When you open Adobe Reader, this is how the Help bit kicks off:

What can you do with Adobe Reader?

I know what I’d like to do with Adobe reader. But anyway, this is what it goes on to explain:

‘Adobe® Reader® is the tool for opening and using Adobe PDFs that are created in Adobe Acrobat®. Although you can’t create PDFs in Reader, you can use Reader to view, print, and manage PDFs. After opening a PDF in Reader, you have a variety of tools to help you find information quickly. If you receive a PDF form, you can complete it online and submit it electronically. If you receive an invitation to review a PDF, use the commenting and markup tools to annotate it. Use the Reader multimedia tools to play video and music in a PDF. And if a PDF contains sensitive information, you can sign or certify a document with a digital ID.’

I realise I am miles behind the music on all things techie, but having been asked about 937 times over the years to get the latest version of, update, add to, and upgrade Adobe Reader, frankly I’m unimpressed with the above rationale. Unless I’m very much mistaken, the blurb says that the entire point of Adobe Reader is to read stuff that Adobe puts out in its other product, Adobe Acrobat, whose total raison d’etre is to open pdf files.

One thing I can promise you, hand on heart: I have never wanted to watch a video or listen to music in a pdf. I opened Adobe Reader two hours ago for the first time in my life voluntarily because I was bored, and mooching around the screensaver. There is nothing funky, fun or immediately appealing about completing this action. And logically, this leads the inquisitive (bored) thinker to ask what the point of Adobe Acrobat is, then. And this is where Adobe gets a little hazy on the detail.

Still unanswered at the Adobe forums (yes, we’re back in the bowels of the Chateau d’If again) is this moving message posted there by ‘dsafdsfsdfds’ on the 18th January 2010, at 7.03 in the morning:

This means that, if I keep on pestering people who want to get on with their work by telling them to update Slog, buy Slog accessories, use Slog apps and get new Slog 2012, within a matter of months the phone will ring, and it’ll be Steve Ballmer offering to pay me $7bn if I will go join the Microsoft family.

However, it doesn’t alter the fact that you can hear what’s in my mind by simply asking me a question. You don’t need Adobe to read Jane Eyre. Or watch a movie. Or listen to I’m sorry I haven’t a Clue. We have books, cinemas and radios for that sort of thing. So why do pdfs needing Adobe exist?

It seems a fair question to ask. After all, how many times have you seen this at Google?

File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – Quick View

Oh right, Adobe-guys, so this is the sell: you can get a quick view that’s easy to open and highlight, or you can f**k around with PDF for half an hour, once you’ve found out which obscure file the thing downloaded itself to without asking you. It doesn’t do it for me.

If you go to this place, Amit Agarwal (personal technology columnist and founder of Digital Inspiration) will tell you ‘How to Do Everything with PDF Files’. But he lost me in the second paragraph, when he wrote ‘PDF is the best format for sharing documents because they are compact, the formatting is preserved and most computers / mobile devices / ebook readers can easily handle PDF files’.

Sorry to be the one to tell you this Amit, but these are not exactly unique features. I have yet to suffering from crumbling word docs, and most androids will read anything. It gets worse as Amit immediately wanders off the subject to show you fifteen ways to get around the fact that pdfs exist. These include such rhetorical nuggets as ‘How do I directly save a web page as PDF without having to save that page as an HTML file first?‘. Slog’s tip: cut out the pdf bit.

Next there’s ‘I have some PDF documents on my computer in the sense that they neither allow printing nor can you select text with the mouse’. Amit’s recommendation is ‘Get the PDF Unlocker’. Slog’s advice: never use pdfs again. They suck.

Obviously, there’s a reason for pdfs, and no doubt I am one ‘publish’ click from a million techies telling me why. But pdf files are, in the general run of pc frustration, something I’d try hard to manage without. However, Adobe’s acrobatic reader (and most pc hardware manuals) say the words would slide off your screen and stain the carpet without all those updates. So over time, we have all somehow gradually become like the people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Our voices go dead and slightly metallic as, on waking up each morning, we say ‘Ireffly muffst  upfrate Aglobul acroflagg leedel foodayf’. (The first thing I do each day is clean my teeth).

News from today: (Reuters) – Adobe Systems Inc is halting development of its popular Flash Player for use in mobile browsers, essentially admitting defeat to rival Apple Inc in a long-running battle over Web standards.

—————————————————-

AOL has been around for so long now, one forgets it stands for America on Line. A little known fact is that it really stands for Asylum of Lunatics. I’ve had an AOL site-mail account for years (wardslog@aol.com) but a little while back, AOL bought Huffington Post – and within three weeks I was banned from posting there. So I figured that, having been banned by Gmail for slagging off Google/President Obama, the same fate would soon follow at AOL.

I went to Yahoo, and have so far managed to send less than one email from there. The site is a mess, and the service execrable. I can’t use picky Microsoft for site-mail, because they won’t allow more than ten recipients per mail. And I can’t use Orange on account of a long-running spat that goes back to the days of Not Born Yesterday. So I wound up back at AOL. This has been my experience over the last fortnight:

1. Only around 10% of mails have sent without problem.

2. The rest get one of those error panels. It tells you that somebody from Mars (them) is messing around with your account, and directs you to a security test page.

3. At the page is another panel. The header tells you to retype the word in the space below. It doesn’t tell you if the type is case-sensitive. About 50% of the time, there is indeed a word in the panel. All other hair-pulling experiences at the AOL security-test page involve there being no word, or two words.

4. When you leave the page to get a fresh go at the security-test page, at the next try the connection to the security page normally times out.

5. When you sign out of AOL to try and start all over again, it tells you to sign in. You sign in, and it confirms that you have signed out.

6. When you sign in again, it fills the user and password panels for you. So you press ‘enter’, and it says you got one of the items wrong, please try again. The trick is to ignore the advice and press ‘enter’ again. This time it lets you in.

7. After an average of 15-20 minutes of this unparalleled display of incompetence, the security page likes your word, and congratulates you on ‘passing the test’. There is no irony intended, nor indeed felt.

8. The mail now sends. Always. Waydergo.

I have been posting evidence about ISPs and geek brass neck in this sector for over seven years. No legislative action of any import has been taken to insist on improved service by a single Government in the world – except in China, where their motives are, shall we say, suspect. I cannot think of another industry that would or could get away with the ridiculous silo-hiding, user-forum and general rubbish software bollocks we all have to go through just to get anything done through their switch-keys.

The security is not for us, it’s for them. They work against each other in a sleazy, censorious war that always rebounds badly on us. A lot of the time, they work for the Government, ensuring that they too can mumble autistically in a warhead-silo somewhere without taking any notice of us.

Just my writing this will probably get me turned off, but I’ll write it anyway: the day after we finish with the bankers, we need to extract every wriggling Dalek from his or her hidey-hole, and tell them to go hire some folks who can then serve the public, make themselves enough money to repay debt and restart the economy, and help these idiots gain some market share based on raising the table stakes.

Nothing that is wrong with the way business, technology, politics and society works today is a mutually exclusive factor. Join up the dots, and it really is incredibly simple to discern what we need to do. Sorry to keep going on about this, but we have as citizens a limited amount of time to get on with this. Before we know it, we won’t be able to give any of these gargoyles any feedback at all.

If you didn’t find this entirely irrelevant to you, then you might like No Feedback, No Comment.

And for the brighter side, go to The Big Top