Disguested at Adobe....

So I built a web application around the Adobe supported IAC (InterAppCommunication) API using JavaScript and HTML object tags to embed. All was working well, then Adobe comes out with Acrobat Reader 8 and suddenly I get calls that the navigation panel buttons are appearing to the left.

Sure enough, with this change Adobe has effectively altered the UI of any application using the Acrobat Reader .OCX

Now you may be thinking, "it's free, deal with it", but the problem is there is no way to "deal with it". There is no Acrobat 8 SDK (yet) and Adobe failed to provide any methods (through IAC) to allow JavaScript programmers to disable the nav panel. I'm suppose to tell people "Adobe owns that space of the application, it's their plug-in we just have to deal with it, so there are no other options if you're using Acrobat 8 to build your PDF's". That's just not good enough.

Yet, I don't see any other complaints here, I feel isolated when dealing with this problem.

With credit card in hand, I called Adobe, ready to pay whatever rate they wanted just to get some developer support and I was told it could take up to five days for turn around time and that support would only be provided by e-mail. Now, I've worked with professional support by IBM, Sun, Microsoft and others and have never encounted anything this bad.

After hours of searching I found a hint in this document:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_open_parameters.pdf

According to that document if I were opening the PDF in a a web browser I could use #navpane=0, however there does not seem to be a counterpart to doing that in JavaScript when the PDF is embedded through the tag.

If the tone of this message sounds a bit angry, that's because IT IS. I don't think I've gotten this upset with a software company in years. I think it's mostly because I would have expected so much more for Adobe and they have really let me down.