James Hamilton has a nice writeup of Jeff Dean’s talk at the Google I/O conference. The slides to the talk itself are well worth checking out as well.

I’m glad I can finally talk more about the project that has been consuming me for the last fifteen months - the first beta release of Acrobat.com. One of the questions the end users of SHARE ask us a lot is whether SHARE is just a short-lived experiment - they worry that Adobe will just shut it down one day and they’ll lose their files. I think the announcement of Acrobat.com, with what was once known as share acting as the central file hub, should address that question pretty convincingly. It was hard not being able to give people a real answer before.

Beyond that, there is so much to talk about here that I need to split things up into several blog posts. For this first post, I’m going to talk about the project from a more personal and historical perspective. Future posts will discuss the design of the new file organizer and the work that was done to make SHARE scale.

I came into the project myself somewhat serendipitously: just a couple of months before, I’d taken a job as an architect in the Acrobat team, thinking about how we could further extend PDF’s reach - on the web, on mobile devices, etc. One of the things I designed was a better experience for viewing PDFs in Flash, which ended up being one of the key features of Adobe Share. At the time, though, I was really thinking more about mobile devices. (I did some other cool design/prototype work, some of which may show up in Acrobat.com one of these days…). But then there was a reorg, and my boss had me take over an existing group that was responsible for several existing hosted services around PDF, most notably Create PDF, Adobe Document Center (which lets you protect PDF files), and pdf2html (an online PDF to text/HTML converter intended primarily for accessibility). Together, these services generate quite a bit of traffic, a lot more than people might think. But they weren’t generating enough traffic or revenue to make them into a viable business in and of themselves. We joined forces with the Acrobat Connect team who were working on a next generation web conferencing platform that became Brio. Our mission was to take the talented and experienced teams who had built those services and help them build something more successful that focused on collaborative work in its myriad forms.

For my team, the first step was to build SHARE, which was first released in October 2007: something extremely easy to use and that solved a real world problem, something we could build relatively quickly and get feedback on from real users. From that perspective SHARE was a huge success. We’ve gotten a lot of user signups, we’ve shipped a lot of releases, and we’ve learned how to scale our underlying platform. That platform, by the way, is largely based on the Document Center code-base. But you’d never know it by looking at the UIs of the two products (click the image to view full-size):

(I also need to mention that we had a lot of help on the SHARE UI from our talented XD designers - thanks y’all!)

Along the way we also bought Buzzword, which fit in incredibly well with our strategy for acrobat.com. When you look at the product today you can see how well the pieces fit together, and it shouldn’t be hard for people to figure out how we’re going to mesh these projects even more closely in the future. It also shouldn’t be hard to see how the incredible UI design of Buzzword has influenced the design of the rest of Acrobat.com - one of the things we’ve been working very hard on is redoing the user interface of SHARE, using the Buzzword document organizer as a starting point. But Buzzword’s organizer only had to deal with one type of document, it didn’t support thumbnails, and it wasn’t built to help people organize larger numbers of files. Once again, we worked with a lot of talented designers to come up with a new design. I think the new organizer in Acrobat.com has really come up with some innovative ways of solving those problems, which I’ll discuss more in a future blog post. Again, a side by side comparison is in order:

We also had a very fruitful collaboration with the teams who make Acrobat and Reader. These teams are much larger and better organized than ours, and they are working on a much more mature product. I know there were more than a few times when they wanted to throttle us because our product reliability was “chaotic”, and I want to thank them for their forbearance. I think the end result is going to be an incredible boon to our customers - the workflows for Shared Review and Forms are vastly easier to use now that they are integrated with Acrobat.com, and having our AIR application included with Reader should help a lot of those users share their documents with others.

