Apple Briefs

Last week Adobe announced Acrobat 9 and made it available for preorder. There will be three versions of Acrobat 9: Standard, Pro, and Pro Extended. Of these, only Pro appears to be available for Mac OS X. Many of the new features of Acrobat 9 focus on interactivity and multimedia. For example, Acrobat 9 will support embedded Flash content. Acrobat 9 Pro Extended allows you to add video, audio, demos, and more to Microsoft Powerpoint presentations. The big hook for lawyers using Acrobat is the idea of the paperless office. Acrobat 9 does add a few features that should help small businesses work without paper:

• Create a PDF from the contents of the clipboard
• Create a PDF from a portion of a webpage, keeping links and interactive content intact (unfortunately, this feature is for Windows and IE only)
• Compare PDFs and highlight the differences
• Combine multiple documents into a single PDF Portfolio
• Create forms and track responses online at Acrobat.com
• Collaborate on a document using Acrobat.com
• Encrypt documents with 256-bit encryption

None of these are “must have” features in my mind. Everything except PDF comparisons can be done adequately in other ways. Still, having a single integrated tool is nice (instead of, for example, having to run PGP for encryption or send multiple documents in a zip file instead of a PDF portfolio).