Users of Adobe’s Reader and Acrobat products will want to perform an update or upgrade today, depending on the software version they have in place. A JavaScript vulnerability received a Critical rating from Adobe, meriting immediate attention.

“This vulnerability would cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system,” Adobe said in its security bulletin. “This update resolves an input validation issue in a JavaScript method that could potentially lead to remote code execution.”

People on versions up to 8.1.2 of Reader and Acrobat may update their products with a security fix, currently available for download. Adobe recommended users of Acrobat and Reader 7 update those products to version 7.1.0.

SecurityFocus noted the Information Security Team of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory picked up on the problem with Acrobat and Reader. Vulnerable Adobe products fail to adequately sanitize user input to prevent exploitation.

Such sanitization issues have plagued websites all over the Internet. Their ease of exploitation makes them a favorite avenue of attack for malicious types, a problem exacerbated by failure to detect and update vulnerable products before exploits hit.

I got a demo and briefing from Peter Ryce, a "Connectionist" (aka Technical Evangelist) at Adobe. You can hear Peter give you a short recorded overview of the upgrade at this link. He explained that the upgrade affects several areas of operation in the Connect products.

The most important upgrade is the use of a new codec in the video handling portions of Connect. A codec is the software algorithm that compresses and reconstitutes the bit stream making up the video signal. Connect previously used the codec that came standard in Flash version 6 (Connect is completely Flash-based and uses the power of that software to drive both the presenter and audience side of the application). Adobe did some market penetration studies and concluded that Flash 8 or 9 is now installed on most computer systems (Peter mentioned a 95-96 adoption rate), so they felt comfortable in upgrading Connect to use the improved codec included in those versions of the software.

The new codec significantly reduces the amount of information flowing over the Internet when a presenter shows a video, HTML animation, or screen share from his or her desktop. The smaller bandwidth usage makes for a faster and smoother playback on the audience’s computers. Peter says that in their testing they saw anywhere from three to six times improvements in transmission quality over the old release.

I asked about improvements to audio playback and Peter said that audio improvements would purely be a side effect of the smaller video bandwidth. They didn’t change the audio streaming algorithms, but there is now more "room" for the audio data to move through the Web to participants’ computers since the video takes up less "space." (I’m simplifying because this isn’t a technical forum. Datacomm professionals are advised to take a stress pill.)

Adobe hired handl Consulting to run performance tests on the new Connect screen sharing versus WebEx, Live Meeting, GoToMeeting, and Yugma. You can view the report here. The summary conclusion was that Connect beat the combined average performance of those four in categories of Latency, Smoothness, Fidelity, Total Bandwidth Consumption, and Average Bandwidth Consumption. The report does not deliver head-to-head comparisons against any one of the competitors taken alone.

I had Peter show me a number of screen sharing scenarios. My personal take is that it is indeed an improvement and good enough for most common conferencing applications. But when I asked Peter to run my PowerPoint torture test in full screen slide show mode, I was able to spot obvious areas where the polling and transmission of large amounts of data couldn’t keep up with the full slide redraws necessary to do smooth slide transitions.

The screen sharing feature that I found most disconcerting was the way Adobe chose to implement cursor display from the presenter’s desktop. Instead of transmitting the image of the cursor (which requires constantly erasing and redrawing not only the cursor, but the information under it), Connect transmits only the location coordinates of the cursor. It is physically drawn on each audience member’s screen as a local image. This is very efficient, but has inevitable drawbacks. If you change your desktop cursor (for instance, using an extra large cursor for better visibility) the audience doesn’t see it that way. If you are demonstrating a software application that changes the cursor as a visual indicator, your audience won’t see it. And if you show a web page, your audience won’t see cursor changes such as an hourglass or hand symbol, which are important indicators in browser operations.

The locally drawn cursor also annoyed me, as it has a "cute" little icon attached to it that indicates you are viewing the presenter’s cursor rather than your own. The icon is distracting and covers up more space than it needs to. I suggested that Adobe offer an option to see a "normal" cursor in this mode. Heck, it’s just a locally loaded symbol… they could make an entire gallery of cursors available at the viewer’s preference!

