Over on the Adobe LiveCycle Developer Center, there's a short video tutorial I recorded on what it's like using LiveCycle Designer in Workbench.
It's not a tutorial so much as it is a quick tour, but if you're curious about LiveCycle, Designer, Workbench and how they interact, have a look.
I haven't posted in a little while, but I'm going to try to get back into it. Famous last words, I know, but I'll start with a post with some real content in it.
Quite a few people have commented on an entry I posted back over a year ago, where I talk about the data format that's POSTed from a form to an HTTP server. The data format is supposed to look something like this:
TextField1=test1&TextField2=test2&RichTextField=&ListBox1=&RadioButtonList=
However, some of you said that you were getting data that looked like this:
TextField1=test1TextField2=test2RichTextField=ListBox1=RadioButtonList=
This was actually a bug in Acrobat 8.0, and is fixed in the 8.1 update. If you're running Acrobat 8.0, allow the Adobe Updater to install Acrobat 8.1 and you'll get the data in the correct format.
Acrobat 8 has been announced, and we're in the Acrobat 8 Professional box so we share a little bit of that spotlight.
There's a lot to talk about with version 8. One of the big new features is a new type of form designed for users who need to take an existing form (either scanned or generated in some other program) and make it an interactive, fillable form while preserving the exact look of the original form. Just what you'd expect from PDF. We'll be talking about this more once more infomation on the product has been released.
On a related note, it's great to see Breeze getting the spotlight through it's rebranding as Acrobat Connect. Breeze is the best collaboration tool I've used.
I'm not going to MAX this year. I went last year, though, and had a great time.
Last year's MAX experience for me was mostly about discovering that the Flash player has become a serious virtual machine and runtime for even CPU-intensive applications, thanks to its ability to compile ActionScript down to native code. There's even a Commodore 64 emulator for Flash Player 9.
And it was about discovering Flex and Flex Builder, the Eclipse-based IDE that you use to build Flex apps. I had no experience with Flex before MAX; now it's near the top of my "things to dive into more deeply" list.
Last year, MAX happened just before the Adobe / Macromedia merger was finalized, so there wasn't any official Adobe sessions; this year, MAX has a track for Adobe LiveCycle Technologies.
This year Flash and Flex folks will have the opportunity to discover LiveCycle the way we LiveCycle folks had the opportunity last year to discover Flash and Flex.
If you're in that boat, don't miss Matt Butler's session on Adobe's Core LiveCycle Architecture and Hands On Deployment, and Sanga Viswanathan's session, LiveCycle 8: What's Coming.
Working for Adobe, I have access to Adobe software. Acrobat is a tool I don't think I would have considered buying before starting with Adobe, but after using it for the last two years, I can say it's right up there with Microsoft Office as one of the things I'd have to have on a new computer.
I was reminded of this just recently, when I was filling out the Tarion 30 day warranty form for my new house.
I received a paper copy of this form as part of the huge stack of documents I got when the house sale closed, but after compiling a list of ~30 items, I just didn't feel like writing it all out. That's where Acrobat comes in.
Fillable forms come in two flavours: XFA and Acroform. Acroform forms are forms where you've placed the input fields on the form using Acrobat itself; XFA forms are forms created using the Form Designer tool.
I found the forms online, but they're not fillable. This is pretty common - form authors create forms using something like Illustrator or InDesign, and then create a PDF from that and just post it online, rather than taking the extra step of importing that into Form Designer and adding fields.
But Acrobat has a feature that's designed for this specific problem: The Typewriter Tool.
I loaded up the Tarion form, got out my handy typewriter, and filled out the form. Printed it, signed it, and faxed it off.
The nice thing about doing it this way is that as I was filling out the form, quite a few times I had to go back and edit something; if I was filling it out on paper, that would have been impossible. I could have filled out a draft on paper and then copied it to the real form, but that's just more work.
What would the next best thing have been? Loading a bitmap of the form into PhotoShop and filling it out there, I guess - doable, but not nearly as easy.