Having been just upgraded (without prior warning) by my company's IT department, Acrobat X is filling me with the same horror as the MS Ribbon. Fine if you've never used past versions. But if you have, it's dreadful.
Well-used features have disappeared altogether - believe me I've searched the blogs to be sure about this.
Logical layout is out the window - so much for working on double-page spreads at a reasonable magnification when you now have to use a side panel that takes up about 15% of the screen real estate.
Default settings which give you an invisible panel when viewing through a browser - wow, how intuitive, let's play hide and seek with the navigation controls.
And the list goes on and on.
Yes there is a lot to fit into the program. Making it difficult for those who use more than the basics to find anything, and impossible to keep them onscreen, just kills productivity.
Oh, and I agree with other commenters about the poor icons - plus they take up so much space that if you add many more to the quick tools they move into a dropdown. Which totally defeats the purpose.
Having been just upgraded (without prior warning) by my company's IT department, Acrobat X is filling me with the same horror as the MS Ribbon. Fine if you've never used past versions. But if you have, it's dreadful.
Well-used features have disappeared altogether - believe me I've searched the blogs to be sure about this.
Logical layout is out the window - so much for working on double-page spreads at a reasonable magnification when you now have to use a side panel that takes up about 15% of the screen real estate.
Default settings which give you an invisible panel when viewing through a browser - wow, how intuitive, let's play hide and seek with the navigation controls.
And the list goes on and on.
Yes there is a lot to fit into the program. Making it difficult for those who use more than the basics to find anything, and impossible to keep them onscreen, just kills productivity.
Oh, and I agree with other commenters about the poor icons - plus they take up so much space that if you add many more to the quick tools they move into a dropdown. Which totally defeats the purpose.
I really like the appearance of icons in adobe products eg. in inDesign, Photoshop that look greyish but cool with minimal use of color. However, in Acrobat X they get color but they are so dull and used colors cause them to look like early versions of linux or Dev C++ software !!! They absolutely look sick!
Icons in Acrobat X are something prepared during early versions of linux. As you can see in figures create, open, print, ... buttons are really look old that I think there must be a mistake because even the icons in Acrobat 9 were better.
I should have mentioned the lack of an upgrade path for CS users, and I agree that such users will really need to justify the cost of an upgrade now. I doubt it would be practical for most users.
I'd disagree that Acrobat X Pro is targeting just corporate users. Yeah there's several new features for them—export to Word is a great example—but the new creative features are nothing to sneeze at either. I'm a designer and I didn't start using PDF Portfolios with Acrobat 9 because they weren't customizable enough for me. Acrobat X Pro is a lot closer to what I want, and I've started using PDF Portfolios to deliver assets to clients (think corporate ID packages and such). I still need to master the SDK and build a portfolio layout that gets it perfect though.
I'd say for all customers—corporate and creative—there's going to be a hard debate on whether to upgrade now. Both market segments are served fairly well with Acrobat X Pro.
From this review, it sounds like Adobe needs some immediately cash flow generation and not much else. No thanks. I'll hold off until there's a cost-effective upgrade down the road.
Note there is no upgrade path to Acrobat X from Creative Suite 5. You have to uninstall Acro 9, purchase the full Acrobat X product ($450 US) and install that. You can only get away with paying a $199 upgrade to Acro X if you own Acro 9 as a stand-alone "point product, that is, purchased separately from the Suite.
Acro X will probably be bundled with the next dot release (CS5.whatever), but since Adobe has not even announced if/when they're providing a dot release, it's safe to assume it's not imminent. Compare this to when Acro 9 came out in June 2008 ... CS3 users could upgrade almost immediately to CS3.3 to upgrade from the bundled Acro 8 to Acro 9 .
Acro X is squarely aimed at the corporate business user, not the creative professional. If your central software suite is Microsoft Office for Windows, or you do a lot of paper-to-digital (scanning) work such as in the legal or medical fields, Acro X is a must-have upgrade, there are tons of new and beefed-up features for those users.
For Creative Suite users, it's a "meh" upgrade. I agree the interface is far better (it does take a little getitng used to). But somewhat fancier portfolios and meager actions are no draw, imo. How many CS users are creating and distributing portfolios with Acro 9? (cue rolling tumbleweeds and chirping crickets).
And the actions ... I like them, it's just that they're not new. They are just a much better interface on an old feature (Batch Processing), and the program now comes with 7 editable default sequences.
Now, if the Acrobat team had taken as much time integrating the CS apps into Acrobat as they did Windows Office apps, I'd feel differently. A "must have" feature like, say, export PDF to InDesign, or convert PDF image objects to Smart Objects, that would be cool. Did you know you can export Acro X files to Microsoft Office format, layout intact, complete with comments and annotations? But we can't even get the frigging *comments* exported to the source InDesign file.
Yes, I'm bitter! ;-) Still love Acro, but only have Acro X because I needed it to record the Lynda.com "Acrobat X Essential Training" last month (plug, plug). But I'm telling my CS-using clients not to bother buying a new copy of Acro X just to have it ... unless they do a lot of MS Office for Windows workflow work too.
Acrobat X is terrible.
Having been just upgraded (without prior warning) by my company's IT department, Acrobat X is filling me with the same horror as the MS Ribbon. Fine if you've never used past versions. But if you have, it's dreadful.
