Like most other people I was very excited by the recent release of the Apple iPad. It wasn’t excitement about the specific device but the potential growth it heralded for the tablet PC form factor. The design of tablet PCs and modern eBook readers make a stronger connection to the experience of working with physical paper documents. They also encourage the development of natural user interfaces (NUIs) for reading and working with documents.

Working with documents in natural way is a very important part of our gDoc product vision. The first generation of natural user interfaces can be seen in the Flick and Assembly views within gDoc Fusion. The future of the gDoc Product range will take this much further. I wrote about multi-touch and gesture based technologies in a previous blog post, another natural interface we are interested in is handwriting recognition.

Considering the iPad’s name, I was surprised to see that it didn’t support handwriting input. The Windows-based tablet PCs coming to the market offer extensive handwriting recognition functionality. Intuitively, handwriting seems like a natural way to interface with this kind of device. However I’m starting to wonder if traditional handwriting is actually a skill that people would still consider natural.

Bill Buxton (Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research) pointed out in a recent interview that there are only a very small number of truly innate natural skills and the rest only feel natural as we have invested large amounts of time learning and maintaining them. I was taught over a number of years to write at school, it started with block text and then moved onto a cursive (joined up) form of writing. Before the home PC was commonplace I used a pen and paper to generate all kinds of written documents. At university I reinvested time to learn how to use a PC and keyboard to write documents. I now use a PC exclusively to write documents and my hand writing skills are reduced to note taking tasks.

A couple of years ago I bought an electronic pad for taking notes in meetings. I would write on the paper and the electronic pen would record what I wrote. The recording could then be turned into text using handwriting recognition software. Sounded great until I realised that my handwriting skill had degraded too far to make it useful. Don’t get me wrong I can write legibly but not the same time as rapidly. I found myself thinking if only I had learned some form of shorthand.

I have come to the conclusion that I would be in much better position now to make technology work for me if my school had focused on teaching touch-typing together with a form of shorthand for taking notes. It makes me wonder as we move into the era of natural user interfaces (NUI) whether software companies need to be encouraging us to develop more relevant natural skills. Maybe if the iPad had offered shorthand recognition rather than handwriting recognition I would think about retraining myself again.

Business-strength PDF software for students and home computer users

This week Global Graphics announced the launch of gDoc Fusion Home & Student Edition (http://www.globalgraphics.com/fusion-homestudent), offering students and home computer users easy-to-use, enterprise-level PDF software at an affordable price.

The PDF creation software has been designed with simple navigation and user interface so people can quickly and easily create, review, edit, share and archive documents. Instead of presenting you with a window with a blank document and thousands of tools, toolbars and menu options, gDoc fusion was designed from scratch to give you a clean and simple user interface, giving you different views to suit the way you want to work, having observed users struggle with enterprise applications that are not intuitive to use.

The interaction is intuitive, if you select some text, you get a context sensitive toolbar automatically popup right beside it. This gives you all the commands you need when you need them at your finger tips. Once you have edited your document you can use the Flick View to browse through it and see how it looks or present it to your friends and family in a fun way.

gDoc Fusion Home & Student Edition also offers students and home users advanced functionality that was only available to enterprise users with benefits such as:

• Viewing, editing and saving Microsoft Office (Word, Excel & PowerPoint) documents
• Enhancing the presentation of coursework, essays, and dissertations
• Redaction and secure archiving of sensitive personal documents
• Sharing, emailing, printing or posting documents to websites
• Creating easy-to-share electronic photo albums
• Simple ‘drag and drop’ editing of multiple file formats into one document
• Viewing documents with unique Flick View functionality to reduce wasteful printing

While our gDoc Creator product remains free for anyone to download here (http://www.globalgraphics.com/en/gdoc/free-creator) we are passing on the huge benefits of its big brother, gDoc Fusion, to home and students users at a great price. Download gDoc Fusion Home & Student Edition here (http://www.globalgraphics.com/fusion-homestudent).

One of the more intriguing findings from our recent research (http://www.globalgraphics.com/freesoftware) into the use of free software by large enterprises regarded support.

Product quality and the availability of support were the two biggest concerns of CIOs when considering the use of free software. Product quality is a straight-forward concern with a simple solution; 82% of CIOs subject a free software product to the same evaluation criteria as a paid-for software product.

Support is a more complex area. Asked what type of support a free software vendor should offer, the majority (41%) of CIOs suggested free product support such as patches and upgrades.

To my mind that seemed surprisingly low given that all software products need such updates, and paying for upgrades for a free product seems a little perverse (indeed, less than 10% of CIOs thought that was a good move!).

What grabbed my attention was that 22% of CIOs want paid-for technical support (1-2-1) to sit behind a free software product. It’s completely understandable, given the professionalism expected of IT within a large corporate, but I was surprised that paid-for support rated so highly for a free product. There was equal backing for free forum-led knowledge.

It just brings home how important it is that products used within a business must be reliable – even to the extent of making a free product one that brings with it a support cost.

It also shows, of course, that flexibility is key, which is exactly the approach Global Graphics has taken; free product upgrades with a choice of free or paid-for technical support.

Similarly, we somewhat assumed that large enterprises would find server-based downloads more convenient as it eases the centralised management of a free software product. Yet only 17% of CIOs wanted server-based downloads and installation; one in five preferred PC-based downloads and installation. The overwhelming majority (62%) want, you guessed it, both!

So, just as well we support both options on that too…