I’ll be running a live repeat of my recent “Introduction to LiveCycle Designer ES2” eSeminar via Adobe Connect this Thursday at 12pm, 24th July 2010, Sydney, Australia time (GMT+10 – roughly 7pm Wednesday in California).

Watch me build a form from scratch in about 45 minutes as I take you through some of the features of Designer. This session will be good for both Adobe Acrobat users & LiveCycle developers. Come say hello and ask your questions live!

Register to attend the eSeminar on the Australian eSeminar site at http://adobeeseminars.com.au/sessions/view/acrobat/

Today I ran a live eSeminar introducing LiveCycle Designer ES2. In this session I covered how to build forms from scratch, included some tips and tricks along the way and included some of the latest features available in the latest Designer ES2 release.

The session was recorded and includes over 45 minutes of me demonstrating how to build a complete form from scratch. The recording is here;

http://pacific.adobe.acrobat.com/p29554294/

Here is the form I built:Leave Form (ok..  this is the form I built, but the other one is a bit tidier)

Some other useful links are here;

• http://www.acrobattown.com/au/
• http://www.adobe.com/ap/products/acrobatpro/tryout.html
• http://forms.stefcameron.com/
• http://blogs.adobe.com/stevex/
• http://www.adobe.com/devnet/livecycle/
• http://www.adobeeseminars.com.au/

Over the last few days there have been a few updates and announcements of note to Acrobat & LiveCycle users, plus anyone running Adobe Reader (and that’s most of us right?)

Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.3 and 8.2

A new security update is available for Acrobat & Reader users. I’m by no means a security expert but I understand the importance of staying up to date, so that was reason enough for me to upgrade. If you’d like more details, have a read of Reader Product Manager Steve Gottwals blog post.

Adobe Reader and Acrobat Version 7 End of Support

As of December 28th, 2009 Adobe is no longer provide updates for Adobe Reader & Acrobat 7. The full details about the End of Support are covered here, but my suggestion is to download & install Adobe Reader 9 straight away, its free after all. Of course if you are managing a desktop rollout of thousands of PCs, then take a look at Adobe’s Enterprise Deployment site for tools to help you.

Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES2

Late last year Adobe released a new version of Adobe LiveCycle ES. Part of this included an update to the Designer tool that also is bundled as part of the Acrobat 9 Pro & Acrobat 9 Pro Extended 9 license. Owners of these versions of Acrobat can upgrade to the new version for a small fee via the online Adobe Store. Trust me, the Action Builder alone is worth the upgrade!

Missing out on all the fun? You can grab the trial version of Acrobat from here!

Adobe recently announced that you can sign up to access the public beta of the next version of LiveCycle ES, and within that is the newest version of LiveCycle Designer. Here is a look at what is new for form designers;

Default Scripting Language for all forms
Ok, so you could sort of do this by making your own templates, but its a nice start.

Form Validation control
This one is cool, you can now specify at a form level how validation messages are displayed to the user, controlling things like how message boxes appear, colouring madatory fields, colour the border or background of fields that fail validation and set focus to the first item that fails.

Translation Identifiers
You can now have Designer add XLIFF identifiers to make it easier to translate the text in a form. Given that Designer forms can be saved in the XML based XDP format, you can open up the file after its designed to translate.

New locales
This one probably wont affect too many people I know but there is new support for Catalan, Basque & Tagalog

Paste options into lists
If you have data for a drop down list somewhere and you dont want to retype it you can now simply cut and paste!

Action Builder
I saved the best till last… over the last 5 years working with form designers one common feedback I get from many is that javascript is still too hard. The Designer team have come to the rescue with the new Action Builder, a wizard that allows you to add functionality that in the past would have required at least one line of code. Simply follow the wizard to perform tasks like showing / hiding a section, adding a new instance of a form, opening a web site and so on.

All up there is plenty for LiveCycle Designer users to get excited about, as well as less barriers for newcomers to the tool to start taking advantage of advanced features. Acrobat Pro users can look forward to an upgrade option as well, so sign up to access the public beta of the next version of LiveCycle ES and provide feedback today!

Australian journalist Brad Howarth recently interviewed me regarding my opinions on what Adobe is doing with Flash and has included my comments in an unbiased article recently published in February 20th B&T magazine.

Apart from choosing the technology that can get your message to as many people as possible, one key takeaway from the article is the importance of understanding the workflow between your developer and designers. This is especially important now that the demand for a great user experience is important.

Having creative people burn cycles slicing and dicing their artwork for developers is time consuming and costly. Developers cannot afford to ignore the user experience as there audience expect higher engagement and “that will do” is no longer an option. In fact, many projects are now start with a “front to back” approach (designing the user experience first then wiring it up behind) rather than the traditional “back to front” method which leaves the user interface as a final consideration.

Adobe has put an amazing amount of effort into the latest release of Creative Suite, CS4, that specifically targets these designer / developer workflows. New functionality such as being able to move from Photoshop to Fireworks to CSS compliant HTML in Dreamweaver are easier than ever before. Improvements such as Subversion support in Dreamweaver makes it even easier to sit alongside a dev project.

If you add to this that Flash is no longer constrained to a web browser and can be included in a desktop application (Adobe AIR) or inside a PDF (Acrobat 9) then all of a sudden your creative efforts have been leveraged across many different mediums.

While you can implement the new workflow improvements today, what many of you are waiting on anxiously is Flash Catalyst (previously codenamed Thermo). Catalyst will tighten the designer / developer workflow even more allowing true round tripping between tools.

While I intend to write a whole lot more about this, you can see a snippet of information held in the slides and samples from the recent Refresh event.

You can also read Brad’s full article by downloading the RTF files in Brad’s latest blog post. or purchasing the print edition as I did.

Slides from this week’s presentation in Canberra on LiveCycle Designer ES, including some pointers on creating accessible forms from Adobe’s Andrew Kirkpatrick;

Note that the workshop was mostly hands on demonstration, so the slides are minimal.

Adobe is hosting a free full day workshop at the Canberra Convention Centre on Tuesday 3rd February. If you keep wondering what the big deal with Acrobat (it only makes PDF right? Wrong!) or never really understood what Adobe LiveCycle was for, then come along and say hi.

The first part of the workshop is presented by Adobe colleagues Lindsay Brown and Adam Jeske. They will cover how to get the most out of Adobe Acrobat 9, including how to create accessible content, interactive presentations and use the new built in Flash runtime to create PDF portfolios.

At 1pm I’ll be taking over and presenting a two hour deep dive on building forms with LiveCycle Designer, as well as a quick look at how to take the new form and add a Flash based form guide and add workflow with the rest of the LiveCycle suite. Even if you have current budget issues, I’ll talk about how you can leverage the Business.gov.au SmartForms hosted service to get your smart forms hosted.

The full session breakdown of the workshop is listed in the attached PDF, and although it is free you will need to register to attend.

Adobe Workshop Registration Form