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Save Your Vista Upgrade Allowance and Buy an iPhone

IPHONE, IPHONE, IPHONE.

Think you've already heard enough of the iPhone? Not yet, its just starting. 

Being in imaging and graphics for 25 years, I can't remember the last time I was this blown away (except maybe in college but that's another story) with a new gadget or device. Just like other iPhone reviewers, my impression of the imaging and graphics on the iPhone are that they are awesome; easy to use and fun. No, I'm not one of these guys with a picture of myself standing in front of the Apple building, and I've never owned a Mac. No, I did not wait in line on Friday, June 29, here in Boston or anywhere else.

I never really used many of the features on my old phone. This morning my 11 year old was up before me and changed the first screen on my iPhone to be a picture of himself. I was able to use almost all of the applications without a manual in about 40 minutes.

Some of my favorite iPhone features:

1. Sort and select songs by flipping through pictures of the album covers of the artists.
2. Camera and photos rotate when the iPhone is rotated.
3. Much larger screen since there is no keyboard - just a touch screen.
4. Easy to use.
5. Zoom by double tapping the screen or moving your fingers apart.
6. Most applications can rotate by turning the iPhone sideways.

Did I mention how easy it was to use?

I also know the criticisms of the iPhone. First off the price: $500 for the 4 Gig model and $600 for the 8 gig model, sounds like a lot, but isn't the price of Vista Ultimate $600? Of course, with Vista you get the translucent windows and Microsoft is still promising more application extras with Vista Ultimate, even though you were shipped only three. The iPhone can open .pdf and Office files too. And since it has a full web browser, Safari, you could go to Google office.

iPhone vs Vista is an interesting concept. First off, people waited in line to buy the iPhone while many people got Vista usually because they had no choice. Few people upgraded existing PC's, especially with the confusion related to upgrade choices, compatability and functionality; and even then, it was a difficult process.  Vista took more than five years to come out, and it was not backward compatible with existing device drivers or many applications. iPhone is completely backward compatible with the iPod and will install all existing songs from iTunes. It also will fit with current iPod docking stations and other accessories.

The only downside to the iPhone in Boston is that the phone service is AT&T (which in Boston is probably the worst coverage). There is a $60 per month plan and a $100 per month plan and both have unlimited data. The more expensive plan just gives you more phone time. But who cares? I really don't use a cell phone much.

The bottom line is, at this time, less than a week after the introduction, Apple may have already sold 1 million units.

Don't knock this thing until you've tried it out for yourself. Try it out and you'll want one.

-Jim

Additional iPhone and Vista Reviews & Opinions

• What the iPhone doesn't do, why not, and why I still want one...
• Terry White's iPhone Review
• Windows Vista: I’m Breaking up with You

Integrating Viewing Applications into Document Imaging Systems

Developing a robust application that meets needs of all of your users is no small task. Building document imaging components requires deep technical expertise and long development cycles to engineer properly. Doing this entirely in-house can hinder your plans to increase business efficiency.

Working with independent software vendors (ISVs) to incorporate specialized imaging functions into your product provides you with the right capabilities to compete in the ever-changing landscape of document imaging. One trend in building large-scale applications and systems is to use component applications for specialized tasks, such as FlexSnap: SI for document review and annotation. A component application that can be embedded or added as a module provides flexibility and extends the capabilities of your system.

Component applications can save significant time and cost by allowing you to bypass the development phase for a particular document imaging function entirely. Imaging application vendors have a significant stake in providing the functionality that is important for their customers. That means you shouldn’t have to sacrifice necessary features for a pre-built component. An application specifically built to be the imaging component of a larger system will also minimize the time needed for integration.

Imaging applications should be designed as distributed applications so that as your imaging needs expand, the process of pushing software to your users is seamless. Sustainable component applications also require continuous development by the vendor to stay current with imaging trends and formats. A dedicated team should be available to provide technical information on integration and maintenance and accept customer feedback on new functionality requests. Vendors that also sell an SDK can give you the tools to develop, customize and maintain your application component over its entire lifecycle.

