The app lets you turn common document files like Microsoft Office, Open Office, Adobe Illustrator or InDesign and a variety of images into Adobe's propriety PDF format. The company promises document quality comparable to that produced by Acrobat for dekstops.

We can see this feature being useful in a number of professional scenarios. Anytime a report, contract or other work-related document needs to be transmitted as a PDF, this app can do it without the need to be in front of a desktop computer. Anybody doing more sophisticated layout and page design work, however, is still chained to a desktop for that workflow, so they'll have little reason to use mobile PDF creation tools like this.

CreatePDF is available for $9.99 in the App Store.

You may recognize the programs. They go by names like "Vista Security 2012," "XP Antispyware 2012" and "Mac Defender." Yet, according to Enigma Software, these scareware programs are on the decline. In June, the FBI raided malicious programmers 12 countries including the U.S. and arrested ChronoPay's CEO Pavel Vrublevsky, whose Russian payments company was believed to be behind many of the applications.

Engima does not make mention of Mac Defender, but the malicious program was one of the first widespread Trojans to target Apple computers. Apple moved quickly to fix the problem with a series of security updates earlier this year. Apple is not known to issue weekly patches but the existence of these type of malware applications may force it in the future to be more proactive about security.

The way the FBI raids effectively cut down on scareware programs was to go after their payments systems.

"The FBI raids cut off the ability for the scareware makers and distributors to get paid and when they can't get paid by their victims, they shrivel up and go away," Enigma wrote.

Enigma is prudent in saying that, while the instances of these programs are down, it is likely a temporary cycle in the war against malware.

"Sadly, cybercriminals and scareware makers are smart. They're very good at what they do. And we have no doubt that sometime soon, they'll be back. They'll figure out another way to get their scareware out and to get paid by their victims. We expect that another cyber gang is going to step in and fill that void," the company wrote.

Image Sources: Enigma Software

For example, during President Obama's inauguration, content delivery network Akamai delivered 7 million simultaneous streams of video, with traffic surpassing two terabytes per second (Tbps), which broke records. The next year, Akamai's network traffic peaked at about 3.45 Tbps.

This growth is not guaranteed to be smooth, either.

"Because of the limited capacity at the Internet's various bottlenecks, even an extremely well-provisioned and well-connected data center can only expect to have no more than a few hundred Gbps of real throughput to end users," the report reads. "This means that a CDN or other network with even 50 well-provisioned, highly connected data centers still falls well short of achieving the 100 Tbps needed to support video's near-term growth."

Not surprisingly, the paper's touts Akamai's technology as a potential solution to any issues this may present. The report, a PDF of which can be viewed here, is rich in technical detail about how Akamai, content delivery and the Internet in general work and makes for a pretty interesting read over all.

via New TeeVee. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Design By Zouny

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While this could be seen as just another variation of the "Internet makes you dumb" argument, a favorite of academics and contrarian technology writers, Gabler's article touched a nerve for me. As I look around at my own industry, tech news, there is certainly no shortage of content. But ideas... those we're bereft of. Tech media today is driven by deals and speculation. There are plenty of ideas-driven people, too, but you generally won't find them at the top of Techmeme anymore.

"There is the eclipse of the public intellectual in the general media by the pundit who substitutes outrageousness for thoughtfulness, and the concomitant decline of the essay in general-interest magazines. And there is the rise of an increasingly visual culture, especially among the young - a form in which ideas are more difficult to express."

Information & Thinking

So: less intellectuals, more pundits; less essays, more posts; less text, more visuals. But Gabler is careful not to blame any of those factors for the lack of ideas. Rather, he notes that the huge increase in the availability of information has caused the post-idea era:

"The real cause may be information itself. It may seem counterintuitive that at a time when we know more than we have ever known, we think about it less."
(emphasis mine)

It's a valid argument, although one that futurist and author Bruce Sterling disagrees with. What Gabler is really lamenting, according to Sterling, "is how annoying it is to have the former-audience tweeting at each other instead of reading the New York Times."

There's some truth in that observation, in that the world of ideas is no longer limited to intellectual figureheads talking down to the rest of us.

However, I mostly think Gabler is right: we know a lot, but before we can think about it deeply we've moved onto the next thing. Certainly in the tech blogosphere, which has been my intellectual playground for the past decade, I've noticed a distinct downward spiral in ideas.

