Box.net Now Uses Scribd’s iPaper for Previews - Sorry, Adobe, but this thing just works better | Hacker News Reader

Box.net Now Uses Scribd’s iPaper for Previews - Sorry, Adobe, but this thing just works better

mashable.com

26 pointsraburmester18 comments

But it doesn't work better than the Safari or Preview.

I understand how slow and clunky Adobe Reader is, but I'm on a Mac: Safari handles PDFs fast and renders text much nicer than iPaper.

No doubt Scribd will make iPaper even more awesome, but right now I'm gonna be annoyed if sites lose their PDF links and only offer iPaper viewing.

Is Safari orders of magnitude better than iPaper? Did you see the cool grid thing iPaper does?.

Safari is kinda the minority too and I guess webmasters would like to control and monetize those documents if possible

being able to download a PDF is an order of magnitude better than web-only.

The best value here comes from not having to startup a Microsoft Office application to view one of those types of documents.

So while iPaper may not be any better than FoxIt, Preview or Adobe Reader, it is a lot better than starting a full fledged viewing/editing application just to browse a document.

I own a Macbook and even it starts up Keynote if I want to look at a PowerPoint presentation. It would be nice to setup QuickLook as the default app for Office documents but I'm not sure if that's possible.

Quick look does work on Office documents. And keynote documents. Just hit space bar instead of opening the document.

I didn't mean to say that it doesn't work with Office documents. I only wanted to make it the default action for double click. Thank you for the space bar tip.

Sorry Adobe? You realize iPaper is Flash based, another Adobe product.

Long live Adobe!

Adobe could care less if iPaper catches on. They'll just copy it and release it into the next version of Flash Paper.

Or buy it.

Maybe. Maybe not. To survive, startups have to assume that's not the case.

After tying it, I wouldn't say it works better than Reader or FoxIt.

haven't tried FoxIt, but I would say it is faster, less clunky, and more responsive than reader at least on my box

On my machine, with my browser, iPaper seems to be far slower than Foxit.

I have a reasonably fast machine, but iPaper seems at least as unresponsive as Reader.

I'm all about it but what's with the name? iPaper? When is the "i" thing going to die? Product is great but they could have put a little more work into the name imo...

why does the name matter if the product is great? The name is a b2b name, normal web users would hardly have to interact with it.

True dat. If someone is dumb enough to make a PDF, then I will be slightly less annoyed if I can view it in Scribd. Still doesn't top FoxIt, though.

"Dumb enough to make a PDF"?

You mean, dumb enough to make the only completely device independent, 100% consistent document format?

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