DataViz to Demo Native Adobe PDF Support

DataViz today announced it will be providing a demonstration of its native Adobe PDF support for Palm OS at next week's CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment show San Francisco, CA. This native PDF solution provides Palm OS devices with an image-rich, WYSIWYG-view of product brochures, manuals, annual reports and other common Adobe PDF files without requiring any desktop conversion.

Later this fall DataViz will be adding this new native Adobe PDF support into Documents To Go Premium Edition, making Documents To Go the only commercially available native PDF solution for the Palm OS platform.

Native PDF technology will include support for embedded graphics, tables, multiple zoom levels, page layout and word wrap views to provide a desktop-quality view of PDF files on Treo smartphones and other popular Palm OS devices. In addition, no desktop application or pre-processing of files is required before the file can be viewed on the mobile device. For instance, customers who receive PDF files as e-mail attachments can easily view them right on their mobile device.

"Native PDF support is a natural extension of the Premium Edition of Documents To Go," said Danny Tu, Product Manager, DataViz, Inc. "This has been by far the top feature request as our customers begin to migrate to the wireless world. So we are anxious to bring this ground breaking capability to market."

Demonstrations of this native PDF technology can be seen at the MobileFocus showcase event held at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco on Tuesday, September 29. In addition it will be on display at CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment 2005 in both the DataViz booth (#1405) and the Palm booth (#311). Native PDF support will be added into a future version of Documents To Go to be released later this fall. Previous customers will be able to upgrade for $29.99 directly from DataViz. Documents To Go Premium Edition retails for $49.99 [BUY].

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Whoopie!

Khris @ 9/21/2005 2:24:51 PM # Q
*twirls finger*

What an innovation!

RE: Whoopie!
phoneboy @ 9/21/2005 3:49:14 PM # Q
I'm underwhelmed. My 2+ year-old Sony Clie came with Picsel Viewer wich allows me to view native pdf files at great detail and with great reliability (not to mention viewing native Word, Excel, JPG and other files).

I was hoping not to have to pay extra for this ability when (or if) I upgrade to the TX.

Sharp 16KB Organizer, US Robotics Palm Pilot 1000, Palm III, Palm IIIx, Palm V, Palm Vx, Palm M505, Sony Clie NR-70, Palm Tungsten 3, Compaq iPaq 3955 (for kicks), Sony Clie UX-50

RE: Whoopie!
ackmondual @ 9/22/2005 12:22:14 PM # Q
^^

Not to sound like an unsympathetic bastard or anything, but for all that marvel of including a feature/function rich viewer years ahead of Dataviz, Clie's and therefore Piscel viewer aren't around anymore.

Dataviz should get some (but not too much) slack since i hear they're a small company. They wouldn't really be able to compete with a large dev division of a large corporation on productivity.

"Do you know the difference between an error and a mistake? Anyone can make an error, but that error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it."
-Grand Admiral Thrawn

the secret to enjoying your job is to have a hobby that's even worse

My PDAs: Visor --> Visor Neo (blue) --> Zire 71 --> Tungsten T3 (with 4 of 6 screws still remaining) ~?~> zodiac 2?

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Ingenious! Well Maybe Not That Good?

LiveFaith @ 9/21/2005 2:25:16 PM # Q
Ingenious!

Well maybe not ingenious, but it is about time someone seized this huge hole in the Palm Economy ... err Palm Inc handheld market. I hope DV makes a fortune off this. They should.

What Adobe (and Palm) have been calling a PDF viewer is about like China saying that it has a "People's Republic". Way to go DataViz!

Pat Horne; www.churchoflivingfaith.com

RE: Ingenious! Well Maybe Not That Good?
twrock @ 9/22/2005 10:02:30 AM # Q
...like China saying that it has a "People's Republic"
LOL!

I'm still waiting for the mythical "color HandEra."
RE: Ingenious! Well Maybe Not That Good?
asiayeah @ 9/22/2005 11:43:06 AM # Q
...like China saying that it has a "People's Republic"

China's full name is People's Republic of China. Do you have a problem with that?

Check out the below if you want to know the details,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Republic_of_China

--
With great power comes great responsiblity.

