Tag Archives: Adobe

Get a legal version of Adobe Flex Builder for free

Adobe has been trying hard to build an ecosystem around Flex, which is a collection of technologies for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich Internet applications based on the Adobe Flash platform.

In order to woo more developers to use Flex, they are giving away free copies of Adobe Flex Builder. In order to get these free copies you have be

  • A student or a faculty or employed in an educational institution
  • A developer who is unemployed due to layoff.

To get these free copies all you have to do is just fill out a form at this link (student, unemployed)

Additional free resources

Together with free copies they are also offering the following

If you ask me, I would say this is a smart move by Adobe to get more developers into the ecosystem.

If you are not eligible to get a free copy, then you can get the trial version of Adobe Flex Builder which can be used up to 60 days for free or buy it in retail for $249.

Posted in Web Programming | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Make Acrobat Reader load faster

I am a great fan of PDF documents and I am using Acrobat Reader right from version 4.0. But in the earlier versions I had only one complain. It used to take a long time for it to load. So I used to keep the main reader window open even if I am not reading a document so that then next time when I need to open a file I need not wait for it to load again.

But that has changed a lot in the latest version 7.0 of Acrobat Reader. Seriously Adobe has done some tweaks to make it load faster. But recently I found that it is loading lot of Plugin by default and a considerable amount of time can be reduced during loading if the optional Plugins are removed.

I was going through the installation directory of Acrobat Reader and found that there is an optional directory where we can put those Plugins which we do not want to load by default. This directory can be found in the following path (C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\Optional) and the Plugin directory can be found in this path (C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\plug_ins). I am assuming that you choose the default directory during installation. If you have installed it in a different directory then change the path accordingly.

The optional Plugins can be moved from the Plugin directory to the optional directory. Each Plugin can be identified but the extension (.api). But before doing that find out the Plugins which you are not going to use. You can see the list of Plugins and their dependencies in the Plugin’s page.

Click Help -> About Adobe Plugins.

areader1.GIF

You will see the following page.

areader2.GIF

From this page you can get a fair idea of Plugins that you don’t need and then move those corresponding .api files to the optional directory. While doing that please note that some Plugins may depend on other Plugins for loading. So if you get an error message stating that a particular Plugin was not able to load properly then restore the necessary Plugins. You will notice a significant improvement in the time taken for loading after moving the optional Plugins.

Here the list of Plugins which I have moved for your reference.

  • Accessibility.api – Acrobat Accessibility
  • Annots.api – Comments
  • AcroForm.api – Forms
  • MakeAccessible.api – MakeAccessible
  • Spelling.api – Spelling
  • soap.api – soap
  • Sendmail.api – Send Mail
  • reflow.api – Reflow
  • LegalPDF.api – Legal PDF
  • DigSig.api – Digital Signature
  • Multimedia.api – Multimedia
  • PPKLite.api – PPKLite
  • Updater.api – Updater
  • eBook.api – Adobe DRM
  • PDDom.api – PDCom
  • SaveAsRTF.api – Save as RTF
  • Checkers.api – Checkers

Posted in Windows/.NET | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments