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Acrobat XI has been released by Adobe, adding new capabilities and removing some strong features. Most significantly for Windows users, LiveCycle Designer has been completely dropped (it's still available but as a separate product) along with Acrobat Suites (unrelated to the Creative Suites). For everyone, there's been the removal of self-contained multimedia capabilities within Acrobat. Rather, Acrobat has shifted gears somewhat to focus on its core function: creating PDFs from more sources. It also adds better capabilities to export from Acrobat into Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. In addition, it is much easier to edit PDFs and to work with images within PDFs. And finally, after watching the Creative Suites provide workspaces for over 10 years, we now have workspaces within Acrobat, but alas, the interface...

The CS5.5 Suites provide an opportunity for Adobe to keep some of their products current with the latest technology in the ever-sprinting technological race we live in. New features within Dreamweaver make it significantly easier to design for mobile, tablet, and monitor sized websites all at the same time, using the same content. It wasn't that long ago when "state of the art: websites had developers creating one website for desktops and a completely different site for phones. Now that tablets are becoming part of the digital landscape, developing is getting more complicated, but the updates to Dreamweaver significantly ease the burden. New features in InDesign make it much easier to export your interactive content for both tablets and for standard EPUB. And interactions between Premiere Pro and Media Encoder let you cue up multiple output to a variety of screen sizes. And while the encoding is taking place, you can continue working in Premiere Pro. These are a few of the examples that lead Adobe to provide a nick name for this round of Suites as the "CS5.5 & Any Screen."

The word for the day is "ribbons." Moving from the floating Formatting Palette, Microsoft has now joined the Mac version of Office to the PC version, and we have ribbons! Also part of this transition is bringing the email client Outlook to the Mac and eliminating Entourage. Sometimes ribbons work and sometimes they do not; it depends on the application and how they are implemented. They are not the best thing in software applications and are certainly not the worst. Meanwhile I'm finding Outlook to be a major step backwards. Like any big release, there are some excellent new features and some improvements on older features. Similarly, there are some new features that one has to be wondering what they thought they were doing. Nonetheless, the new Office for Mac 2011 has been released and it's time to explore what we have.

Adobe Acrobat X is the biggest rewrite of the interface ever. Any time there is a new release of software, typically the primary focus that beckons new or return buyers are new and/or better features. There are, of course, new and/or better features in Acrobat X, but the biggest change from previous versions of this release is the interface. In many cases, having the various tools and processes located in this new interface makes the features easier to find and use. Laying all the tools right out in front of you in the tabbed interface makes discovery easier. However, finding what you want can be much more of a challenge. Additionally, some of those changes were done halfway, were poorly thought out, and, in some cases, are just plain nonsensical. Please understand that there is much to like with AX, but getting to what you like will take some work on your part.

InDesign (ID) is an application used to create books, magazines, newspapers, journals, posters, flyers, whatever. If you want to print it, ID is a great place to make it. For the most part, content created with ID was intended for print or PDF. But Adobe has created a whole new infrastructure within ID so that not only can one create standard documents for standard print jobs, but now one can easily create electronic documents meant for anything from ebooks to complex electronic publications with fully integrated Flash elements. Simply, what before would have required a seasoned Flash designer to create can now be created by you with no Flash coding. In addition to these new features, there are a host of other updates to the ID design dynamics that further enhance and improve the layout designs.

For users with disabilities rendering even small amounts of typing difficult, this program is a priceless tool, but for just about any user, Dictate's voice transcription capability is a dream realized - a slick and pleasant method of entering text, usually faster than manual typing

Convert PDF to EPUB on Mac OS X for reading on iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and other ereaders

The task is truly daunting: the release of eighteen major applications along with a wide peripheral collection of many supporting applications, web-based applications, Flash-based applications, and associated shared resource applications. To release any one of these is a big task, to release them all, on the same day is, well, either risky or reckless. To be successful at it is amazing. To do it 5 times in a row, is battling luck. But if Pixar can be successful time after time, why not Adobe? And they have. The range of product improvements in Creative Suite 5 goes from subtle and cool to drop-down amazing.

MacSpeech Scribe is the first really purpose-designed transcription solution for users who need to work with recorded digital audio files. Scribe has the capability to transcribe with a simple button-click speaker-entered recordings made with an iPhone whenever a thought you want to record occurs, with an iPhone, a dedicated digital voice recorder, or even a mic and your computer, either from a recording of the user's own voice, or that of someone other if you have a voice training profile for them available

With the level of satisfaction I'd been enjoying with MacSpeech Dictate 1.3, the developer's announcement that they'd found a way to squeeze out up to 20% better voice recognition accuracy out of version 1.5 sounded almost too good to be true, but having tried it I can affirm that Dictate is now even more impressive than it had been, and the bar was already set pretty high

Summarizing my 2007 review of Dictate's predecessor iListen 1.7 I commented "iListen 1.7 rocks!" Well, Dictate 1.3 rocks even more loudly. If you've never tried dictation software, or perhaps did some years ago and found yourself underwhelmed, it's time to consider (or reconsider) how it can make your computing more comfortable, pleasant and efficient