Announcing today – Tables on Acrobat.com Labs. Tables is the most recent addition to Acrobat.com, and joins Presentations and Buzzword. And it’s pretty amazing, if we do say so ourselves. Check it out: http://labs.acrobat.com. And don’t miss the Crash Course. You’ll see what we mean when you open your first table.
Today we announced Acrobat.com Presentations, a new beta service on http://labs.acrobat.com. Imagine the beauty, power and collaboration of Buzzword, only for presentations. I think Anthony Ha at Venture Beat said it pretty well in the first blog posting we saw in the wild, “…there’s a solid core for Adobe to build around…genuinely beautiful…the key feature of Acrobat.com is the collaboration it allows…”
You asked. We listened. Today, we’re announcing Acrobat.com Presentations.
This is a Labs Preview of our latest application – Presentations. It’s an exciting, new product and we want you to give it a spin!
Our new presentation tool joins Buzzword in the growing ranks of our online collaborative offerings. You can try the public beta version on our site (http://labs.acrobat.com). If you already have an Acrobat.com account, you can just sign in. Or, there’s free sign up for new users. UPDATE: Nov 2009 – Presentations is now live on the regular Acrobat.com site!
Fred Bayles, a Professor at Boston University School of Journalism, is a hard man to talk to. Not because he’s unfriendly or isn’t interested in talking, but he’s got other priorities. During the semester, he’s generally got a desk phone attached to one ear, a cell phone on the other and his fingers on a keyboard. At the other end of the phones and on his email are his students who are on Beacon Hill (Boston) staffing BU’s Statehouse Program. They’re reporters covering government and politics for a dozen local newspapers, websites, and radio stations around the state. And Bayles is their editor/teacher/mentor.
I’m going to show you some tricks I use with Buzzword to create really beautiful and professional business letters. Of course, just writing the letter in Buzzword in the first place will help your cause, because unlike Microsoft Word, one of Buzzword’s strongest qualities is what you see is what you print (WYSIWYP). This is true for the layout of your document as well as that indescribably beautiful thing that happens to a document when you run it though Adobe’s rendering engines. It just looks better. Period. But I’m a little off topic now. Let’s take a standard business letter and put Buzzword through its paces.
Guest post by Dan Weinstein, Ph.D.
(Dan Weinstein is currently Associate Professor of English at Dakota State University in Madison, South Dakota. There, roughly 1400 miles from his birthplace in New York City, he teaches both writing and web design and researches best practices for computer supported writing instruction.)
One key to good teaching is simply the habit of keeping one’s teaching house in order. Usually, there is quite a bit to keep track of. Documents that range from assignment descriptions to lectures, handouts, and tests need to be created, updated, distributed, archived, and kept ready for access at a moment’s notice (this is particularly true when one is teaching online, which I quite often do).
To minimize the burden of this sort of housekeeping and keep my attention where it should be (on my students), I have devised a system of file management that streamlines my workflow to the point where virtually all I have to think about are the critical human interactions the system exists to support.
To do this, I use two tools in tandem: Buzzword and a spreadsheet. Any garden variety spreadsheet will do, the only requirement being that it support hyperlinks. At the moment I use either OpenOffice.org Calc or Microsoft Excel. If Buzzword were to host a spreadsheet application, I would probably use that. 
I have to write documents frequently in both my professional and personal life. One thing I share in common with the rest of the Buzzword staff (and Adobe, for that matter) is a true love for crafting a really good document. What can I say, I’m a bit of a word processing nerd. When I have something really interesting to write, I look forward to the process. I really look forward to writing in Buzzword because it is so easy to produce a fabulous document. Today I want to talk about a little trick that lets you totally forget about the outside world and focus on the subject at hand – your writing.
Here at Buzzword Central, we’re really excited about the extended sharing capability we added in the latest release. In case you haven’t heard, Buzzword now enables its authors to make their documents accessible by anyone, with or without a Buzzword account, whether or not the others have signed in.
We call these open access documents, and we hope it will not only make Buzzword documents more ubiquitous, but will make sharing of documents easier. Especially in those cases where you have 20 or more people with whom you want to share a document (and the contents aren’t particularly sensitive), you can now just send them the URL to an open access doc and they can read it directly.
So here’s a little experiment in which you can view this blog entry in Buzzword…
Most crosswords in the daily newspaper are written by freelance constructors who submit proposed puzzles to the various editors. One such constructor is Andrew Greene, the author of this post. When not engaged with his cruciverbalism hobby, Andrew is a developer on the Buzzword team. Most recently he brought you spell checking in 19 different languages.
Guest author: Andrew M. Greene
Many people think of constructing and solving crossword puzzles as a solitary activity. While this may be true for some, there are organizations like the National Puzzlers’ League and events like the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (which was featured in the 2006 movie Wordplay) that bring puzzle solvers and constructors together.
Today’s puzzle in the Wall Street Journal was constructed by a team of three hobbyists who know one another from the National Puzzlers’ League. One lives in Denver, one lives in Vancouver, and I live in Boston. We used Buzzword to collaborate on writing the clues for this puzzle.
Yesterday, Jonathan Blum of TheStreet posted an entry on his Small Business center column with the evocative title Buzzword Loses Some of Its Charm. This obviously caught the attention of several of us on the Buzzword team.
We’re a little obsessive about customer feedback – the entire team subscribes to the feedback mailing list and reads each message. The reason is not to bask in the overwhelmingly positive responses we receive, but to pay attention to areas where we can improve the product. Our development schedule and priorities are largely determined by what we here from our customers – from the street, so to speak. So when we collectively turned to this article, it was with an honest interest in learning how we could do better.
First the good news…
Though the title is cautionary, much of the article is quite positive. For starters, it indicates that the folks at TheStreet, “have edited dozens of stories and blog items per week with Buzzword.” So we knew two things: they are speaking from experience, and they must appreciate Buzzword to use it so heavily. In fact, the article begins by laying out the case for Buzzword:
Make no mistake: Buzzword is the word-processing, document-handling real deal. For absolutely no upfront cost, you get a fully functional, easy-to-use word processor that edits, stores, marks up and files your documents.
Buzzword is no homemade, cheapie product. It has the entire design and business muscle of Adobe behind it. So it’s not going anywhere. And the design and user interface for this software is off the hook: Elegant fonts, excellent graphics tools and slick spellcheckers are my favorites among many rich layout and design features.
Listen up, digital content creators: Buzzword has a terrific export option that enables dead-on, clean extraction of text and graphics. Got a hungry blog to feed? Buzzword’s export-to-text feature has literally never coughed up even a bad spacing in our testing. Just try working that miracle using Microsoft Word or Google Apps.
Adobe also deserves credit for some neat programming sleights of hand here. Buzzword is based on Adobe’s Web language Flash, so all document processing is handled locally on your desktop. Under the right conditions, text appears in real time on the page. And the system can work on even very slow Web connections, and collaboration is well thought out and easy to use.
Then he summarizes the enumerated benefits of Buzzword this way:
In many ways, Buzzword is one of the best word processors you can buy (sic). Period.
