Acrobat Standard, Professional and Reader received the Windows Vista treatment this week with a new 8.1 update, Adobe announced June 6. The 8.1 update features new hooks into Office 2007, too.
“Customers running Vista have an expectation about how applications will look and behave in the Vista environment,” says Marion Melani, group product marketing manager for Acrobat. “Acrobat 8.1 will meet their expectations.”
Melani says Vistas new wrinkles enabled features in Acrobat and Reader 8.1 such as right-clicking to create PDFs from within Office apps, as well as richer previews of PDF files. Acrobat and Reader both insert themselves into Office 2007s “ribbon” interface, which organizes buttons and features into a new-but-familiar tabs scheme.
Adobe will distribute the update both via auto-updater calls from user desktops as well as via downloads at Adobe.com. Melani says that means Adobe has to be ready for millions of downloads once it goes live with software crossing multiple platforms and Windows versions.
“We definitely anticipate and are prepared for a spike in demand when we release an update like Acrobat 8.1,” she says.