Category: News-Politics

If you use the full version of Adobe Acrobat on a Windows machine you are aware of a wonderful feature it has called “reflow.” Reflow allows you to draw a marquee over a selected section of a page, say one column of a Web page, and then the page automatically resizes itself to “flow” at the width you drew. So you can read down a page column by column on a small device such as a PDA. Adobe did not get this feature into Acrobat 5 for the Mac. Adobe, when do Mac users get reflow?

A second wonderful feature of Acrobat (and it works cross-platform) is its ability to convert a Web page to a PDF. This is a great way to show someone a Web site you are designing. Acrobat allows the viewer to click through the links as if it were a real Web page, but also permits the reviewer to attach comments and remarks to the PDF file and send it back. The problem is that Acrobat doesn’t handle divs using CSS positioning well at all. A Web page using CSS positioning may look nothing like the onscreen display after Acrobat converts it to PDF. So the second item on my wish list is for Acrobat to reliably display divs using CSS positioning.

Macromedia.com has come up with a Group Management tool that works with Blackboard. There is a link to a demo walkthrough on a Blackboard server in the linked article. Many colleges, including mine, use Blackboard for student interaction in online courses. It would be interesting to see if this tool from Macromedia makes using Blackboard any less “clicky.” (Blackboard works well, but it requires too many clicks to complete an action.).

Consumer WebWatch: How Consumers and Experts Rate Credibility on the Web gives results from a large study showing how people rate the credibility of a Web site. If you are thinking credible content is what counts, you’d better take a look at this.