OT - iPad in the news today ...

[Swingman]

The price will fall. Today the iPhone can be had for $99, down from $599 when originally released.

You're right about pdf format. I love pdf for its 'portability' in my business.

A couple of years ago all of our invoices were sent and received via FAX.

I'd say that 98%+ are now done via e-mail in pdf format.

And with a free app like BullZip:

it is even easier to "pdf" documents, maps, plans, invoices, proposals, etc.

Sure makes "doing business" easier, quicker, and a damn sight more efficient.

[Dave Balderstone]

PDF is amazingly useful for moving print documents around. It's a huge component of our publishing workflow. But for the web? Not so much. More of a PITA.

[J. Clarke]

Far as I'm concerned Adobe is the antichrist for foisting Flash and the PDF and Postscript off on an unsuspecting world, but that ship has sailed, they've won, and any viable system has to be able to cope with them in the modern world. Maybe Osama will fly a plane into them or something but until that happens we're stuck with their crap.

[Robatoy]

All my Mac's will allow you to 'print' to .pdf. Handy as a bag of chips/pocket on a shirt. PDF in vector mode are far more reliable than any of the 100 .eps formats. It has made my workflow from Vectorworks to my CNC seamless.

[Swingman]

Another workflow expediter is my wireless Brother printer that will "copy" to pdf format and send it via wireless to any computer on the network ... handy for those faxes that come in and need to be e-mailed to someone else.

[Dave Balderstone]

I have to disagree with you on PostScript. It revolutionized the publishing industry where I've worked for more than 30 years.

PDF has its place, but the web isn't it.

[Robatoy]

Indeedie. PDF's have simplified my life reliably, effectively and these days justabout anybody can open them. Well done Adobe. I cannot say that I am too impressed with Adobe in other areas, but that is for another thread. hint: I own all current licenses for Illustrator and Photoshop...but for my macs. Now that my CNC has pushed me into running PC gear, do you think those Adobe people would simply issue me a couple of licenses so that I can run my paid-for software on the platform of my choice?

[Larry Jaques]

On Sat, 30 Jan 2010 10:04:29 -0600, the infamous Dave Balderstone scrawled the following:

Small Flash animations are fine. Flash sites suck the big one.

-- Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will. -- George Bernard Shaw

[Larry Jaques]

On Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:29:11 -0500, the infamous "J. Clarke" scrawled the following:

...and then charge an arm and _both_ legs for use of their tools to work with 'em...

They're the Micro$oft of graphics, though their products do work after a monstrous vertical cliff of learning. I hate to go from Photoshop to GIMP, but I may in the next computer. I doubt Adobe will allow me to move the CS over to Win7, even if M$ does.

-- Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will. -- George Bernard Shaw

[Steve]

Uh, PDF is NOT Flash.

Yes, PDF is firmly entrenched. It's revolutionized the industry I'm in. Where we once loaded files on disc and sent them to a prep house to be output to film to be MAILED to printers and publications or the like while shlepping printouts to our clients for approvals, we now just send PDFs to both.

Which really sucks for the prep houses... who've largely disappeared.

Flash still bites the big one. (Go, HTML5!)

[Steve]

Anything can be had for a price... Adobe will tell you what that price is but it's likely to be full boat when it's cross-platform, unless you surrender your Mac licenses.

[Steve]

Not for display online, perhaps, but it's remarkably efficient for transporting gobs of data, even it that data began as TIFFs. I was able to download a 400+ -page book yesterday, OCR it, and have a searchable file in about a half-hour. How long would it have taken to page through a paper document? How long would it have taken to page through the PDF? A lot longer than the searchable PDF, though the paper document would have have been quicker than non-searchable PDF.

But enough of this -- let's go make sawdust!

[J. Clarke]

Broadband has made PDFs much more useful, but a lot of us have not-fond memories of having do download some immense file over a 300 baud connection, in its entirety, before we could begin looking for the one lousy line of information we needed.

And OCR? That was worthless until desktops hit Cray speed.

[Dave Balderstone]

I recall accepting a contract to do OCR work about 17 -18 years ago.

It turned out it was more profitable for SWMBO to just key the stuff, because she could type 120 wpm with 98% accuracy.

[J. Clarke]

When the browsers that most people use support it then perhaps it will come into widespread use.

Didn't those morons learn anything from the pre-OSX Mac?

But what? If they can't tell you what it does for you in a single sentence then they're fighting an uphill battle. So far the only simple summary I can think of is "ipad--it looks cool".

[Larry Jaques]

On Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:13:06 -0500, the infamous "J. Clarke" scrawled the following:

I started with a screaming fast modem, 1,200 baud. I remember marveling at the zoomy 1-character-per-second speed, yelonblk text showing on the huge 14" monitor! Thank Crom that's no longer the norm. Can you imagine having to download these huge spams at that speed, paying for phone time the whole way? There'd have been lynchings. (IMHO, there still should be.)

AFAIC, it still is. Searching for stray characters it misses takes longer than retyping the page.

-- Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will. -- George Bernard Shaw

[Dave Balderstone]

I've been amazed at what Acrobat can pull out of a scanned file saved as a PDF, actually. Well above 99% accuracy most times.

[Robatoy]

That's all it takes to make it desirable. Jobs will sell millions. It's all about style. But, I think it missed one very important feature. Can't stick in a DVD and watch a movie.

[Puckdropper]

Robert Haar wrote in news:C789F2F0.487B61% [e-mail]:

*snip*

Sorta like something a person can carry around with them and keep track of their appointments, contacts, and business notes? Look Apple's invented the PDA!

Sure would be interested if it was Newton reincarnated. Sounds like it's got a lot of the features I'd include if I could redesign it.

Puckdropper

[Han]

Robatoy wrote in news:6cd344ea-36c7-4e65-b9b8- [e-mail]:

What's a DVD?