RE: Ingenious! Well Maybe Not That Good?
ackmondual @ 9/22/2005 12:29:41 PM # Q
QUOTE
Well maybe not ingenious, but it is about time someone seized this huge hole in the Palm Economy ... err Palm Inc handheld market. I hope DV makes a fortune off this. They should.
END

At $50 a pop, but $30 per upgrade, they just might.

QUOTE
China's full name is People's Republic of China. Do you have a problem with that?
END

While that is china's name, due to some of China's social, political, and various other policies, some ppl would beg to differ.

This got me thinking into the whole deal with full country names like for Great Britain. IMO Britain is a respectable country (yah Astraware!), but not that "Great". In actuality, "Great" is a measure location and land like 'contiguous' United States or 'mainland' China and not goodness.

Speaking of which, "United States" doesn't seem so 'United' when it takes our government 8 days after a major natural disaster to realize that emergency response officials are NOT doing a good job and to send in rescue/relief efforts.

"Do you know the difference between an error and a mistake? Anyone can make an error, but that error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it."
-Grand Admiral Thrawn

the secret to enjoying your job is to have a hobby that's even worse

My PDAs: Visor --> Visor Neo (blue) --> Zire 71 --> Tungsten T3 (with 4 of 6 screws still remaining) ~?~> zodiac 2?

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No need to go WM!

sr4 @ 9/21/2005 2:32:43 PM # Q

There goes half my argument for switching Palmies to WM ;)

Surur

RE: No need to go WM!
T. @ 9/21/2005 2:37:26 PM # Q
FINALLY. This is the hole I needed to fill. I've got access to VNC, FTP, E-mail, Wifi, Terminal Emulation, Project (Natara), Access (Dataviz), faxes (efax), IM (Verichat) and Word (Dataviz), but I still had to carry a stupid laptop around to read *.pdf's that people sent me.

Now I just need them to make it capable of creating *pdf's and also get Skype working on the Palm. Then I wouldn't even care that the Yankees are only a 1/2 game behind the Red Sox.



RE: No need to go WM!
hkklife @ 9/21/2005 2:47:51 PM # Q
The big question remains...with the limited heap on many recent Palm models, how will it copy with larger PDFs? Some of the ones that have rolled into my e-mail box lately have been notoriously (overly) large and rather unwieldy.

This needs to be a STANDARD bundled app, no questions asked, on all Palm devices $200+.

I suppose Adobe is going to give up on their own feeble POS reader?

RE: No need to go WM!
Gekko @ 9/21/2005 2:53:31 PM # Q

i hate adobe/.pdfs. i only use it when i have to.



RE: No need to go WM!
LiveFaith @ 9/21/2005 4:17:42 PM # Q
hkk,

Do I sense that you did not mean Palm OS when you said POS Reader? :-o

Pat Horne; www.churchoflivingfaith.com

RE: No need to go WM!
rasty @ 9/21/2005 5:48:04 PM # Q
There's always RepliGo.. not native, but does the job for me!

RE: No need to go WM!
hkklife @ 9/21/2005 8:29:19 PM # Q
Double entendre there, Pat!

You know me...

New question of the day:

I wonder which version of DTG will ship on the T7? Will Dataviz use the upcoming T7 launch to showcase DTG 9 and/or their PDF reader support?

BTW, I meant "cope" above, not "copy".

RE: No need to go WM!
Timothy Rapson @ 9/21/2005 8:41:36 PM # Q
This could get me into a new TX and up to DTG premium.
I have a PDF map of the world that I use once or twice. It is very nice huge political map with all the countries and many islands, cities, and islands named. It looks marvelous on my desktop.
On my Zire 72 it shrinks to a much less usable size in Adobe's Palm OS viewer. I can't open it full sized in Adobe Palm OS PDF viewer at all unless I have 15 Meg of RAM free, and I rarely want to go to that length of freeing space. I bought RoadLinqua world atlas and it is nice too, but it does not pan around the maps properly on my 72 (buggy) and it does not show the various countries in a zoomable context of the countries surrounding them. You only view one country at a time. That is not what I really want, though the other information Roadlingua has makes it worthwhile.
The other problem I have is that the version of DTG that came with my 72 crashes as often as it runs properly, so I don't use it. I don't even have it installed right now. I am pretty sure that this is not normal for most versions of DTG or I would have heard a lot of others complaining about it. Perhaps by next Spring the TX will be available at a good discount and this newly promised version of DTG will be in it's third maintainance update and working well. That would save me buying all new software if I switched to another platform.
Hmmmm.......



