I took some time tonight to check out the new Acrobat.com, which I mentioned yesterday. Acrobat.com is Adobe's new document sharing, collaborating, and storage system. It makes liberal use of Flash, and offers a lot of potential.
I have to admit that it is pretty slick overall, with a beautiful, smooth interface, and a pretty solid stack of features. However, there are quite a few things that disturbed me from the get go. What follows is my experience so far.
Acrobat.com
To begin with, I started with the main Acrobat.com interface. When you first arrive at the Acrobat.com page, you're presented with a series of icons that show you what you can do at the site. To log in, I looked for the simple sign in link or icon, but couldn't find one, so I had to click one of the icons and then click the begin button. This is, to me, a big no-no in terms of design. It goes in the face of accept process, which is that when I go to a site, I expect to be able to either log-in from a box on the front page, or link a simple link somewhere on that page, visible on loading, and log right in.
Once you enter, you're presented with the section of whatever button you clicked.
I decided, since I didn't have any files listed, that I would set about uploading some documents. When I clicked the upload button, the panel split open so that the files list became a lower pane, which was still usable. I oohed and ahhed a little, and then moved on.While I picked a series of .docx files to upload from a folder on my computer, the 'instruction pdf's' populated in the files pane below. I finished picking a series of 5 .docx (Word 2007 files) and a .pdf (an Acrobat Portable Document File) files, and then I hit upload. At first, 2 files appeared pretty much right away, which I expected since they were small documents, and logically should have uploaded quickly, but then things seemed to stall and the other files weren't showing up. The status indicator at the bottom just spun, telling me that uploading was happening.
I figured I would just go ahead and continue poking around while I waited, so I clicked one of the files. It lit up, as it was selected, but nothing happened. The down arrow next to the file present me with the context menu I needed to open it. Another indicator appeared and I was told that a Flash preview of my file was being prepared, then a moment later I was informed that the preview couldn't be created, although I wasn't told why. I went back to my file list and tried the other file that was there, noticing that I was still being told that uploading was happening, but nothing new had shown up yet. I was told the same with the second .docx file as the first.
I thought that perhaps some processing needed to happen in the background, and decided to let it sit for a little while. After a reasonable amount of time, I came back, but nothing had changed. Feeling a little defeated, and impatient, I closed the tab, and then re-logged in. When I got back, I found that the 2 original files were still there, alone, and of course, they still wouldn't give me a preview. Frustrated, I deleted these files, and uploaded .pdf versions of the same files.
This worked fine, although I had to close the tab again when I'd tried to look at one of the introductory files they had, while scrolling around, my cursor changed to a pointer finger, and when I tried to navigate around again, I couldn't. This might sound strange, but the bottom line is that I couldn't use the interface anymore.
Once I returned, I checked out a few of my documents and discovered that navigating and using the files was a fairly smooth process, and overall worked pretty well. While I had wanted to check out the process of converting a file to a .pdf format, but couldn't since I couldn't use .docx file, I wasn't able to test out that function. Apparently, though, after reading some of the documentation, you get 5GB of storage, but you can only convert 5 files into .pdf, which seems like an extremely weak limitation, for so many reasons. (Primarily because almost every word processing application on the planet allows you to convert your files to .pdf) I decided at this point, I would check out buzzword, their new embedded flash based word processor.
Buzzword
When you change to Buzzword, you discover that you're in a similar interface, but it's a completely separate application from acrobat.com. I'm not sure why this is, to be honest, because it seems like they should be able to integrate the systems together. The problem with having them separate is that under acrobat.com's 'My Docs', none of your Buzzword documents appear, unless you export your file as a .pdf and then re-import it into Acrobat.com. That is, in my opinion, a pretty lame way to have to do things.
The interface for Buzzword, however, is really polished, and works very well overall. It's not hard to figure out what you're doing, and it features some robust functions. I was pretty impressed with the ability to embed images and tables, and at how easy it was to configure and use them.
There was one thing that I couldn't help but laugh at. While I tend to be good when it comes to spelling and grammar, I will admit that I tend to make some mistakes on a regular basis, primarily because I type fast and from habit, (I often add a 'd' when spelling 'soul' because I type 'should' more often, for example) and when I made one of these mistakes, I noticed the little red underline, a staple of the word processing world to alerted me that I'd typed something incorrectly.
When I clicked the arrow at the end of the underline, expecting to find the proper correction for my less than stellar spelling of 'receive', I found that the answer wasn't there. This seemed like a pretty basic correction, and I once I stopped laughing, I found myself a bit disappointed. This wouldn't be so bad, but of course, because it's a Flash based interface, Firefox can't step in and fix the problem either.
The Flash interface is also a little hard to get used to because there's no ability to right click. I think I've had this gripe before, but it's a major downfall to the Flash trend, because you only have use a left click, right clicking opens the flash settings, which are worthless for the most part. I've said it before, but I'll say it again, if I wanted to use only one mouse button I'd get a Mac. (Speaking of, does anyone find their multi-touch trackpads their putting on their new MacBooks is a little silly, you can use multiple fingers but you still only get one giant button?)
Once I'd finished testing out Buzzword, I exported the file to .pdf format, and then I went back to Acrobat.com and imported it. I decided to test out the embed function, just to see how good Adobe could do.
This also was a little disappointing, at least when compared to Scribd's iPaper. My biggest complaint here is that there's no way to read this document inline on the page, you have to go full screen, where you get great tools to use, but overall the document is pointless when embedded.
Conclusion...
Overall, I have to say that I was disappointed with Adobe's offering. The space is great, and the interface is pretty, but the overall functionality is just bad. Between the fact that I couldn't get everything to work right, and the fact that it's actually 2 separate web apps that don't play well together, it just doesn't seem like it's ready for prime time.
I understand that this is a beta, but beta shouldn't mean broken. I can give some great examples of solid beta apps that work great, GMail being one of them. If you open a beta to the general public, it should, for the most part function well. In my case, with a fast connection and computer, and a reasonable ability to use webware, I had quite a few errors and found that the functionality wasn't as rich as I was expecting, and that just seems wrong.
Photoshop Express is still in beta, and it works great, while still showing off all the slickness of a well designed interface. I guess I just expected something similar. (I'm not saying the PSExpress is perfect by any means, just that it works better and is an Adobe product, so the parallels worked for me.)
The inclusion of Buzzword as a word processor is great, but there are many options for web based word processors that are much more robust and work better (Google Docs, for example) and there are other options for document storage and sharing (Scribd) and so it seems that Acrobat.com isn't the right way to go. Perhaps, though, with all the potential, it might be built into something great. Of course, they don't tout this as being a replacement for your desktop publishing needs, but rather just another piece of the puzzle, but personally, I don't think this piece really fits.
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