Introducing the new Acrobat Connect Pro Iphone App

Unless you’ve been living in a cave on a deserted island somewhere, you probably know that Steve Jobs at Apple is not too pleased with the folks at Adobe and their approach to Flash and its performance on the Mac. More importantly, he is so critical of Adobe Flash that he will not allow Flash on the Iphone, Ipod Touch and the soon to be released Ipad. I’m going to leave the corporate positioning and name calling to the professionals and stay very clear of this debate. Yes, I know, I’m sure they are all relieved to know that I’ll be taking a neutral position.

Rather than focus on what one company could do better or how another company could be more accommodating, I would like to highlight something that I’ve recently started using that is quite useful. It’s the new Iphone App from Adobe for Acrobat Connect Pro 7.5. Watch this video>

Despite the fact that Connect Pro delivers online meetings via the F-word (Flash for those of you not paying attention), Adobe has designed an elegant little app that allows mobile participants to attend Acrobat Connect Pro meetings using just their Iphone and a data plan. The app is just for participants and does not currently allow for meeting host controls, but it has a nice clean interface and is quite fast for those users out there that need to attend meetings on the go.

I have worked in the online Collaboration or “webconferencing” space for going on eleven years now. I’ve seen quite a few attempts by various companies to develop the holy grail of mobile webconferencing applications over the years only to deliver average results and moderate functionality. So, with that in mind, I downloaded the new Acrobat Connect Pro Iphone app with great skepticism.

To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised. I was able to install the app in seconds. I logged into a team meeting and was able to follow along with the presentation quite easily. I expected there to be latency, but was excited that I was able to see new slides as they were presented within seconds of the changes being pushed by the presenter. In fact, I was in my office and was watching the same presentation on my laptop and I was getting new slides on my Iphone at about the same speed as my computer.

In addition, you can switch from the presentation view to a live chat view and follow along with any Q&A taking place. If you want to see the presenter via their webcam, there is a view for that too. The video quality is not the best, but the fact that you can see a live video feed from a remote users webcam presented on your mobile device is a pretty neat trick. Overall, the way Adobe has leveraged the most important aspects of an online meeting and created different displays, controlled by the user, to help maximize limited screen real estate is pretty impressive.

I’m a traveler and fan of both Adobe and Apple. I know they currently have their differences, but it's nice to see that a little corporate friction is not getting in the way of two innovative companies releasing technology that helps us little guys get more done with less. If you haven’t seen the Acrobat Connect Pro app yet, then you should check it out.