Comments on: Please embed Flex in LiveCycle PDF’s

By: Will Pollard

Will Pollard — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 13:27:01 +0000

JesterXL,

Thanks for this. I still am not getting any clues about LiveCycle/ Acrobat 8 from Adobe sources. what you say sounds all too plausible. Flex is the future. OK, I have to think about this now.

Will

By: JesterXL

JesterXL — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 22:36:19 +0000

Flex 1 & 1.5 were originally targted this way to. I think this was, however, recon on Macromedia’s part, and to garner capital as well as prove / unprove assumptions about the market.

Apollo will use PDF & Flash Player together, but they won’t embed eachother per se (although, PDF does support ActiveX control embedding).

Not sure… I have no idea about the ‘PDF’ market. The only market segment I was in that had a relation was manufacturing. Buyer’s send RFQ’s in with 3D embedded designs and other 2D drafts of products to be created for manufacturers to build. It was a great global format for transferring those types of data around, but not really sure how Flex would fit it. I once hoped that perhaps a lot of LiveCycle’s automatic, server-side form generation could be embedded in PDF’s to allow a more dynamic presentation. To me, it’s really easy to create forms in Flex, and play with that data, so I just assumed it’d be easier to do those types of things in Flex INSIDE a PDF vs. using the native PDF form stuff. I’ve kind of got subjective blinders on now; anytime I see forms, I think ‘Flex’.

By: Will Pollard

Will Pollard — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 21:37:49 +0000

Thanks for getting some guidance on how Flex and LiveCycle compare. I come to this from the PDF end. I have been interested in LiveCycle but it always seems very expensive. One reason the LiveCycle crowd would not know about Flex is that Adobe is really great at market segmentation and targeted messages. Unfortunately it leads to confusion eventually. Flex seems really well promoted with a free SDK for developers and a free starter phase of server software. LiveCycle is only even promoted to a small target group of large organisations. Maybe Adobe see this as the past, to be exploited for high prices while it lasts. flex is the future so needs to scale up. Hope this is wrong but it is the impression I am getting. There is no information about acrobat 8 except it should help upgrade income. why? what features? Apollo implies that PDF will be a better container for Flash. Maybe people with acrobat 7 would be better off finding out more about Flex than upgrading?

By: bud

bud — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 22:26:27 +0000

There is a difference between boring & easier to use.

By: JesterXL

JesterXL — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 18:27:30 +0000

Thanks for the rundown Mike. Context helps.

I still think of they hired me, however, I could use Flex to make them more bling.