Scribd Streamlines Embedded Docs With iPaper 2

I know that many folks on HN much prefer raw pdf's to a flash viewer, but JR (sole programmer for iPaper) has done an amazing job single-handedly replacing a multi-billion dollar company's product: Macromedia's FlashPaper.

JR is a quiet, but very friendly french canadian, an avid roller-blader, and was previously one of the programmer's on the Assassin's Creed ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin%27s_Creed )

When I worked at Scribd, JR and I shared an office while he was writing the first version of iPaper. The sheer complexity of getting all the fonts worked out and embedded images and searching and compression and streaming in the document for faster load times etc etc was quite a feat for a single developer. He would come in early and leave late, all the day working with an amazing focus. He's a real work horse.

I remember when his Programming Erlang book arrived - he devoured it in a couple of days and re-architected the iPaper system to more efficiently stream the documents to the viewer. Despite the iPaper viewer being in flash, there are some very sexy technologies under the hood.

Anyway, just wanted to shed some light on the guy behind the product. It's not a team of highly paid flash code monkeys - just JR quietly working away to make billion dollar company's products obsolete.

Google's PDF viewer used for attachments in Gmail is better by leaps and bounds -- I hope they start using it in SERPs at some point. I wonder if an API could be hacked together for use from a Firefox extension...