The remaining improvements included in the Service Pack are:

• Support for additional languages. Users can see all onscreen menus, commands, messages, help, and documentation in languages such as Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish.
• Support for native Intel chipsets on Macintosh computers. Mac users no longer have to configure their settings to use the Rosetta emulation mode. A single universal code base runs Connect on both PowerPC and Intel machines.
• Support for integrated telephone user management from the web console for enterprises using Avaya or Cisco MeetingPlace switches. This complements the existing phone management through Premiere Global audio conferencing.
• Creation of a new Connect user group forum for sharing information in an online community format.

That’s a nice collection of improvements for an interim Service Pack. My respect for the Connect platform continues to grow. If this is what they do between release numbers, I can’t wait for the next formal release!

By the way, you can see the Acrobat Connect platform in action this Thursday, September 20, when I use it to deliver a free webinar on how to make your webinars more effective.

Comments

So here it is.

October 19th, 2005

I have been through hell trying to figure out how to permanently delete the annoying little PDFMaker toolbar that Acrobat 7.0 installs in Word, Excel, Outlook, etc.

This toolbar cannot be turned off by any ordinary means. It pops up in different places in the application, sometimes making a two-tiered toolbar set into a three-tiered one.

It’s in the way, it serves no purpose when all one has to do is print to PDF anyway.

I did a few hours of searching before I found this fix. Here’s the entire document if you’d like to read it, but I’ll summarize below.

1. Open the Windows registry by typing ‘regedit’ at the command line.

2. Backup the registry before making changes.

3. Click on the key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE]
then go through SOFTWAREMicrosoftOfficeWordAddinsPDFMaker.OfficeAddin].

4. Change the subkey called “LoadBehavior” from a value of 3 to a value of 0.

5. This makes the change for Word; to do it for the other Office apps do the same thing (Excel, Outlook, Access, Publisher).

Easy-peasy and so much less of a headache. I love Photoshop but I really think less of Adobe for installing this little annoyance that insinuates itself into everything else.

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Debbie Campbell
Parallax Web Design | Web Design Blog

Adobe announced “Commercial Availability” of Acrobat Connect today. That means that the free trial period they had been running, allowing all those Adobe Acrobat users to try out personal web conferencing meeting rooms, is over.

It costs $39/month or $395/year. This is where the rubber meets the road. Will Acrobat lead enough new customers to the web conferencing product? Will they pay for the privilege? Time will tell.

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With a background in software development and marketing, Ken has been producing and delivering business webinars since 1999. His background in public speaking, radio, stage acting, and training has given him a unique perspective on what it takes to create a compelling and effective presentation. Currently Ken offers consulting services through his company Webinar Success (www.wsuccess.com).

He has screen shots, information on specific features, and comparison points with other types of web conferencing products (he doesn’t do a head-to-head comparison against named vendors). Set aside some time and go through it if you are considering purchasing or re-evaluating your current web conferencing product.

For what it’s worth, I like Acrobat Connect as well. All the features Robin talked about are on the money. For me, the two biggest product lacks at the moment are: There is no easy way to produce a distributable recording file of your webinar; There is no way for audience members to provide “mood indicator” feedback to the presenter unless you let them see the full attendee list. Those are offset by a lot of positive aspects.

And now I have to close off this message. I’m about to give a webinar with Adobe using Connect Pro!

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With a background in software development and marketing, Ken has been producing and delivering business webinars since 1999. His background in public speaking, radio, stage acting, and training has given him a unique perspective on what it takes to create a compelling and effective presentation. Currently Ken offers consulting services through his company Webinar Success (www.wsuccess.com).