RE: No need to go WM!
asiayeah @ 9/22/2005 11:47:15 AM # Q
It is most handy to have a native PDF viewer when you receive a PDF document in an e-mail or you want to read a PDF document on a webpage.

--
With great power comes great responsiblity.
About high damn time
ackmondual @ 9/22/2005 12:53:37 PM # Q
QUOTE
There goes half my argument for switching Palmies to WM ;)
END

I didn't know how important PDF was to so many ppl. Never knew that PPC had a better, decent version of PDF viewer either.

For me, it's the combo of features. The zooming, native support, AND preserved tables and graphics are what count for me. Now, I can view train timetables w/o having to copy and paste them into a Word doc.

QUOTE
The big question remains...with the limited heap on many recent Palm models, how will it copy with larger PDFs? Some of the ones that have rolled into my e-mail box lately have been notoriously (overly) large and rather unwieldy.

This needs to be a STANDARD bundled app, no questions asked, on all Palm devices $200+.

I suppose Adobe is going to give up on their own feeble POS reader?
END

Ditto with Word docs I suppose. Hope u have a handheld with lots of free user RAM for that. In all honesty, do you really need to be receiving 15MB+ PDF files on your PDA?

Not bloody likely to be included. Palm isn't even including a cradle, metal casing, acceptable level of software bugs, and decent customer support for $400+ models anymore.

"*going to* give up"??? I was under the impression that Acrobat Reader for Palm was some beta and never got finished in the first place. It was so terrible that after using it for the first time, i uninstalled it and nearly puked!! On second thought, the semi-expired yogart i ate could've had something to do with that, but it was still aweful!!

QUOTE
i hate adobe/.pdfs. i only use it when i have to.
END

Similar sentiment here as well. I don't hate it, but not wild about it either. It seems like places such as news groups are wild about it. For example, I have a friend who worked at National Public Radio, and not only are PDFs widely used, but the shareware app to create PDFs, Acrobat as opposed to the freeware viewer Acrobat Reader is practically installed on all PCs there.

"Do you know the difference between an error and a mistake? Anyone can make an error, but that error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it."
-Grand Admiral Thrawn

the secret to enjoying your job is to have a hobby that's even worse

My PDAs: Visor --> Visor Neo (blue) --> Zire 71 --> Tungsten T3 (with 4 of 6 screws still remaining) ~?~> zodiac 2?

Reply to this comment

Hopefully...

vesther @ 9/21/2005 8:06:38 PM # Q
...this will warrant us to dump Adobe PDF Reader for Palm OS in favor of a more Palm OS 5 and higher-friendly solution.

Powered by Palm OS since March 2002
The irony comes to a close....
ackmondual @ 9/22/2005 1:08:43 PM # Q
Anyone else find it ironic that the "Portable Document Format" isn't so portable on the most portable of devices?
RE: Hopefully...
hkklife @ 9/22/2005 1:30:20 PM # Q
It's a riot. I get PDFs from a few people who have a digital camera & some fancy all-in-one machine or a scanner that can output to PDF. They print out a jpeg they just took, then scan it with their AIO machine and send me the PDF of the scanned image (I'm not kidding) because it ends up being a few hundred k smaller in size (better for emailing). They don't know about resizing or more aggressive levels of jpeg compression.

PDFs are great for downloading things like manuals to tech equipment from manufacturers' support sites. But when you start seeing fuzzy, low-res images being posted or e-mails as PDFs, it just irks me.

That said, it's way past time (3 years?) for something like this on Palm OS.

RE: Hopefully...
r0k @ 10/10/2005 11:07:26 PM # Q
I have complained to Adobe about their product. In fact, I went to their site today only to find that they are STILL on version 3.05. pdf is such a universal format that it does not make sense for palm to continue to ignore having a native viewer free. That being said, I will consider the dataviz version when it becomes available. Datavis' site still says they support pdfs as sync only. If it were available today, I would download and try it.

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