Adobe ruined Portfolio's in Acrobat 10

Adobe never provides public-access download links for legacy versions of their products. If a customer has purchased a copy via the ESD service, it will however remain available via their secure login. Customers of physical products of course have the installation media, and customers who downloaded a trial version and paid to activate it are strongly-advised to keep a copy of the downloaded installer.

PDF Portfolios have changed a lot between version 9 and X, and I agree that some people love the new designs and some hate them, with equal passion. I have to say that when 9 was first released, we saw similar complaints about the styles of bundled layout; but people got used to them. Version 9 was the first attempt at this sort of thing and lessons were learned, hence the changes in X - most significantly it is now a lot easier to re-style layouts, and even write your own. Yes it still involves Flex programming to create a layout, but it's nowhere near as much a black art as it was in version 9.

I suspect that things will change again with the next version - I'm not confirming or denying anything, but we all know that there have been significant events in the Flash and Flex world in recent months. Right now, PDF Portfolios are an interesting "proof of concept" but from my personal viewpoint they never got the customer adoption we expected in the early days, especially from the Flex community. Adobe's plan was that by releasing the SDK, Flex people could make money by writing new layouts for people (which for a Flex programmer is a simple job), and Acrobat users could pick and choose from an open market of free and paid designs, just as you do now with website templates. It never happened, and I doubt it will now.

There are useful things you can do with a Portfolio that you can't do with ZIPs or attachments, and vice-versa, but the dominance of mobile in years to come will decide which methods win out. As the ISO PDF standard controls what can and cannot be put in a PDF file, doing something like switching from Flex to HTML5 for layout controllers, while technically possible in theory, would be a monumental political battle and could take several years to be adopted. Adobe may lead the market in PDF software but they're not the only player on the field by any stretch.

Acrobat Pro has always been the standard-setter for PDF creation and editing, and as part of that it is also the place where new ideas are first tried out - some, like geospatial maps, don't float and are devolved into the community or depreciated; others, like embedded video, get overwhelmingly-positive feedback. If we could predict which will work out, these forums would be a lot quieter - we'd all be lying on beaches deciding which private jet to buy.

Thanks for the quick and kind response. Please forgive my venting, but I'm still very frustrated with Portfolio and the fact that Adobe won't give me the product that my company paid a large sum for. Which, by the way, you validated in the first sentence of your reply. Thanks. (sorry I digress again)

All that aside, I truly mean this as constructive criticism in hopes that one day we will all be able to create useable portfolios.

An Acrobat 9 portfolio, laid out with the tiles on the left side that have a rich viewer on the right that displays not only PDF's, but also most of the MS Office documents, is revolutionary! In fact, it really rocks. The user viewing the portfolio can “page” and skim through it just like a paper binder. One step closer to the “paperless” office.

With Acrobat X, the user navigates through unusable thumbnails floating on a huge, mostly unused canvas. It's like a leaf floating in a pool. The user can no longer skim, they have to download the file. While the presentation is really cool, it's no more functional that just attaching files to an email. (Waiting for a third party to produce a solution that I have to pay additional for won't happen.)

In your response, you also portrayed some dismay, for lack of better words, that things have not caught on as anticipated.

The answer is clear: Cost. $499.00. That's $150.00 more that the top of the line MS Office 2010. I think I could safely assume your site licensing is proportionally more Microsoft's too.

So, due to the exorbitantly high cost, to get a copy of Acrobat, one has to clearly justify a business need which will keep Acrobat off 99% of the machines, at least where I work. (Portfolio as a need, especially with X wouldn't fly.)

Anyway, thanks again Caver Dave!