-Ed

Why Should Developers Use Professional Services?

Snowbound Software came into being offering development tools for engineers who wanted to embed imaging technology into their own specific applications. These companies had already made the decision that their area of expertise was not in imaging technology. The display and conversion of various image formats such as TIFF, JPEG, MO:DCA, AFP, and PCL was better left to the experts – Snowbound or our competitors. When tabulating the cost of development, if you could find the expertise, and comparing it to our price which included mature, widely tested technology, it was a no-brainer.

Because it is a developer to developer relationship, we talk the right language and we understand engineering needs. Many times we’ve added new capabilities at a customer’s request – it helps them and it helps us create a more powerful, more useful product. When we developed a Java version of our Windows and Unix imaging libraries, it was originally at a customer’s request.

So what’s different today? Well, time-to-market and cost concerns seem more pressing. Everyone is in crisis mode. Some people don’t even have time to read the manual ☺. Well, we have a new department for that – Professional Services. We’ve organized and expanded what we’ve always provided – a group of engineers that can understand your needs (often better than you can yourself), recommend the right product, and also integrate it into your system. 

And if you want to support your system yourself, what then? Simply contract us to create the integration layers for you to own. Then, with the purchase of our imaging tools, you can both get a quick start and obtain full control of your application.

We can implement our imaging solutions for you quickly because we’re the experts – we know our products and how to get the most out of them. We’ve solved the imaging problems for hundreds of companies world-wide - this is what we do.

-Simon

Getting the Most Out of Your Imaging Vendor

Implementing or upgrading to a strong document imaging solution can significantly improve a company's overall productivity and accelerate overall growth. However, the integration and implementation of such solutions is often complex and can lead to engineering errors, costly delays or even project abandonment. That is why working with a reliable and experienced imaging vendor can eliminate the risks and get your company up and running on time just by following a few easy guidelines.

Know your business needs and what you want to accomplish. Review and analyze your current workflow and processes with an imaging expert, let them recommend changes that could increase productivity and save time by implementing imaging solutions. Work with an imaging expert to establish which solution will best meet your requirements and then review a range of imaging solutions and components that meet the criteria. This will ensure you have the best suited tools to fit your new streamlined processes.

Know what you're working with. List and review all the formats (proprietary, non-proprietary or specialized) that you will be working with. Then consult with the potential vendors of your imaging component to determine if they offer universal viewing for both your proprietary and non-proprietary formats, and the ability to display multiple formats or any conversion/merging tasks that you have in place or wish to implement. This allows the vendor to know all the possible uses for the application ahead to ensure all your bases are covered.

Know your Environment. Choosing a platform for your document imaging system can often mean extending your current platform. It is important to involve your vendor in this process to ensure you operate on the best platform to meet not only your current needs, but possible future needs as well. The applications and systems already installed, especially any kind of document repository or management system, must be considered when integrating any document imaging component. Determining how these applications will work together is not something you want to address without the valuable input of your document imaging vendor. Also be sure to consider things like 3^rd party software that is either in use or will have to be implemented with the imaging solution and/or security requirements that may already be in place.

Know you will need help. Make sure you budget for a maintenance and support program. This will not only allow you the latest releases and upgrades, it will give you access to the imaging software vendor’s resources; valuable tools that can help and guide your engineers or 3^rd party contractors that may not be familiar enough with the system to perform detailed maintenance, upgrades, or general troubleshooting when problems may arise. Things like new features or changes to the existing application can often be confusing and difficult to work around. Your vendor's support programs are a  valuable resource that will ensure you always have someone to turn to for help.

- Ed

Why Build Your Own Web Viewer?

Snowbound originally only offered imaging toolkits from which our customers created all kinds of applications including viewers, server-based applications for document conversion, and comprehensive document management systems. Today, our image manipulation and viewing technology continues to be embedded in customers products; allowing them to seamlessly enhance their applications with advanced imaging functions, while still being able to deploy their own custom solutions.

