What’s new in ADEP Designer 10
First off – thanks to everyone who came to my session on “What’s new in Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform Document Services Designer 10″ and for engaging in the conversation.
Second – thanks to Adobe for delivering such a great conference. It was an honour to present at the conference.
I promised that I would share all of the assets that I delivered at the session and here they are.
Reference cards
The following PDF contain the Flash Field and Style Sheet reference cards, in both A3 and Letter formats.
Assure Dynamics Reference Cards (A3)
Assure Dynamics Reference Cards (Letter)
Flash field demo files
One of the new features in Designer that we covered is the Flash Field. This is a great feature and we would recommend that you check out Adobe’s interactive statements demo. As we outlined at the conference, each of these demos is focused on single use cases. The interactive statement brings it all together in a comprehensive example.
Each of the three Flash Field demos is in a zipped folder and contain all of the assets, including the Flash Builder project files.
I would recommend right-clicking on the links and selecting Save Target As/Download.
Assure Dynamics Webcam Security Pass
Assure Dynamics Map with Signature
Please bear in mind that to edit these files you will need ADEP Designer 10. In addition, users will need Acrobat X/Adobe Reader X in order to use the new Flash Field feature.
During the conference John Brinkman enlightened me on the option to embed images and Flash swf in XFA forms. Once you have set the URL in Designer, the asset (image or swf) will travel with the form and be available on any computer. You would only tick the embed option if you wanted the asset to be available to other developers opening the form in Designer. John has discussed this many times before. This topic probably deserves another post on its own.
Style sheets demo files
All of the style sheet demo files are in this zipped folder.
Please remember that while you need to edit the style sheets in ADEP Designer 10, the styles will be backward compatible in earlier versions of Acrobat/Adobe Reader (version 10 or below).
MAX online
The session is available on the Adobe MAX website, or clicking the viewer below.
You can also view the presentation handout. This is a large file, so right-click to download:
What’s new in Designer 10 (Handout)
Feedback
I am very grateful for any feedback that you may have in relation to the session or the demo assets. Please feel free to use the comments section below or email me directly.
If you have any problems with the demo assets, please contact me and I will work with you.
Have fun!!!
John Brinkman's FormFeed
LoveCycle Blog
Stefan Cameron on Forms
Technoracle
Hi Niall,
hope you enjoyed MAX.
Very nice samples you’ve made, especially the maps thing is cool.
Not to mention the reference cards.
Best,
Marcus
Thanks Marcus!
Adobe MAX was awesome. Absolutely the BEST opportunity to learn and meet people in the community. It was really great to meet the ADEP teams as well.
You should try and get over to MAX at some stage. At least all of the sessions are available online.
Just about to board to make my way back, so will be on the forums next week.
Thanks,
Niall
Hi Niall,
Thank you for a great session at MAX!
Designer is always present on my daily work and everyday I face new challenges – clients are always really creative in demanding new solutions.
The new features you presented in your sessions and the great samples and reference card (thank you for those!) are really a great help!
Marcos
Brasil
You are very welcome Marcos! I am glad you enjoyed the session and the demos.
We will be working up more examples, over time, so please come back and check out the Code Solutions.
Niall
Hi Nial,
Thank you so much for all the great samples and reference cards.
Han
You are very welcome Han! I hope they help.
Niall
[...] [...]
Very interesting and useful material, Niall. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Samartha! I appreciate your feedback!
Niall,
Thanks for all the work with our SMS. We’d be lost without it now. Always the professional!
Zena
What is the simplest way to add a nice flash pop box for normal fields in Adobe LiveCycle Form?
I have a Dynamic LiveCycle PDF Form, which has many Fields each has complex meaning. It require 3-4 lines of text to clarify the meaning of such fields, and I want to find a nice way to provide the user with more information about such field by, say, clicking on a “?” button or something similar.
See this post for more details:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/4314323#4314323
Appreciate your help.
Hi Tarek,
I have had a look at the thread on the forums and because the users will have previous versions of Acrobat/Reader, I would not recommend using a Flash object.
Generally, I would use the tooltip to provide supporting information. However in one form I create an “Information” zone, which was populated with text when the user brought the mouse over a field. This just used the mouseEnter and mouseExit events. It worked well and the client was happy with the approach.
If you want to use a question mark icon, then on the click or mouseEnter you could change the presence of the supporting information beneath the field (text object or subform) to visible. This would work best in a flowed layout. As an alternative you could have the field and the supporting information in a western flowed subform and reduce the width of the field and show the information. On mouseExit restore the width of the field and hide the supporting information.
Because there aren’t any transitions, it is going to appear clunky and not as polished as a Flash/Flex solution. However if you want to maintain support for Acrobat/Reader version 9, then I think it is the only option.
I hope that helps,
Niall
I recently upgraded to the new version from LC Es2 9.0. While I do like some of the new features, there are some components I use all the time I wish we could be control. I like what they’ve done with the new feature when creating a table , however I wish I can have the option to turn off the guides. It was a lot easier in the previous version to highlight multiple rows where as now I have to hold the control button down and select my rows. It was also easier to adjust the table with being able to adjust the table from either the top or bottom. Today it’s done from the bottom. Lastly, I’m excited they finally added bullets, however I hate the fact they automatically indent 5 spaces on the bullets which also cannot be adjusted. We’ll see if they update that in the future.
There are many great improvements in Designer 10 and we can expect more when the next release is announced. I appreciate that some features may not give you all of the functionality that you are after, but on balance, we have seen some great advancements over the years!
Niall