Well-used features have disappeared altogether - believe me I've searched the blogs to be sure about this.
Logical layout is out the window - so much for working on double-page spreads at a reasonable magnification when you now have to use a side panel that takes up about 15% of the screen real estate.
Default settings which give you an invisible panel when viewing through a browser - wow, how intuitive, let's play hide and seek with the navigation controls.
And the list goes on and on.
Yes there is a lot to fit into the program. Making it difficult for those who use more than the basics to find anything, and impossible to keep them onscreen, just kills productivity.
Oh, and I agree with other commenters about the poor icons - plus they take up so much space that if you add many more to the quick tools they move into a dropdown. Which totally defeats the purpose.
Acrobat X is terrible.
Having been just upgraded (without prior warning) by my company's IT department, Acrobat X is filling me with the same horror as the MS Ribbon. Fine if you've never used past versions. But if you have, it's dreadful.
Well-used features have disappeared altogether - believe me I've searched the blogs to be sure about this.
Logical layout is out the window - so much for working on double-page spreads at a reasonable magnification when you now have to use a side panel that takes up about 15% of the screen real estate.
Default settings which give you an invisible panel when viewing through a browser - wow, how intuitive, let's play hide and seek with the navigation controls.
And the list goes on and on.
Yes there is a lot to fit into the program. Making it difficult for those who use more than the basics to find anything, and impossible to keep them onscreen, just kills productivity.
Oh, and I agree with other commenters about the poor icons - plus they take up so much space that if you add many more to the quick tools they move into a dropdown. Which totally defeats the purpose.
Icons in Acrobat look like old linux versions...
I really like the appearance of icons in adobe products eg. in inDesign, Photoshop that look greyish but cool with minimal use of color. However, in Acrobat X they get color but they are so dull and used colors cause them to look like early versions of linux or Dev C++ software !!! They absolutely look sick!
Wow!!!
Using the Acrobat Pro X to save as a Microsoft Word doc is simply amazing! Worth the price.
User interface is OK but icons in Acrobat X archaic
Icons in Acrobat X are something prepared during early versions of linux. As you can see in figures create, open, print, ... buttons are really look old that I think there must be a mistake because even the icons in Acrobat 9 were better.
Responding to Anne
Hi Anne, I wanted to respond to your comments.
I should have mentioned the lack of an upgrade path for CS users, and I agree that such users will really need to justify the cost of an upgrade now. I doubt it would be practical for most users.
I'd disagree that Acrobat X Pro is targeting just corporate users. Yeah there's several new features for them—export to Word is a great example—but the new creative features are nothing to sneeze at either. I'm a designer and I didn't start using PDF Portfolios with Acrobat 9 because they weren't customizable enough for me. Acrobat X Pro is a lot closer to what I want, and I've started using PDF Portfolios to deliver assets to clients (think corporate ID packages and such). I still need to master the SDK and build a portfolio layout that gets it perfect though.
I'd say for all customers—corporate and creative—there's going to be a hard debate on whether to upgrade now. Both market segments are served fairly well with Acrobat X Pro.
Acro X Pro
From this review, it sounds like Adobe needs some immediately cash flow generation and not much else. No thanks. I'll hold off until there's a cost-effective upgrade down the road.
Acro X not a biggie for Creative Pro users
Note there is no upgrade path to Acrobat X from Creative Suite 5. You have to uninstall Acro 9, purchase the full Acrobat X product ($450 US) and install that. You can only get away with paying a $199 upgrade to Acro X if you own Acro 9 as a stand-alone "point product, that is, purchased separately from the Suite.
Acro X will probably be bundled with the next dot release (CS5.whatever), but since Adobe has not even announced if/when they're providing a dot release, it's safe to assume it's not imminent. Compare this to when Acro 9 came out in June 2008 ... CS3 users could upgrade almost immediately to CS3.3 to upgrade from the bundled Acro 8 to Acro 9 .
Acro X is squarely aimed at the corporate business user, not the creative professional. If your central software suite is Microsoft Office for Windows, or you do a lot of paper-to-digital (scanning) work such as in the legal or medical fields, Acro X is a must-have upgrade, there are tons of new and beefed-up features for those users.
For Creative Suite users, it's a "meh" upgrade. I agree the interface is far better (it does take a little getitng used to). But somewhat fancier portfolios and meager actions are no draw, imo. How many CS users are creating and distributing portfolios with Acro 9? (cue rolling tumbleweeds and chirping crickets).
And the actions ... I like them, it's just that they're not new. They are just a much better interface on an old feature (Batch Processing), and the program now comes with 7 editable default sequences.
Now, if the Acrobat team had taken as much time integrating the CS apps into Acrobat as they did Windows Office apps, I'd feel differently. A "must have" feature like, say, export PDF to InDesign, or convert PDF image objects to Smart Objects, that would be cool. Did you know you can export Acro X files to Microsoft Office format, layout intact, complete with comments and annotations? But we can't even get the frigging *comments* exported to the source InDesign file.
Yes, I'm bitter! ;-) Still love Acro, but only have Acro X because I needed it to record the Lynda.com "Acrobat X Essential Training" last month (plug, plug). But I'm telling my CS-using clients not to bother buying a new copy of Acro X just to have it ... unless they do a lot of MS Office for Windows workflow work too.
Anne-Marie Concepcion
amarie@senecadesign.com