Deals & Rumors

Look at the story that is, as I write this, at the top of Techmeme:

The story, about renewed rumors of an LTE-enabled iPhone, is pretty interesting. It's about how the next version of the iPhone might support 4G cellphone technology. Engadget is an excellent tech blog and this was a nice scoop by them, so there is absolutely nothing wrong with this story.

Except that it's fairly useless knowledge for the vast majority of us. We'll tweet about it, discuss it on Google Plus, blog about it. Then we'll move onto the next such story, probably within a day, without having really learned anything.

The previous story on top of Techmeme was a much bigger one: Google acquiring Motorola. That led to hundreds of articles being written about the deal. A couple of them made it to the top of Techmeme: speculation on who else wanted to buy Motorola and discussion about the effect on Motorola rival RIM.

But again, what did we really learn from all of that discussion?

Ideas & Opinions

It would be easy to dismiss Gabler as an intellectual ivory tower type figure bemoaning the rise of tools that enable anyone (provided they live in countries that allow freedom of speech) to have a voice.

Likewise, perhaps I am just an old-school blogger wistfully wanting the 'good old days' of the tech blogosphere back. However, I'd argue that it was more about ideas back then: experimenting with RSS and pondering the ramifications, analyzing how the media industry was being disrupted, exploring the way YouTube was changing the way we interacted with video, and so on.

Nowadays, it's all about deals and rumors; and endless opinionating and speculation around that. While there are interesting blogs around that write thoughtful commentary about new ideas - Bruce Sterling's Wired blog is a great example - they don't tend to feature on Techmeme. That's not the fault of Techmeme, because it simply aggregates what tech media is writing about. Although I think Techmeme could do a better job of reducing the incentive for media sites and blogs to opinionate and bloviate around a particular deal or tech rumor.

Do you think there are enough big ideas in the blogosphere and social media these days? Or is your mind being stimulated enough by stories such as the Motorola acquisition and LTE rumors?

Photo credit: Will Hastings

Typically, PDFs are rendered in a browser with a plugin - either with Adobe's own PDF reader or with another provider's renderer. These plugins often cannot take full advantage of PDF features. Furthermore, as Gal points out, there is quite a large trusted code base, something that's forced the Google Chrome browser to have sandbox the PDF renderer in order to avoid code injection attacks. An HTML5 version would be make this more secure, as would the open source nature of the project.

"It's important to note that we're not trying to promote PDF to a first-class web citizen like HTML5 is," writes Gal. "Instead we hope that a browser-native PDF renderer written on the web platform allows web technologies to subsume PDF." But with the ubiquity of the PDF, it's great news - particularly for the mobile Web - that it may soon be easier to view PDFs natively in the browser.

The Portable Document Format, or .PDF, sometimes feels silly these days - doesn't it? Sure, they are often pretty - but they feel so static and inflexible. No more! With the new integration of contextual search tool Apture, HTML5-powered PDF viewing and sharing community Scribd now offers a radically new way to read PDFs.

Above, you can see an image of my screen while reading a PDF titled The Internet of things: Networked objects and smart devices. I highlighted the name of a company quoted in the report and with two quick clicks I was watching a YouTube video of a product demo. I highlighted an expert's name and was able to learn all about their career and find them on Twitter - without leaving the page.

Those are strong words, but really - the user experience is there and remarkable. Apture says that Scribd represents the biggest installation of the company's service to date. Other Scribd docs appear in the Apture search results when searches are performed on site.

ReadWriteWeb uses Apture as well - try it out here by highlighting any word or phrase on any page. Just this afternoon I used it to watch a YouTube video about a historical event brought up in comments here with just a few clicks. I am a big, big fan of Apture. Now that I can read PDFs with Apture in Scribd, that's where I'm most likely to be reading PDFs in the future.

Most of the time right now I read PDFs on my iPad. Scribd says it's working on a native iPad experience for its service, but that won't arrive until later this year or next year. There's not word whether the company will try to incorporate Apture there - but that sure would be great.

Today Geospatial PDF editing software provider Avenza launched a Geospatial PDF viewing app for iPhone and iPad. (iTunes link) The app lets you locate yourself on a Geospatial PDF, view and edit points of interest, load different layers of data and take area measurements - even of polygons. Check out the screenshots below.

When you're ready to hit the town or country with your iOS device in hand, this Geospatial PDF viewing app looks like a pretty great way to download a whole lot of location data and make it viewable even without any further connectivity.

