Where am I going with this? Let’s talk about Adobe.

Adobe makes some pretty powerful and complex applications that help users communicate. At the end of the day, Photoshop helps people communicate their message to someone else. Same thing with InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, and even Acrobat (which has more to do with creating a wrapper to maintain the fidelity of the message when rendered). Adobe has a great history of making applications that help people create and communicate.

But somehow, Adobe is starting to move away from this history. They seem to have a disturbing (at least to me) fascination with “Enterprise” and “Development Platforms” (Live Cycle, Acrobat, and Flash). And then there’s the additional “services” they are trying to sell on top of these “platforms”. This isn’t the Adobe I’m used to and I’m sensing that a lot of creatives are like me, wondering where the old Adobe went. With all these different business focuses and the tight 18 month release schedule, the software is becoming, unfortunately, less stable, more buggy, and filled with tie-ins to services I see little value in. I think the biggest issue that Adobe faces is that it’s failing to connect to the creative individual like me. I’m sure they connect with the giant ad agencies though – I mean just look at the interactivity that InDesign CS5 can do!*

I just want an Adobe which is more focused on making my creative apps run better, faster, more efficiently, and that gets out of my way and let’s me communicate. There’s room for improvement.

*Have you ever seen the work done by somebody trying to translate their print design to web? That’s the same vibe I get from this CS5 feature.

Unrelated to this post: Thanks for spotting the spelling mistake Chris.

The name is not that great, Slate or Tablet would have been better although one could argue that these are too generic. Sorry to see no camera, and I think another USB port would have added to its functionality (more devices it could hook up to). And then there’s the rigmarole with the App store and the limited iPhone-like multitasking.

It’s a game changer despite these limitations. Why? Because the future, which the iPad has finally opened up (at least to my view), is awesome.

Imagine when auto manufacturers include docking stations for this. Instant carputer. Imagine a docking station for this in the back of a car seat’s headrest. Instant car entertainment system. And then the fact that one could just undock it and take it with them when they’re done traveling – pure awesomeness there. It’s the little digital consuming platform that everyone secretly needs.

Some may argue that it doesn’t have a very good business application and that laptops are much more flexible and powerful. And I would say, for digital creation – yes. But for digital content consumption? A laptop is overkill. In fact an iPod touch does digital media consumption much more effectively then my laptop. But web browsing and reading on an iPod touch is…well, small. And so the iPad addresses this with a larger screen. The iPad could be that perfect digital companion for the professional. Imagine an iPad (or even iPhone) application that would record and transcribe audio. Doctors, lawyers, management – even college students – could then take an iPad around and capture their meetings, lectures, or whatever it is they need to capture. Then transcribe that audio into useful digital text that could be utilized by other systems within the individual’s workflow. Now also imagine an app that used a special stylus (“the horror!!!” you say – but think of a plastic pen-like object with something that would work with the touchscreen tech). Now imagine an app that would save images of your scrawls written with this stylus. Later you could get these images OCRd into useful digital text (probably by transferring the images to a more powerful machine for OCR and then re-uploading the now-digitized text to your iPad). None of this “try and recognize my handwriting right now” approach. I think this approach to hand writing has potential and the iPad could actually make it very palatable for end-consumers to use.

Although at first glance the iPad doesn’t look like much, I’m seeing glimpses of the future and it’s freaking awesome. Now I only wonder why earlier Tablet PC’s never showed me such promise?

Anyway, the content should be fairly accessible even if it does look all wonky in “the worlds most widely used browser.”

Buttinger, in 1967, clearly points out what could have been if better policies had been followed, if France had treated the Vietnamese nation with the respect and dignity it deserved, if the US had chose to back the Vietnamese nationalists instead of France, if the US would have forced Diem to make the essential and necessary political and social changes that were so desperately needed. It is fascinating and troubling to see the answers so readily apparent in 1967 and yet these answers were not followed (or possibly understood). It makes a tragic read to some extent.

In the end, “Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled” is an amazing, well-written social, political, and historical review of modern Vietnam (up to 1967 standards any way) and is amazingly prescient about the problems that would eventually turn Vietnam into a communist nation.