The Snowtide Blog

We’ve finally recovered from our harrowing experience of being discovered via digg (so horrible to have the problem of too much attention!).  PDFTextOnline is back online, and greatly beefed up.

Also, the new interface I promised earlier is now in effect as well.  It’s simpler, easier to understand, and provides some new features as well (such as being able to choose the font used to display extracted PDF text, and being able to choose which layout mode should be used when performing each extraction).  Let us know what you think.

Finally, we’ve brought in Adsense ads.  I guess we’ve sold out now, eh?  Of course, it’s the smart thing to do given the pretty significant waves of traffic we continue to get from around the web that was prompted by the digg post.

Well, that was a surprise. PDFTextOnline was linked to on Digg, and made it to the front page (it made it to #2 when I saw it).

Of course, you know the drill from here. We built PDFTextOnline and put it out there as a nifty little tool, hoping that some people would find it useful, and maybe a couple curious software developers and managers might stumble upon PDFTextStream as a great way to bring PDF text extraction like they see in PDFTextOnline into their organization. We haven’t promoted it, or even linked to it heavily on snowtide.com.
Given all that, we didn’t put PDFTextOnline on a particularly large server — in fact, it was running on a mid-level VPS. Definitely nothing special.

Then we got hit with the digg-effect, and whammo, say goodbye. I haven’t poked at the server logs much yet, but the flood of traffic was heavy and unyielding.

So, I got the hint — PDFTextOnline is genuinely interesting to an audience larger than us. Now I need to go server-shopping.

My hope is that PDFTextOnline will be back up later tonight, and then moved to a real server next week. Then maybe we can get slashdotted, and do it all over again!

In my rush to self-flagellate in my last post, I neglected to mention that PDFTextOnline’s ‘Save Text to Disk’ command is now available.  This is really what makes PDFTextOnline worthwhile — being able to get a quality text extract from your PDF documents without spending time copy-and-pasting everywhere.  (Not to mention all of the other advantages that PDFTextOnline gets you, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text extraction capability, which is generally shoddy in ‘regular’ PDF viewers.)

Give a high-quality text extraction tool a whirl.

PDFTextOnline, our shiny-new AJAX-y PDF text extraction application, is a nifty tool, and we’re getting some decent feedback. However, many people have indicated (not so indirectly) that its user interface sucks. Yeah, OK, our bad.

This is a lesson that was learned about a decade ago, which we didn’t so much as recognize as stumble over. Here’s PDFTextOnline’s user interface currently (click to enlarge):

It doesn’t look too bad, right? Not so shabby for ‘beta’, whatever that means. Of course, using it is a wholly separate matter. The buttons in the toolbar in the upper right corner are entirely opaque as to their meaning — even though the icons use familiar visual metaphors (open folder for the ‘Open File’ action, a disk for the ‘Save As’ action, etc), they don’t seem to work within this environment. The split betwen the drawer on the left and the main text area doesn’t really work quite right, apparently regardless of whether you’re a Windows, Mac, or Linux person.

Users are flummoxed, and don’t see what the path is from pont A to point B.

Those are just a few of the comments we’ve received so far. The point being, of course, that we didn’t design the UI for the web, as we should have — we designed it to mimic a desktop PDF viewer (except PDFTextOnline’s stock in trade is text). Maybe if we redoubled our efforts, we could roll in a new widget set (perhaps those from Backbase, or something similar), tighten all of javascript that worked with the interactive bits to make those parts more snappy, and end up with something that felt more desktop-ish.

Of course, that’s a bad idea. This is not a desktop application, it’s a web application. Duh.

We’ll have something better in a few weeks, promise.