design a form from scratch by dragging and dropping form objects or using one of the many bundled templates Continue Reading

Given that I often demonstrate Adobe’s server products (LiveCycle ES and others) I typically have a server centric environment on a VMWare image stored locally on my laptop. I have (finally) upgraded my demonstration environment from Windows 2003 to Windows 2008 R2. Since I often get asked how and why I set up my demo environment the way I do, I’ve captured some notes and share them

I won’t cover the actual OS installation, so i’ll assuming the OS & drivers are installed and you’ve run Windows update. First, in order to make the OS look slightly more familiar, I install the Desktop Experience feature using Server Manager, or with the following command line:

• ServerManagerCmd -i Desktop-Experience

• Click Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization
• Click Personalization and select the Aero Theme

Stop the annoying Windows server shutdown event tracker. Each time you reboot you have to log a reason why… useful in production, but ANNOYING in development & demo. Continue Reading

Note: This is a repost of an article published in Australian Personal Computer (APC Mag) in May 2010

Adobe’s online service, Acrobat.com, is free, has great apps and lets you share files.

Sharing electronic documents can be a real challenge and we often find ourselves dealing with bounced emails, FTP accounts and other issues. Adobe’s free Acrobat.com cloud based service was designed to make it easy to share information quickly and easily and is a combination of many useful features, including a word processor [that I’m writing this article with), a presentation and tables tool, web conferencing and more.

UPLOADING

For this article we’ll be focusing on sharing files. First you need a free Acrobat.com account. Browse to http://acrobat.com and click the Sign Up button. Enter your email address, create a password and other details, then click Sign Up and you are ready to go.

Once logged in, you will see a list of your files. These are stored online and can be accessed by anyone that you give permission to [and anywhere). Let’s start by uploading a file of your own. In the ‘Actions’ palette on the left-hand side, click on ‘Upload’ and then browse and select the file you wish to upload.

Click on the file name, and if you uploaded a PDF then Acrobat.com will l show you a preview. You can zoom in and out and navigate through the pages. To download the file again, click ‘Download’ to copy the file back to your computer. No matter where you go now, you can store and access up to 5GB of files on any computer by browsing to Acrobat.com and logging in.

Continue Reading

Quick post to share a great utility for anyone like me who would like to show off their Android app on a projector. In my case I’ve been demoing the latest Adobe Reader, LiveCycle client, Acrobat.com, Photoshop Express apps from Adobe as well as some samples created with the upcoming AIR for Android.

The problem is that I used to use a web camera and try and hold the phone in front of it while demonstrating. What I’ve started using now is AndroidScreencast (http://androidscreencast.googlecode.com). It’s a java app that displays whatever is on your Android device onto your PC. The screen refresh rate is not amazing, but it does work on Mac, Windows & Linux!

All the gory details are on the project site, but it works great!

Fun video put together by the Adobe Acrobat product team including interviews with members of the Adobe Europe team. Look out for a quick appearance by me as I attended a technical conference in Paris recently!