Adobe offers online presentation technology
Acrobat.com Presentation, an Adobe Labs project, lets multiple people simultaneously create an online presentation and share it.
- Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
Expanding its push from software toward online services, Adobe Systems on Wednesday introduced a technology for collaboratively producing and sharing online presentations.
Acrobat.com Presentations, hosted at Adobe Labs in its current, somewhat experimental state, joins Adobe's Buzzword online word processor with its ConnectNow service for screen sharing and other online meeting activities. Adobe also offers a basic online version of its Photoshop image-editing technology called Photoshop.com.
"The application includes built-in tools and layouts for adding visually appealing elements, such as pre-defined color sets, intelligent image placement and graphic tools for creating diagrams and adding effects," Adobe said in a statement.
Acrobat.com Presentations also lets multiple people work on the same presentation at the same time. "With simultaneous editing capabilities, no one is locked out of the presentation while others are making changes," Adobe said. "The application also makes it easy to see who has access to the presentation, who is viewing, who is editing and which slide each person is editing."
Acrobat.com Presentations is based on Adobe's Flash technology, an add-on that's widely installed in Web browsers. In contrast, a rival service, Google Docs, uses the JavaScript programming language built into Web browsers. Microsoft's upcoming online Office service will use JavaScript but get extra abilities if a browser has Silverlight, Microsoft's rival to Flash, installed.