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[Insider TV] [Chris French on Acrobat XI]
[In this video: New UI Features] [Changes to the Actions workflow]
[New PDF editing capabilities]
I'm Chris French.
I'm a senior product manager here working on the Acrobat and Reader products.
[What are you most looking forward to about the Acrobat XI release?]
I'm really excited about some of the things we're doing
with the user interface this release.
We're looking at Actions, which is a brand-new feature
that we introduced in Acrobat X, making some real big
efficiency improvements there.
We're also looking at customization and making the interface
much more adaptable to people that want to customize.
And we're also looking at the environment for these new devices
that are coming on the market now that
allow people to use their finger rather than a mouse on the keyboard
and what can we do to their desktop products to make
working in that type of an environment much easier?
[One thing you've been working on is improving the Actions feature in Acrobat.]
[What inspired some of the changes to Actions that we'll see in Acrobat XI?]
In the case of Actions, what we heard is we got really great feedback
on the feature itself, but we heard about some limitations,
things like when you start an action you have to go all the way through.
You can't deviate from the original script that the person
that created the action set up, so people were asking for more flexibility.
They also wanted a little bit more feedback as they were going through it.
What step am I on?
That kind of stuff, and so we think we've taken a really innovative approach
to the design to try and answer those questions and make a much better experience.
[What about the new customization features-
where did the inspiration for these features come from?]
In the case of customization, we did some things in Acrobat X
to allow people to put tools in the top tool bar.
But we were taking a very minimalistic approach.
One of our design principles for Acrobat X
is we wanted to make it easy to use, and so by doing that
we took a lot of the capabilities in the area of customization
that you had in earlier releases and simplified them,
and so I think in this release we've taken a giant step forward
as far as letting people do what they need to do to get the tools
in the place that they want it to be the most efficient.
[What kinds of new features can we look forward to in Acrobat XI?]
Another big emphasis for us with Acrobat XI is
the whole area of being able to edit a PDF
and being able to get content out of a PDF and reuse it,
and so we're taking a lot of the tools that already exist in Acrobat to help you do that.
We're refining them, making them easier to use
and creating a whole experience around that,
so you'll notice when you're combining PDF documents
that it's a much richer experience, a lot more capabilities.
You can even expand the capability to take over the full desktop
and really get deep into the feature.
[How do all these changes reflect the direction of Acrobat's development in general?]
What we're doing with Acrobat XI is we're taking a lot of the learnings
from our FormsCentral service
and bringing that down to the desktop, so a lot of the
ease of use and kind of
cool ways that we provide for you to create a form online,
we're bringing that down and letting you do that on the desktop
and then export a PDF and continue the workflow in Acrobat.
I think another good example is what we're doing on the Reader side.
Reader is typically a tool that you use to consume PDF only,
but a lot of the services that we have now on acrobat.com
extend the capability to the Reader user,
and so we're trying to make those much more approachable,
and so now in Reader you can do things like
export the content out into Word or Excel,
and eventually you'll be able to do that into PowerPoint as well.
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