With the numerous advances in the power and profitablity of web-based technology and distributed applications, many of our customers migrated to Java or established a need for web-based viewing and document processing. We moved with them, and developed a powerful Java imaging SDK, and later one for .NET as well. In the process of creating demo programs and samples for these toolkits, we found ourselves exceedingly expert in not only developing imaging functions and tools, but also in creating powerful viewers and client-server web imaging applications. As our customers discovered these powerful applications, more and more they realized that it didn't make sense to develop their own web-based document processing systems.

That's how Snowbound's FlexSnap family of web viewers was born. We are proud to continue to provide software developers with exceptional tools to embed in their applications. It is upon this foundation that we now offer a comprehensive family of exceptional web viewers. Our experience, our robust imaging libraries and the years spent developing them have all come together in our customizable web imaging applications.

-Simon

How Important are Version Upgrades?

For many application users, upgrades are welcomed due to a host of exciting new features. However if you’re an engineer, upgrades are often regarded as a necessary nuisance. If your tool or application is doing its job, why change it?

Well, you know that if you delay upgrading, at some point operating system changes, important features, or (in our case) new types of images and documents will cause your product to fail. 

So when we breathlessly announce our latest product version, what do most of you do? Well, about 20% of our maintenance customers (who get upgrades at no charge) request an upgrade at the time of announcement. The rest of you can take as long as 12 months. 

If you’re going to delay, should you upgrade at all? 

The industry is continually changing and obsoleting old products. Your product will eventually fail if you don’t upgrade its underlying technology. And though you can contract for old versions to be supported, that’s not a good solution. You start getting orphaned products that don’t receive the latest enhancements. It costs us and you, much more. 

What Do We Recommend?

We don’t expect you to follow our schedule but you should establish your own upgrade QA schedule.  We release upgrades once per year and we urge you to not delay from our release by more than four - six months. This gives you time to explore the latest improvements and also be in a position to get any special assistance from us without going to extra expense.

-Simon

The AIIM 2006 Trade Show

Last week we had the pleasure of meeting many of you at the annual AIIM show. We were surprised to see so many visitors from across the Pacific and the Atlantic. Though Philadelphia may not be on the radar for many people, it was a good trade show with a lot to offer.

One of our favorite activities is to demonstrate to our customers our latest products and features. This year we attracted some of you with our FlexSnap demo. This product is a very powerful web viewer and also a very vivid demonstration of the powerful applets and applications you can build with RasterMaster for Java.

I wanted also to note that it was very enjoyable to meet with our many exhibitor-customers. It’s so hard to see each other often in person, and here is one venue where we can easily do that.

I have to also mention that DataCap, one of our customers, was cleverly combining good deeds with excitement and business. With their bicycle races and their efforts to generate contributions to the Lance Armstrong Foundation by encouraging sponsorships from us and many other document imaging companies, they had a very busy booth and were positively noticed by everyone.

Next Year in Boston! We’ll keep you posted on what we’re planning.

-Simon

Eclipse is Gaining Popularity

I've been using Eclipse as an IDE since early 2004 now. It seems to be really catching on. A supplement in SD Times recently had an article on its increasing popularity in the entire software development community, not just Java. 

"62.5 percent of software development managers reported that some or all of their developers use Eclipse--an increase from 53.9 percent a year earlier."

Most of the Java developers at Snowbound are now using Eclipse.

Here are some of the benefits:

• An extensive plugin interface that allows third party tools to be easily integrated. For example, When I want to do some performance testing, all I have to do is run my project using  "Profile"  menu that was added when I installed JProfiler on my machine. When I choose to run my application in this way, JProfiler is automatically launched. By the way, JProfiler is an excellent tool for performance tuning. It pays for itself after only a couple of sessions.

