31st Jan 2007

Adobe releases PDF standard for ISO certification

On the 29th January Adobe announced it will be seeking ISO certification for the PDF 1.7 standard. Up until this point many vendors have been able to implement the PDF standard based solely on trust that Adobe will not significantly change the format and break their respective implementations. If PDF gains ISO certification then this will ensure any vendor can develop for and use the standard in the knowledge that it will not change and be 100% interoperable with other implementations of the same standard.

This is good news for governments and business as it means once certified PDF will become a permanent, unencumbered format. These characteristics will enable organisations to use PDF as an archiving medium for 2-dimensional digital documents with the confidence that no single company can dictate or control the use of the format. This is important because in the past companies like Microsoft have unduly effected the industry with their monopolistic control over formats (as evidenced by the infamous Halloween Memo).

24th Nov 2006

Zamzar - Funny name, potentially interesting concept

Although you wouldn't think it by the name Zamzar is a Web-based file conversation tool. File conversion tools are not new but the fact that it is Web-based is. Zamzar supports are variety of file conversions that fall under document (including Word and Excel), video, image and music categories.

Traditionally file conversion has operated under a fairly conventional model, you pay a license fee and are given a piece of software that sits on your computer that undertakes the file conversion. Zamzar uses a different approach, it is completely free and rather than downloading a piece of software to your computer your file is uploaded to their server for conversion. On completion a link is emailed to you and by following it your newly converted file can be downloaded. The financial model at work here is advertising and the market they are targeting is the casual user who cannot justify the cost or complexity of a fully blown piece of conversion software sitting on their desktop.

13th Oct 2006

Interoperability problems cost Airbus time and money

Given all the attention to interoperability within the AEC industry over the last ten years you would have thought Airbus would have had a handle on the idea. Unfortunately it would appear that even though they are using Catia for the bulk of their design development work the significant format differences between version 4 and 5 plus management mishandling has resulted in the delay of the A380 and millions (if not billions) of dollars of losses. It would appear that even though Boeing's aircraft may not be as imagination inspiring as the A380 their CAD processes are a lot sounder.

2nd May 2006

Adobe Acrobat 3D: a very real threat to DWF

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Architosh and CADwire have feature reviews of Acrobat 3D and I must say it sounds really, really good. I am big fan of the PDF standard but not of recent Adobe Acrobat releases (the term 'bloatware' springs to mind). When I first heard that Adobe where planning on including 3D support in Acrobat I assumed it would be a token gesture in order to differentiate it from its 2D PDF competitors like Foxit (my favourite Windows pdf reader). I began to change my mind and think it was something a little more serious when AutoDesk suddenly seemed to get very anti-PDF when it came to exchanging building information. 

Reading the reviews of Acrobat 3D I can see why the people at AutoDesk seemed so worried, it has one major killer feature that really sets it apart from all the competition, a 'print screen' equivalent for 3D models. This 3D importing feature does not work at the software application level like most data importers, it skips all the difficulties associated with data format translation and plucks the 3D information directly out of the OpenGL buffer. This is a really intelligent move from Adobe, it gives their product a degree of model importing support perhaps only rivaled by Right Hemisphere.