Monday, October 01, 2007

Adobe Share Beta available

Adobe have just released a beta version of a useful new web service. Adobe Share allows users to upload and share up to 1 Gb of files. The service uses an Adobe Id to manage logins. Which is handy for anyone who regularly downloads from labs. The interface for share uses Flex to manage the user interface. It's certainly clear and simple to use. The use of Flex also allows some interested extra features. For example, I uploaded a pdf of a recent presentation. Share provides a url or embed code for sharing this file. The url opens a Share interface with my pdf presented as a book with an additional link to download the document. The book uses the Flash book classes that you are hopefully already familiar with. Consequently there is a very user friendly turn paging experience (not that I'm claiming my presentation is a page turner).

A nice feature is that the files can be shared with anyone or you can select who you want to share the file with. One feature that some systems offer that would be a nice addition is some statistics on the number of views and downloads. But the service is a beta so it will be interesting to see where it goes from here.

I guess it's no coincidence that Adobe announced the purchase of Buzzword on the very same day. Buzzword is a Flex based word processor. Let me see I can edit word documents and save them online for sharing. Do I see a pattern here?

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