Looking forward, I’m incredibly excited about the future stuff we’re working on as a group. Supporting more and better ways to organize your work, adding new types of collaborative workflows, adding subscription features people will gladly pay for, and even inventing whole new classes of applications. I’ve been very lucky in my career to have been able to work on three completely new categories of commercial software, all of them focused on collaboration: first Pink/Taligent, then PlaceWare (which eventually became Microsoft Live Meeting), and now Acrobat.com. I expect that Acrobat.com will be by far the most successful, whether measured in terms of revenue, number of users, or, most importantly, as measured in the effect it has on the way people work together.

Must be something in the water. Here’s an experienced designer ranting about Expression Blend and WPF. My favorite quote:

I think the message of Blend has some nice takes, but in the end the whole concept of [the] Designer <> Developer processes to me is always couched in developer controlled languages which is Blend’s ultimate failing. It really is a tool to allow developers to be better designers, instead of a tool that really let’s designers do their job better.

Hilarious rant about how difficult it is to assign a keyboard command to Find Next in Mac Word. Of course our own buzzword doesn’t offer programmable keyboard shortcuts at all, and it isn’t as Mac-like as it should be sometimes, so I shouldn’t throw stones. But this is so funny I can’t help it…

Got back from Germany on the 29th of April. Didn’t get a lot of time to ease back into work: went into 15 hour day mode immediately and stayed there until this week. It’ll be worth it. Meanwhile, I thought people who enjoy cars and technology might enjoy this trip report.

I spent my first few days in Munich being a tourist: doing a beer-making tour, visiting standard tourist sites, and so forth. I also got to tour the BMW factory in Europe, which was amazing. I was especially impressed by the paint shop, where there was a continuously moving waterfall under the line and the glass walls between us and the robots had no paint on them.

Picking up my car the next day at the BMW Welt was an experience: a bit over the top but also very cool. The architecture is amazing inside and out:

Had a good time driving my new car around Europe. First to Füssen, then Strasbourg.

Overall I did about 1200 km, most of it on the Autobahn at 100 mph+. Maximum speed I hit: 240 km/h (150 mph). But BMWs are kinda famous for exaggerating speeds, so don’t take that as gospel. Trust me when I say it felt pretty darn fast. Funnily enough, 100mph doesn’t feel fast at all on the Autobahn - in fact it felt a lot like going 65 mph here in California. Can’t say enough good things about the German road infrastructure - they do a marvelous job of keeping it in shape.

The highlight of the trip was the day I spent in Nürburg, Germany, home of the Nordschleife, one of the world’s longest and most difficult road courses. Stayed at a place called the RingHaus, which is a lot of fun - many visitors from England, and one group who had driven in from St. Petersburg.

I started the day by doing a lap around the ring in my own car. I was quite nervous about doing this as I’d never driven the course before and worried what would happen if I had an uninsured accident. But my one slow lap (13 minutes, anything less than 11 minutes is respectable) was without incident. Shortly thereafter a proud owner of a new Porsche was not so lucky: like me, he patoodled around the track at low speed, only to get rammed from behind by a motorcycle going to fast around a blind corner. The motorcyclist was seriously injured, unfortunately.

I then did a lap as a passenger in a race-prepped Alfa 75 sedan that had been rented by the English folks I met at the RingHaus - the interior had been stripped and a full roll cage, racing seats, and racing belts were installed. This car wasn’t as powerful as mine but it was far, far lighter. It went around that track pretty quickly. Unfortunately, my ride was a fairly short one - 6 km or so into the lap we spun out and hit the curb, bending the car’s front suspension and steering rack. Fortunately we didn’t get run over by anyone and we didn’t hit the wall, so we just put limped the car the rest of the way around the track. That spin was a little more excitement than I’d planned on - when we got off the track my shirt was soaked through with sweat and my heart was pounding.

As it happens, though, my day wasn’t over yet. A half hour later I got a call from the folks at the BMW Ring Taxi service - they had an open slot available in one of their two BMW M5s. These are extremely capable cars driven by professionals who know the Ring like the back of their hands. We went really, really fast - much faster than the Alfa 75 even though we had four people in the car AND the air conditioning was on. In fact we hit 240 km/h at one point (it feels even faster when you do it on a curvy racecourse!).  I was sitting in the right rear passenger seat, and got thrown around quite a bit as we carved through the turns - no fancy racing buckets here. I turned quit green, and a half hour later I threw up. But it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

From there I drove the car to Frankfurt, spent a day there, then dropped the car off and came home, just in time for my 9th wedding anniversary on the 1st of May. A great trip.

