My business buddies in Alabama sent me a bunch of documents on Friday so that I could work on them over the weekend and help them out on a big project.

When I got the files, they were all saved as Adobe pdf formatted files. They were originally written in MS Word, but then converted to pdf before sending out over the internet. I guess they think that is a way to protect the documents from being modified without their knowledge. People who work in real estate are very protective of their documents and what they send out over the internet.

The only problem is that I don’t know how to reverse that and make a pdf conversion for me to be able to work on the documents. I might have to redo the entire file in MS Word, unless I can figure out how to convert pdf to word. I called down to Alabama to see if they can re-send the files in the original format, but all I get is voicemail. How frustrating!

Apollo alphas released

By Aaron Gustafson | March 19th, 2007

Today Adobe released the first alpha of their new cross-operating system runtime, codenamed Apollo.

For a while now, people have been making desktop widgets using (X)HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but soon designers and developers will have the opportunity to create full-blown desktop applications using the web standards troika as well. This will all be possible using Adobes new cross-platform runtime environment, codenamed Apollo.

Today Adobe released the first alpha of the Apollo runtime environment as well as an SDK and other associated developer tools (the developer downloads require registration). This first alphas only support developing Apollo applications in Flex, a close relative of Flash that is geared toward application development and rich client interfaces, but according to Adobe the next beta should support (X)HTML-based applications. They have not given a time frame for the beta release, however.

Apollo promises to open up a whole new world for designers and developers, allowing us to make our mark on more than just the web as well as allowing us to bring the web experience offline to users on any operating system (I cant wait to see what people come up with). Plus, as Apollo is built on Webkit, it will have excellent standards support right out of the gate, and I think we can all appreciate what a blessing that is.

This is great news from WaSP or the Web Standards Project anyone interested in learning more about them click on the above link, then “about us.” 

Mrs Selena Jackson is a long time friend who has been designing mobile websites with standards as a hobby. She builds websites using Flash and AJAX, and has made a few great sites for me over the years.

She and a couple of her friends are working a a project named Flashtising which will sell Flash ad space on websites. Because it is written in Flash it is search engine friendly. I will probably be using them once she gets the company up and running on my blog.