I am extremely pleased to announce that something I wrote has been rendered obsolete. At the end of April I shared my pain over Adobe Reader's problems with Vista. Yesterday Adobe released the promised updates to its Acrobat 8 and Reader products that are supposed to resolve the problems I (and many others, to be sure) discovered.Adobe got caught in a time trap on Vista. It shipped Acrobat 8 Professional, Acrobat 8 Standard, and Adobe Reader 8 in November, as close to Vista compatible as it could get from working with the operating system beta code, but by the time Vista finally shipped in January, I suspect some of the cargo had shifted, and Adobe's products weren't as compatible as the company -- or I and many others -- would have liked.

The new releases are pronounced to be fully compatible not only with Vista, but with Microsoft Office 2007 as well -- which means they integrate with the new ribbon UI. For details, see Lori DeFurio's official Adobe blog.

There's new stuff in Acrobat 8.1 as well. It will run in 64-bit Citrix and Windows environments now -- it's still a 32-bit app, but it will install and run properly on 64-bit systems.

There's also a bone thrown to Mac users: Flash .SWF files will play in Acrobat and Reader without using QuickTime player. There's also support for CS3's Bridgetalk 2 with InDesign, and some bug fixes.

Best of all, if you bought Acrobat 8, you can get the update for free. For Windows users the updates can be downloaded here, and Mac users will find their files here.

And Adobe Reader 8.1, which is supposed to fix all the problems I noted in my Vista tip in April, is also now available here.