I recently spent some time exploring of Amsterdam with a light-weight, off-line iPad map app of the city, but a jam-packed Geospatial PDF might have been even better to use.

I uploaded a picture of my business card and Google Docs had trouble recognizing the largest text and clearest text on the card, but surprisingly did better with smaller text. A test of a PDF document turned up nearly perfect recognition results, but Google Docs strips nearly all of the formatting out, spewing out the text in a stream of letters and spaces. Other examples from Google Operating System produced decent results, but far from perfect or useful.

Additionally, when scanning a PDF, Google Docs does not save a copy of the PDF, so scanning to text and saving an original file requires two separate uploads. This feature is great for casual OCR users that want to quickly grab text from PDFs and some images or business cards. Those who rely on OCR heavily will likely be disappointed with the features and may have better results with commercial solutions.

Their premier product has had its own share of exploits over the years, which are not necessarily the same as the vulnerabilities that Adobe's Acrobat Reader has faced. Computerworld Magazine's security blog reports that the current FoxIt Reader vulnerabilities are different here:

The Foxit and Adobe bugs are unrelated, however, except for the fact that they are both in the code that parses JBIG2 images, said Thomas Kristensen, chief technology officer at Secunia, the Danish company that reported the flaw to Foxit. "It is a completely different vulnerability related to JBIG2," Kristensen said in an e-mail today.

FoxIt Reader has an integrated update system, so current users should be able to get the latest update automatically, or via the Check For Updates Now link in the Help pull-down menu. The patch details are also available from FoxIt directly.

Originally designed as a solution for e-commerce sites, the service strangely called Adam is not complicated to use. However, the company does estimate that the time it takes from mashup creation to having it live on your web site could be approximately 20 minutes. That's a little bit longer than just linking to a PDF or even uploading it to a document-hosting service like Scridb or Issuu. Still, the extra time may be worth it because Adam lets you create a truly interactive document by allowing you to add videos, HTML, stylized text, and more to what were previously just plain files.

For those familiar with designing web pages, the process may seem familiar. To add content to a document on Adam, you select various "hotspots" in the document and then add the content you want to mashup. This is where you would paste in any text, images, music, or videos you want to appear when the user mouses over that part of the document. The service currently integrates with other content providers including YouTube, flickr, metacafe, Veoh, vimeo, and imeem.

The best way to understand what Adam can do, though, is to view some sample of it in action. You can check out a mashed up floor plan or you can see all the content providers in use on one document.

Adam doesn't provide anything that a talented web designer can't already do on their own, but like every service that comes out of the Web 2.0 movement, it's about letting everyone have access to the tools that previously only skilled professionals knew how to use. If you want to try Adam for yourself, you can sign up here.

Kelly is using the PDF Ads for True Films 3.0. Kelly calls the use of the ads an experiment. "If it works with you readers to the same degree that ad-supported blogs have, it is not hard to imagine thousands of books being released for free with ads on the side," writes Kelly on his blog. "To some in publishing this prospect is the end of the world. The final stake in the heart of good old books. Ads-in-books specifically have been a bogeyman too horrible for them to even think about. [...] I am more pragmatic. I actually like the Google contextual ads on Cool Tools. They bring up choices I would have never encountered, yet they are fairly unobtrusive until you are looking. Why not do the same for books?"

But there are a couple of major obstacles to PDF Ads that I see in this initial iteration. The first is that the ads are opt-in. Because Acrobat Reader needs to connect to Adobe to download the ad content, it first asks for permission (the PDF files are scanned by Yahoo!'s content matching system before you download them, so the Yahoo! robot isn't actually scanning a file on your computer, but it will try to connect to Adobe each time you open to the file to attempt to download the most up-to-date ads). Will people really opt-in to view ads? Hardcore supporters of the author might, but since they're paid on a per click basis, if the people clicking on the ads are only doing so out of support for the author, isn't the advertiser losing out? That's not going to likely be high quality traffic.

The other major hurdle is that the content matching sucks. While reading True Film 3.0, I didn't see one ad that had anything to do with film or documentaries or even the subjects that any of the documentaries being reviewed were about. Instead, the ads were about unrelated things like travel and real estate -- they looks more like broadly purchased defaults (low paying inventory filling ads) than actual contextually matched advertisements. In order for PDF ads to warrant any notice from readers, they'll have to get a lot more relevant.