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.

Global Graphics has been quietly working away on a successor to its very successful JAWS PDF range of desktop software, and today gDoc Fusion makes its debut to a select group prior to its full launch on May 18th.

Those who participated in the Global Graphics desktop software survey back in February and opted in to try out a new software application will shortly be receiving a personalised email, giving them an opportunity to obtain a fully working, pre-release version of this new, office productivity product.

Those who take the opportunity to download and install gDoc Fusion may well want to tell the world about their experiences, and to do so they can post comments to this blog.

You can read more about gDoc Fusion at www.globalgraphics.com/gdoc