You know what would be more interesting than Adobe introducing Acrobat 9? Actual acrobats. Hey, we’re thrilled that the venerable PDF creation program is hitting a major new version, but not nearly as thrilled as we’d be if they would celebrate it with, say, tumbling and trapeze artists. Or even a live performance of The Acro-Brats. I’d take that too.
But no, all we get are a bunch of new features, like native Flash support in PDFs (oh, good, because I’ve always wanted my user manuals to have crazy animations), and “PDF portfolios.” There’s also built-in support for the new Acrobat.com, which just launched into beta yesterday; it’s a service for creating documents online and collaborating with others, as well as part of Adobe’s plan of bringing versions of many of their popular apps to the web (they’ve already done so with Photoshop earlier this year).
Acrobat 9 will be available in July for Windows and OS X in three different flavors. Oddly enough, only one version will be available for OS X: the Pro edition ($449; $159 upgrade). The Standard ($299; $99 upgrade) and Pro Extended ($699; $229 upgrade) are Windows-only. What gives, Adobe?
If you’re looking for more details, the Mothership has a First Look up in its usual speedy fashion, courtesy of our PCWorld cousins.
Update: As commenter Goobimama correctly points out, Mac users can only get the Pro version. The hell?
No sir you are a little wrong in that. The Standard and Pro Extended versions are only available for Windows. Mac OS X seems to be getting the silent treatment here.
YouTube has video of some awesome acrobats:
http://youtube.com/results?search_query=shanghai+acrobats&search_type=
jd/adobe
Acrobat 8 was only available on Mac OS as a Pro flavour as well. The only reason I didn't end up buying it. Very disappointed by Adobe on that one.