Reverse Engineering the 100% AJAX Vuzit Document Viewer
blog.vuzit.com
blog.vuzit.com
The story itself is not really clear on what the value of this thing is.
I wrote the blog post, posted to HN, and then sent out a tweet to my friends which might explain some of the new users. I recognize a couple of the commenters, and FWIW they are entrepreneurs that have technology companies. Here is the tweet: http://twitter.com/chriscera/status/1527260033
The purpose of the article is to point out that the core of the Vuzit viewer is our reliance on web services. Another topic is that anyone could write their own viewer using our web services. The last point is that we only used our published APIs to build our Viewer and our website. My understanding is that nobody else in the marketplace has designed such a technology, and is offering it as a commercial service.
I would love to hear more comments on our Technology and Company. Do you care that it's made from AJAX vs Java vs Flash? Do you care that it's based on Web Services? Would you use it for your website, product, or service?
Any help from the HN community is greatly appreciated! Best, -Chris
The topic was interesting to an extent, but you could have avoided the spammy comments.
In any case, it seems like this got killed from the HN homepage. Can one of the admins tell me what was the primary reason?
I did NOT create any bogus accounts, bogus comments, etc. The only people from vuzit that voted on this post were myself and bmatzelle.
Best, -Chris
Vuzit itself looks like a useful service. What I am not clear on is what value someone would get from writing their own viewer to embed in their website when that seems to be the hardest task they would be "outsourcing" by using your service. Is it to customize the look and feel (possibly by using a technology like Flash as you suggested)?
It's great that you guys have an API. I'll take a look at it when I need to embed docs on a web page.
Thanks for the explanation. You're correct about outsourcing, and this is the #1 reason why we have customers :)
We often get requests to build something specific for a mobile device, customized skins/toolbars, annotation tools, exporting forms, etc. It's impossible for us to do everything, so we changed things around a bit to allow others to build their own interfaces on top of our own.
We will continue to enhance our viewer for our core audience, and we will focus on areas that we believe we can deliver the most value.
I'm hopeful that with our new approach, it will empower other products and services to use 90% of what we have built and add the last 10% themselves.
I hope that clears it up, and thanks for the feedback. -Chris