Technical

Come join us for a seminar on Tuesday, July 22nd @ 11:30 am EDT / 8:30am PDT to learn more about Acrobat.com's developer web services and our progress with “Cocomo.” We’ll discuss the APIs available today and where we are headed, including when everyone will finally be able to try out “Cocomo.”

To join the seminar, simply go to http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/aclearn/. Enter as a guest and you will be taken to a Connect Pro room. The room will be opened 15 minutes before the start of the session. Conference call information will be provided inside the Connect room.

UPDATE: If you missed the eSeminar, the recording is available here.

Wow, glad to have that behind us, now back to work changing the way people work, for the better!

Thanks for all the attention, but you people should stop surfing the web over breakfast coffee and before and after lunch, and spread your tire-kicking out a little! Just kidding, that's life on the web and we were mostly ready for it, but it is pretty tense watching the sun rise over the world on a launch day like Monday.

I'll come back to more details on the "mostly" stuff and lessons learned sometime soon, but I wanted to give a quick update on how things are going, and clarify some stray memes about Acrobat.com that are flying around on the series of tubes serving the web.

Continue reading "Now the real work begins." »

Steven Gemmen created a really cool AIR application called "Handout" using the Share APIs. Check it out http://initapp.com/2007/10/26/new-air-app-handout-powered-by-adobe-share/.

We’ve often been asked to extend Buzzword support to Firefox on Linux. As we’ve said before (pointer to previous post), Linux is an important platform for Buzzword, and the feedback we’ve received has only strengthened that impression. So, we’ve done some of the preliminary work required to get Buzzword running on Linux.

Continue reading "Buzzword for Linux Firefox Users" »

We have heard from a lot of users and prospective users that there’s interest in getting Buzzword onto Linux. Rest assured that Linux, in at least some of its forms and browsers, is on our list of things to do. Not only are the ranks of Linux users swelling, the platform itself is consistent with everything Buzzword stands for - free, ubiquitous and high quality software for everyone.

More Browser Challenges

The big challenge is that it takes custom JavaScript developed for each browser in order to get around some Flash limitations and get rich text onto and off of the clipboard and handle all keystroke combinations.

But, you’re thinking, since Buzzword runs in Firefox on Windows and Mac, it should just work automatically in Firefox/Linux, right? Unfortunately, the Linux version of Firefox isn’t an exact replica of other Firefox versions, so we’ll have to create a Linux/Firefox specific version of Buzzword.

We’ve posted a little on the blog about the tradeoffs of working on supporting additional browsers and operating systems, vs. getting core features up and running.

Continue reading "Buzzword on Linux" »

One of the challenges of delivering desktop-quality software inside a browser is, well, the browser itself. Browsers have clearly come a long way in the last 14 years, but they still fall short of the system level services required to deploy a desktop application.

Fortunately, the Flash Player alleviates some of these shortcomings. For one thing, Flash allows visual experiences far beyond a browser’s native capabilities. The Flash Player also handles some system level chores. We chose the Flash platform over AJAX because it allowed us to get much closer to desktop functionality than native browser and html capabilities.

We work a lot of sleight-of-hand tricks to allow Buzzword to act like a desktop application even though it’s running inside a browser. However, some things are beyond the scope of what current-day browsers permit, due to their architecture, and what Flash permits due to its security model.

So here are a couple browser-related challenges we’re either living with or trying to work around.

Continue reading "Browser Challenges" »

A number of Buzzword Preview testers have asked us to support some of the newer browsers such as Opera, Camino, K-Meleon, Shiira, or Safari 3.0 (currently in beta). The question arises from the observation that most of these are based on the same engines as the browsers we already support, so why don’t we support these others as well?

We actually have to do a lot of work behind the scenes to make keyboard handling and system clipboard import/export function correctly, and we have to do this a bit differently for each browser, even those that are based on the same underlying engine. We have focused so far on the most popular browsers, with the goal of making sure that every user, whether on Windows or Mac, has two supported browsers from which to choose.

The trade off is that we need to use developer and tester hours to support each browser. These are the same hours that we can also use to develop and test features like Spell Check and File Import/Export. It’s a matter of prioritization, and our thinking is that since we know that everyone has Internet Explorer, Safari, or Firefox available to them, we’ll support those for now.

(Ed. note: when this was written, AIR was referred to as "Apollo")

At the Web 2.0 Expo this week, we had the opportunity to demo and discuss Buzzword in the Adobe booth. Our conversations often began with the question, "Can you show us Apollo?" The flip answer, "No we can't, it's invisible."

This was a bit of an exaggeration: we had Buzzword displayed on each of two screens, side-by-side: one instance in a browser, the other in Apollo. The Buzzword application looked virtually identical, the only visible difference was the title bar of each window - one of which read "Apollo Buzzword" as well as some other browser artifacts. (Note that we were demoing on a Mac, which requires a title bar; on Windows we can remove any trace of Apollo).

"So," one visitor asked, "is Apollo another kind browser?" The short answer: well, sort of.

Continue reading "What AIR Means to Buzzword" »

In this post, we want to discuss how we're building Buzzword.

In 2004, we started with the simple notion that we wanted to build a word-processor for the web. The discussion on how to build it came down to the four obvious approaches: .NET, Java, AJAX or Flash (using the Adobe Flex development environment). Though our team had extensive expertise in .NET, it wasn't a practical choice for us since we started with the assumption that this must be a true cross-platform application. From the start, one of our primary audiences has been students, and we knew that the Mac platform was very popular in that crowd.

Why not AJAX?

Continue reading "Flash vs. Ajax" »