July 16, 2003
Macromedia has announced Contribute 2, though it has not yet been released. A coworker is doing an exhaustive review and user group test of Contribute for possible use at work, and along the way we've noticed some oddities. Version 2 will likely be released before we make a decision. Not sure what effect that will have.
Aside from features like FlashPaper, which looks to be a PDF competitor, it's not yet clear what's new. Beyond bug fixes, I'd be interested in something that's more suited to an environment in which more than one person is using a computer. In Contribute 1, a web site administrator sends a connection key to the site updater(s). The connection key contains the username and password necessary to access and edit the site, and is available for use by anyone with access to that computer. I'm not comfortable with that, and it's downright unusable in a situation like a computer lab. This and other little niggling details have been discussed on the newsgroups quite a bit, so I'll be curious to see what Macromedia's done.
At least there will be a Mac version now.
As to FlashPaper, I'd like to see how accessible it is. Text in Flash files should be accessible to screen readers … some screen readers, at any rate … but I don't know how structured text is dealt with. I expect it to take a while to approach the sophistication that PDF has, if that's even a goal.
That reminds me: I must look at Acrobat 6. I have it but haven't even looked to see what's new.
