Adobe acquires buzzword.com.

Adobe is in the process of acquiring buzzword.com.

Buzzword offers a free online word processor, not a rich text editor.

The main reasons why you might want to test this service are:

• If you want to be able to access your documents from wherever you are.
  
  
• If you want to be able collaborate with other people and let them read and/or edit the documents.
  
  
• If you want a word processor that can do all the standard stuff, but is much easier to use.

This new product is based on Flex and Flash Player 9. I want to emphasize that it feels and works just like any regular word processor…but better.

In a near future it will also be available as an AIR application, in other words there will also be a desktop version that doesn't rely on a browser and a Internet connection. The two applications are identical, so it's very easy to move from one to the other.

You can get Buzzword for free at www.buzzword.com.

Seeing is…understanding.

I have always believed in video tutorials, seeing and hearing how something is done always beats reading about it.

When I got the Adobe CS3 Master Collection it came with a gift, 31 days of lynda.com tutorials, and now my eyes have turned rectangular!

I must have spent 40-50 hours learning Dreamweaver, Captivate, Contribute, new stuff in Photoshop, etc, etc…

The lynda.com tutorials cover at least 100 different applications and include all the Adobe software, from Acrobat to Photoshop. The subscription is only $25/month, money extremely well spent!

I strongly recommend you to visit the site! They offer some free "appetizers", check them out and you will have a good idea of what quality level their tutorials are on!

So promising...

After watching a number of Adobe Contribute tutorials at lynda.com I realized that Contribute would be perfect for a number of my clients.

My first step was to set it up with my personal site so I could take it for a spin.

During the site configuration everything looked perfect. Contribute connected via FTP and I could see the files on my site.

In the next step Contribute uploads a file (via FTP) and tries to read it (via HTTP). Now the problems started!

There is one folder name you never should use on an Apache server, "TMP". All attempts to access that folder through HTTP will be blocked by Apache's mod_security rules. Guess what Contribute names its test folder?

I have no idea of why the Adobe engineers chose that name, I guess they could have just generated some random letters instead. It's a shame since Contribute seems to be an excellent application, much better than Co-Author!