An online hotel booking agency sent me a form to fill in and send back. I tried to do the whole thing digitally with Adobe Acrobat and my scanned signature. The whole process was so frustrating, I had to resort to printing out the form, filling it in, with my chicken-scratch handwriting, scanning it back in and sending it off.
Acrobat’s ‘digital signature’ features were definitely designed for some heavy and secure business usage. The only problem is that the software is so hard to use, I can’t imagine a business oriented user having the time to figure this application out. Most business people just don’t have the time to read manuals, like it or not. Simplicity is not on display in Acrobat. There’s so much useless bloated feature creep, it’s ridiculous.
I’d consider myself a power user and this application totally had me doing limbo moves. Once I finally made it through the torturous maze of figuring out how to fill out the form and adding my signature I had five different versions floating around my desktop. Adding insult to injury, I checked the finally pdf in Apple’s Preview app and the signature isn’t even on the form?! You mean to tell me, whoever recieves this form, has to have Acrobat just to even view the signature? How lame.
If I could give the Acrobat dev team my two cents, here’s what that would be: their current ‘digital signature’ feature should be called ‘secure/verified digital signature’ and they should add a new feature called ‘simple signature’ that just allows you to add an image file to the form that has your scanned signature. Wanna be a little bit more secure? Have the editing capabilities of the doc locked by password, upon saving. This ‘simple signature’ functionality would suffice for 90% of most users’ needs. The ability to add 3D models to a pdf doc? I found it hard enough just to add a plain old image.
Some indie mac developer needs to come out with a pixelmator-style app for pdfs. Design a pdf editing application for 70% of users that has 30% of the functionality of Adobe Acrobat. I’d buy that for 10 or 20 bones.
