The patch, released through version 10.1 of the Flash player is available now from www.adobe.com and there is also a new version of Adobe Air as well.

The company may have managed to shoot itself in the foot with this patch however as you’ll see from the amusing screenshot below, where the news story about the patch in the new version of the Flash Player is accompanied by a picture of Homer Simplson asking “Ooh. They have the Internet on Computers now!”

Okay, so this is a banner advert for an Adobe Air app, but I had to share the irony of the event with you.

The patch fixes a critical vulnerability which could allow your PC to be hijacked remotely and it covers Windows, Mac and Linux users, so everybody should upgrade.  All PC users should upgrade their version of Flash as soon as possible to prevent their PCs being vulnerable to the flaw.

An update for Acrobat and Acrobat reader is due sometime in the next week or so to fix the same vulnerability.

Apple Mac and Unix systems are affected by the vulnerability as well but the exploit that is currently in the wild is only affecting Windows. Adobe suggests to enable UAC in Windows Vista (and Windows 7). Windows XP users should consider moving or deleting authplay.dll to protect their computer system from the threat against Adobe Reader and Acrobat “but users will experience a non-exploitable crash or error message when opening a PDF that contains SWF content”.

An alternative would be to uninstall Adobe Reader or Acrobat and install one of the available third party pdf readers like Foxit Reader or Sumatra.

Adobe does not offer any advise on the Flash Player vulnerability. The only viable option seems to be to disable or even uninstall Flash and wait for the patch which is expected to be released on July 30 and July 31.

The security updates are provided for Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat software products running on both Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems. The security bulletin that was issued yesterday contains links that point to downloads for all affected programs and operating systems.

The affected programs are:

• Adobe Reader 9.1.1 and earlier versions
• Adobe Acrobat Standard, Pro, and Pro Extended 9.1.1 and earlier versions

Adobe recommends users of Adobe Reader and Acrobat update their product installations to versions 9.1.2, 8.1.6, or 7.1.3 using the instructions above to protect themselves from potential vulnerabilities. The above updates apply to Windows and Macintosh. Security updates for Adobe Reader on the UNIX platform will be available on June 16, 2009; this Bulletin will be updated to reflect their availability on that date.

Security conscious users might want to consider switching from Adobe Reader to a third party application like Foxit Reader, Sumatra PDF or PDF-Xchange Viewer.

The main focus of Presentations is work collaboration as it makes it possible to work with multiple contributors on the same presentation. The usual workflow in many companies is that one person works on a presentation at a time and saves that presentation on a shared folder or sends it to the next person as an email attachment so that the next contributor can start working on it.

Multiple users can work on the same document simultaneously. It is for example possible that one user works on the text of a slide while a designer works on the layout and graphics.

Several build in themes and layouts are available with the option to create new themes to incorporate corporate design for example.

Editing features offer the usual assortment of text and list controls, shapes and images that can be used to create the presentation. It is possible to preview the presentation as a slideshow directly on the site or export it as a pdf document.

There is unfortunately no support for importing or exporting Microsoft PowerPoint documents yet which is probably the number one feature that would make the Presentations service more attractive to users and businesses.

Acrobat.com Presentations is an interesting service for users who want to create presentations with colleagues or friends who do not mind that the presentations can only be exported as pdf documents.

Update: The service is out of its trial phase and now fully available on the Acrobat website. It allows registered users to create and combine pdf files online, convert pdf documents to Word, Excel or RTF, sign contracts online, create web forms, collaborate or send large files easily.

It was released alongside Adobe Flash9 and received a small amount of coverage, so I decided to have a quick look at what it offered.

Acrobat.com contains 5 services, 3 of which previously existed as Adobe Buzzword (Word Processing), Adobe Brio (Collaboration) and Adobe Share (File sharing). Acrobat doesn’t offer a complete office suite replacement as the lack of spreadsheets and presentations are a notable omission.

Instead Acrobat.com provides a way to create, publish, share, collaborate on and discuss documents with other people. In fact it does this better then any other free online service I can think of, although it’s worth remembering this is still a beta release so expect some issues.

Aside from the three services mentioned Acrobat also has My Files which is a file manager with a generous 5 gigabytes and Create PDF which can convert up to 5 files at a time into Adobe PDF. A 200mb limit is imposed but that shouldn’t be too much of an issue. It supports all major formats (Microsoft Office, Open Office, Star Office and image files).

For me the best feature is the AIR application for desktop access, unfortunately it doesn’t seem to support offline synchronisation and access.

I’m going to keep using Google Docs for now but I think this will definitely be one to watch.

The first method that I discovered was a online service that created a pdf document out of documents that I would upload to their website. The newly created pdf document was then send to my email account. While this message had the advantage that I did not have to install a software on my system it has some disadvantages.

The most important for me are privacy concerns. I sometimes have to convert documents that I don’t want to expose to others and I don’t want to take that risk even if it is a slim one.

A far better solution in my opinion is doPDF which installs itself as a pdf printer on your system. Whenever you would need a pdf document you would simply choose to print – which does not print but save – the document that you want to convert.

This way a pdf document is created without third party involvement which is way better in my opinion.

Take a look at the Youtube video to see a demonstration:

link: dopdf homepage
online pdf converter: pdf online

You can choose between four different quality settings: Default, Screen Optimized, eBook Optimized and Print Optimized. Enough said, great service, try it out.

Update: Express PDF is no more. You can use an alternative service like that offered by PDF Online to convert different document formats into pdf.