• A lot of previously tedious tasks are done for you. Import statements at the top of a Java class can be automatically neatly organized. Getter / Setter Methods can be automatically generated. Required methods of implemented interfaces are automatically stubbed for you.

• I can define my preferred formatted and coloring / or bolding of code. Member variables can be bold, static constants can be gold, etc. Everything is indented exactly how I want in a single keystoke.

Eclipse's annual exhibition, EclipseWorld, will be held in Cambridge in September 06.

-Alex

The Benefits of Server-Client Imaging

People often overlook the importance of Imaging when it comes to their document management solution. Sometimes they simply take for granted that they can look at the documents that they store and work with.

When you ask most people what they view their PDF files with, their response will likely be, "Acrobat Reader". When asked what they will view their Word documents with, they'll of course reply, "Microsoft Word". They likely won't even know what the name of their TIFF viewer is. Ask them what the benefits of viewing documents and images in this way are, i.e. with their creator application, and they won't likely have a good answer for you.

There is one, at least with Word, and that's the ability to edit. However, to edit PDF, you need the full version of Acrobat, and we all know it isn't cheap, so typically only certain users have it. If you are viewing TIFF files, you're probably not editing at all. In fact, I'd guess that most of the time, with any format, users only need to view the files that are in their content management systems. They might also want to annotate or use some other method in an approval process, but that's a separate topic. So, for now we'll talk about straight viewing.

Ask them what the disadvantages of using creator applications to view content are, and they may give a list of things. The first, and most important, is usually the time it takes to actually view the document. Time after time I hear about how long it takes for users to download a full PDF, wait for Adobe Reader to open, and then display the document; they go get their coffee, chat at the water cooler, etc. You know what I'm talking about. Not only are your users wasting valuable work time, but they are using unnecessary bandwidth. If your users are in remote locations from the document repository, the problem is amplified.

So how do you solve the problem? There are multiple ways, most of which are more complicated than they need to be. One solution would be to have caching servers for content in various locations. That may solve access time across a WAN, but not excessive bandwidth use and file transfers, and it requires a large amount of hardware. Another solution would be to split large multi-page files into numerous single page documents, grouped as a virtual document. However, this requires another process in your document management workflow that is time-consuming, and it also increases the complexity of storing and managing your documents. I prefer what I think is the simplest solution: a server-client based viewing system.

Think about it. The server does all the work, and the client reaps all the benefits. Take a 150-page PDF as an example. Its file size might run on the order of 1.4MB. On average, a user isn't going to look at every page, and probably only needs to look at 5 or 10 pages. Would you rather send 1.4MB over the wire to the user, or 20K to begin with, and a total of 160K for 10 pages? Using server-side processing, you can retrieve the file, break up the pages, and pass a single page and a set of thumbnails to the client. When a user needs another page, the client requests the next page, either by paging through, jumping to a page by number, or selecting the desired thumbnail. Not only is this much faster, but it significantly reduces network traffic.

Speed is not the only benefit to this method. Security can be a big concern as well. Implementing this type of solution in Java with a servlet-applet solution, the file never has to touch the file system of the user; the client keeps all the info in memory, and the documents are gone once the session is ended.

Maintaining a servlet-applet solution becomes a simple of matter of updating files on the application server, and the change is transparent to the user. No more worrying about which users have which versions of the software, or updating multiple viewers on every system.

Scalability also becomes much easier. Since such an implementation can fit right into your existing application server architecture, compensating for increasing users is very manageable. As your user base expands, the server-side component is as expandable as your application server architecture.

With the cross-platform nature of Java, portability is a huge benefit. As long as an operating system has a JVM available, your server-client solution will work on that platform. This makes it easy to fit the same solution into a variety of business needs, whether it is internal or external, with no need to migrate code, or to make changes or additions to your existing infrastructure.

All in all, a server-client based approach offers a wide array of benefits when it comes to viewing images and documents, with no real drawbacks.

-Chris