Nice week for Adobe SHARE: first, I demoed the soon to be released version of SHARE in front of 2000+ Adobe geeks during Kevin Lynch’s keynote on Tuesday morning. It was quite an honor to be the first demo geek of the day, and I was really glad that the software didn’t hiccup during the demo. Now if only I could learn not to talk so fast when I’m nervous – one coworker told me that I sounded like I was from New York City… Tech Summit in general has been a great experience. Its really exciting to meet so many brilliant, dedicated people in person and see what they’ve been up to.
Then Robin Good did an in-depth review of SHARE on his “MasterNewMedia” blog today, and he had some very positive things to say. I’m also happy that several things he said he’d like to see improved were things I was able to demonstrate the day before I saw his review. I want to call out one particular quote from the review, though:
By focusing on simplicity and key features, without trying to do everything under one roof, Share succeeds in providing a tool that is ready to be used the next second you are logged in. With a clean and very well though out interface Share feels intuitive and smooth both to the novice as well as to the tech savvy user.
I think this is a super-important point. It is often a lot easier to build an application with tons of features crammed into every corner than it is to build a application that relentlessly focuses on doing a few things really well. In SHARE’s case, the thing it does well is sharing documents with others. Everything else we do is there to support that usage: previewing, embedding in blogs, and so forth. Nice to see that this quality came through. Thanks Robin!
Meanwhile, my cohorts on the Buzzword team continue to rack up nice review after nice review. As good as I think SHARE’s UI is, it feels a little crude sometimes compared to Buzzword’s amazing level of polish. Even dedicated Mac fanatic John Gruber likes it:
Best web app word processor I’ve ever seen. It even does things like let you use Mac-standard shortcuts such as Command-F (Find), Command-S (Save), etc.
John is absolutely right: it really is the best word processor on the web, by far. And it could only have been done using Flash and Flex.
Buzzword, SHARE, and BRIO are the three publicly available projects our team has going right now, and together they make for a pretty exciting set of services. I’m really looking forward to seeing people’s reactions once they see our next generation of stuff in just a few more months…
Posted in Rich Internet Applications, SHARE
Tags: collaboration, documents, PDF, SHARE
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