Not exactly new news, but the TED folks have a nice video podcast of their historical talks. I’ve been watching them now and then as time permits and they are amazing and inspiring. You can also subscribe via iTunes, as I’ve done. One of my dreams is to eventually do something so amazing that I get invited to talk at TED…

This article about Novell’s Moonlight project made me giggle (via Hack The Planet - hi Wes!). I was wondering just the other day about how Miguel de Icaza, a very smart and talented guy, ended up in a career spent developing one Microsoft-clone project after another. Evolution, Gnome, Mono, Moonlight. Just think what he could have done if he had tried to do something new.

I’ve been underwater trying to get a release out the door ever since I got back from Germany two weeks ago, and so haven’t had much time to do anything interesting. But last night I read a fantastic transcript of a talk by Steve Yegge of Google called Dynamic Languages Strike Back. If you care about compilers and/or dynamic languages you should read it and check out some of the linked articles, including one from Adobe. Mind-blowing stuff.

Tim Bray and Mark Pilgrim have done it, so I thought I’d throw my command line history into the mix. Interestingly, I’ve been doing a lot of ruby on rails work over the last few weeks and it has skewed my command line use away from java based stuff like ant and maven:


~ % history | awk ‘{a[$3]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s \n”,a[i],i}}’ | sort -rn | head
259 ls
135 cd
82 p4
61 svn
61 ruby
59 cap
34 rm
31 mate
30 rake
22 script/console


(and, in case anyone was wondering why I use the third column instead of the second, it is because my default shell is still tcsh.)

There’s an interesting post over on Ryan Stewart’s blog about SHARE, my favorite web service (sometimes) and my personal migraine (sometimes). Ryan wants to know why SHARE doesn’t get more love from bloggers, something I can’t really speak to. We do get quite a bit of usage, though. Anyhow, there was lots of great feedback in there which we’ve been discussing on our internal mailing list, but there was one comment from Marc Hughes I wanted to address more publicly:

I’m planning Adobe Share support for AgileAgenda (my scheduling app), but the thing that’s been keeping me from doing it is the beta status.

When it goes official, what will be the fee structure? Free? Free for a limited account, pay for more? Pay-only? How committed it Adobe to the technology? If nobody uses it will it be gone in a year?

Also, being able to embed the content in a web page is great, if you’re sharing one of the few supported formats. But what about custom file formats? I want to supply a custom swf that’s used as the embedded viewer.

First, its really cool that you’d like to support SHARE in AgileAgenda. This kind of integration is exactly the reason why we spent so much time building web services APIs.

Second, on the future: although I can’t make any guarantees that mean anything, the future of SHARE is pretty bright. There is some other software coming from Adobe that make use of the same web service APIs that you can get from SHARE today, so we are pretty darn confident that those APIs will still be around for some number of years to come (since we had to sign support commitments in blood).

Third, on custom file format viewers: this is something we’d definitely like to do, although there are some serious security issues around embedding third party SWF objects inside of our Flex UI which we’re still trying to figure out. So no dates for this functionality just yet. Anyone have any tips? Send them my way.

Fourth, and finally, SHARE itself is getting a little stale, in internet time anyhow: its been almost five months since our last major update. That’s way too long, and we’re going to try to make sure we have something cool to show every couple of months from now on. The good news is that some of the key features we talked about at MAX last October are literally just around the corner, driven in large part by the feedback we’ve received on SHARE to date. And I’m even more excited about the new UI functionality coming in the release after that, which I get to play with a little more every day.

Anyhow, I hope this helps people who are working with SHARE feel better about its future. Hopefully we’ll have more to talk about next week.