After a hectic couple of week’s launching gDoc Fusion to the world, I want to highlight some of the great things being said about our new PDF tool as well as address some small issues people have highlighted.

Across the world journalists, reviewers and our peers have been talking about gDoc Fusion and its benefits. In the UK business and technology publications like VNUet.com and Computer Business Review to general consumer media like Computeractive have highlighted gDoc Fusions’ ease of use as a key benefit.

In the US and Australia, ComputerWorld.au ran our launch story as well as trade media Planet PDF emphasising how easy it is to share and convert PDF, XPS, Word and PowerPoint files using gDoc. Sites like Technolawyer have given gDoc favourable reviews.
And in Germany Computerzietung and Computerwoche covered the launch.

Equally bloggers and Twitterers have been discussing gDoc Fusion including Adrian Ford and Ivan Walsh as well as Martin Heller who’s been recommending it to his followers.

Most reviews have been fantastic covering of the many benefits gDoc Fusion offers in terms of easy of use and simple user interface. Of those reviewers of the pre-release version a couple of people have found some issues on particular hardware configurations but Martin Heller, for example later posted than any challenges he had were just on his Vista for x64 machine but “the product is completely solid on my 32-bit Windows XP machine” and concluded that gDoc Fusion “…does a better job than Acrobat at redacting sensitive text from PDF documents and editing PDF text in place. It also fills a major void in Acrobat’s functionality and converts PDF documents back to Word format.”

Overall, we’ve been extremely pleased with our launch reception and I wish to thank all those who took the time to review the product and offer feedback. Our development team is now pressing ahead with SP1 which we intend to launch mid June.
We’re determined to continue to improve the product and only add extra functionality that users actually need. I look forward to continued feedback from across the world.

I met Thomas Müller yesterday, a veteran PDF expert based in Düsseldorf who wrote one of the first, if not the first, third-party books about Acrobat 3.0. Thomas is a self-confessed Acrobat power user (he knows all the keyboard shortcuts by heart) and has built a consulting business on his expertise.

We wanted to get his take on gDoc Fusion, and his reaction surprised me. When I’ve shown the product to other Acrobat experts, their initial response is often muted. They tend to view gDoc Fusion through the lens of Acrobat, and don’t appreciate the ease of use and intuitive nature of the interface. Thomas did – he immediately saw the benefit of the innovative user interface (UI) ideas embodied in Fusion, and their value to the user, particularly a first-time or occasional user. This was refreshing – often, users who know a software product so well they could work it in their sleep confuse familiarity with ease-of-use, but Thomas recognises that the product he knows inside out, i.e. Acrobat, is not at all obvious to the first time user.

Thomas is not alone in his enthusiasm; we have been getting positive feedback from the many journalists we have met in the last couple of days. I’m looking forward to more feedback when the product is fully released.

Links for Thomas Müller: www.value-netzwerk.de and www.pdfzone.de

We’ve been presenting gDoc Fusion to industry watchers – journalists and analysts at technology market research companies. I heard the term “technology populism” for the first time, defined as the impact of consumer technology on the IT choices companies make. The most obvious example is IM – Instant Messaging – that has made its way from online chat to corporate communication tool. In designing gDoc Fusion, we were also influenced by consumer technology since ease of use (and learning) comes from using paradigms that are already familiar to our users. With the Flick view, we wanted to make visual searching of pages as easy as flicking through a physical document. This view takes advantage of the brain’s extraordinary ability to process images and to select an item of interest as they whizz past. Can we claim to have invented this approach to user interface design? Not exactly – clearly we have been influenced by web interfaces and particularly Apple’s Coverflow on the iPhone. Which brings me back to technology populism – not only does it mean the influence of consumer technology on IT strategy, but it also the influence on the design of new business tools such as gDoc Fusion.