It’s also the launch of Connect which is what my team has been working on: a Flex 2 trial signup application, backed by ColdFusion, leading to the new always-on, personal meeting room that is Connect. A simpler user experience than Connect Professional (the new version of Breeze) at a very reasonable $39 per month – although you can get a free trial through the end of the year right now

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Sean is currently Senior Computer Scientist and Team Lead in the
Hosted Services group at Adobe Systems Incorporated. He has worked in
the IT industry for nearly twenty-five years, first in database
systems and compilers (serving eight years on the ANSI C++ Standards
Committee), then in mobile telecoms, and finally in web development.
Sean is a staunch advocate of software standards and best practices,
and is a well-known and respected speaker on these subjects. Sean has
championed and contributed to a number of ColdFusion frameworks, and
is a frequent publisher on his blog, http://corfield.org/

I guess Google has noticed that most people only use one thing, the search engine (Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, was quoted as saying that even its most die-hard fans can’t remember many of its major products).

Well, remember that Adobe Acrobat 8 video demo I put up last week? Turns out it had 50% more visits than our other podcasts last week. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed that, either. Over on Channel 9 our videos regularly got more visits than the Web site for the product or service we were discussing.

It’s a YouTube, er Google Video, world.

So, here’s a little test I did. I searched for:

Blogger Demo video. None found.

Google Calendar Demo video. None found.

Google Desktop Demo video. None found. Even worse is that there’s one of my videos there from Channel 9 showing off a competitive product.

Google Dodgeball Demo video. None found.

Google Earth Demo video. None found. Oh, there’s another one of my Channel 9 videos again.

Google Groups Demo video. None found. Another one of my Channel 9 videos are there.

Google Maps Demo video. None found. Another one of my Channel 9 videos are there.

Should I go on? I could – seems like almost none of the Google product teams has put a simple video demo of its products up online and if they have, they certainly didn’t make them findable. Seems to me that this would be a great thing to do for Google. I’m sure such videos would be linked into Wikipedia’s list almost instantly.

So, here’s my offer. I’ll come over and do an interviewwith each of your product teams and get a five-minute demo of your products. With my sooopppeeerrrr dddooooppppeeeerrrrr Sony HD camcorder. For free.

That’s what we did on Friday for Scrapblog and Jajah (I don’t charge for this, and am doing it for lots of little companies – we’ll even have a new show we’ll announce soon where it’ll be even easier to get your demo online, you won’t even need to convince me via email that I should come over).

Even better offer for Google? I’ll even put all the Google ones up on Google Video as well as put them on the ScobleShow.

Oh, how powerful is this? Well, do a Google search for “Adobe Acrobat 8 video demo” and what do you find? My video. And, yes, we’re getting visits from Google so I know someone is looking for video demos of products.

Anyway, want to do a demo? 425-205-1921. You won’t even need to pay $30,000 like you would if you were going to this week’s Demo conference (everyone who gets on the stage there pays for the privilege and everyone in the audience pays too).

Why do they pay? Because they know the power of demoing to an influential audience. Funny thing is that there’s a far cheaper (and more effective) way to do the same demo on my show. By the way, the number of people who’ve now seen the Adobe Acrobat 8 video I did is many times bigger than the attendance of the Demo conference this week.

It’s amazing to me that Google hasn’t done this on its own, actually.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …

Particularly on sites that pride themselves on covering everything that moves on the Web like TechCrunch or GigaOM.

But, no, no coverage at all about Adobe Acrobat. Despite having something like 500+ million players loaded on computers near you (Adobe’s numbers, but sounds pretty accurate) there’s nothing out there.

Then I went to Google Blog Search and Technorati and did searches for other bloggers who are covering the new Acrobat announcements. Nothing. Even CNET’s News.com has nothing up about it. You would think that at least someone would post the ceremonial “that sucks” kind of commentary. But, no, just silence. It’s like everyone is reading about the HP scandal and forgot that other stuff could happen.

Interesting. But if some new video service or a new Web 2.0 company or service were announced right now (even from my own company) it’d get covered all over the place.

What do you make of that?

By the way, how do I know that the bloggers are missing out? Cause Christopher Coulter is here at the ScobleCasa. He watched the demo of Acrobat 8 and said “that’s cool” at several places. He even said nice things about my video skills. Oh, boy, now the world has gone topsy turvy.

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The new version allows you to gather documents from different sources, create intelligent forms, as well as collaborate on projects from either side of the firewall.

“Acrobat and PDF have made it easier for dispersed project teams to share document-based information,” said Terrence Pallotto, business analyst and professional engineer with HNTB Corporation. “Acrobat 7.0 Professional opens up the review, markup and approval process by enabling enhanced capabilities in Adobe Reader. Now, all of our clients, partners and employees can comment on materials electronically without having to purchase specialized software like CAD applications.”

“In our business, responding efficiently to customer problems requires quick access to a wide range of information, from technical documents outlining systems to detailed maps highlighting system locations,” said Phil Lee, executive vice president of Layton Graphics. “Acrobat 7.0 will enable us to offer our customers better service. Faster application performance means we can get to customer data more quickly and, even more important, the intelligence inherent in PDF means Acrobat 7.0 provides us access to the high-value data that lies beneath the surface of documents.”

In addition to Acrobat 7.0, Adobe released their LiveCycle Policy Server which enables organizations to apply digital rights to documents to ensure confidentiality and privacy.

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Unfortunately, however, few take full advantage of Acrobat’s capabilities. As a result, their documents are not as effective as they could be.

Here are seven easy ways to improve the image and effectiveness of your Acrobat files.

1. Activate links:

E-mail and web site URLs on many Acrobat files look like active links, but don’t function. Although blue and underlined, the links do not take readers to different pages in the publication, launch their e-mail program and address an e-mail, or open an Internet browser and go to a web site.

After creating an Acrobat file, you must activate the links. Start by selecting the Advanced Editing Option, and use the Link tool, to outline the link, assign an action, and format the link.

Then, you must remember to re-save your Acrobat publication.

Most important, every time you return to the original program and make any changes and create an updated Acrobat file, you must remember to reactivate the links! Otherwise, the links will no longer function-even though they will still appear blue and underlined.

2. Insert and delete pages:

The full version of Acrobat Distiller permits you to insert, delete, and extract-or copy-pages from one Acrobat document to another.

This permits you to create “composite” publications containing pages created with several software programs.

You can include pages created with a variety of software applications with a framework created using Microsoft word. This newsletter, for example, contains a copy of the Mind Map I used to organize my thoughts. The page shows how you can use Mind Mapping to do better work in less time.

3. Save as…

Acrobat’s Save As… command permits you to create a composite document, separate from the original .PDF files. This makes it easy to reuse your original “framework” files.

4. Headers and footers:

After creating a composite Acrobat file, you can add headers and footers. These can include title, author, client information, copyright information, date, and page numbers.

5. Comments:

Although intended for team review and editing of publications, you can use Acrobat’s Comments feature to draw your reader’s attention to specific passages or discuss their relevance.

You can use Comments to add a personal touch to formal documents intended for specific individuals, (for example, “Fred: I inserted this after you requested it when we met in July in Las Vegas. Roger”)

6. Web browser:

Adobe Acrobat Distiller can capture and save web site pages. This works better than saving or printing from your web browser. It avoids cutting illustrations or lines of text in half as often occurs when printing from a browser.

By saving at frequent intervals, you can keep track of how your competitor’s web site changes over time.

7. File size:

The smaller the file, the faster it can be downloaded or sent as an e-mail attachment.

Always choose the appropriate resolution when creating a .PDF file. Documents intended for on-screen reading and desktop printing do not require as much information as publications intended for four-color printing on glossy paper by commercial printers.

After deleting pages or extensive editing, use File>Save As… to save your publication under the original filename. (A prompt will appear warning you that the original file will be over-written. This purges unnecessary information.

Adobe Acrobat is a powerful tool that few people take full advantage of. Using these seven techniques, your documents will be more effective.

Roger C. Parker knows the secrets to promoting your business one page at a time. Find out the simple way to keep in constant touch with your customers, while saving you time and money. Visit www.OnePageNewsletters.com for your three free reports.