October 09, 2003

flash paper

Jeremy Allaire posts about Flash Paper, a Macromedia alternative to Adobe’s PDF. While I agree with the notion that we need alternatives to the ever-bloating PDF monster, Macromedia’s missing a key user modality with digital documents – email attachments. PDFs get saved, forwarded, marked up, forwarded on again, reused, repurposed, in a way that web-bound Flash paper documents couldn’t… Even if Macromedia gave away the Flash paper producer (unlike Adobe, which charges a hefty sum for it), they’d need to be in bed with the intranet / workspace providers to make sharing those docs as easy as emailing an attachment…and then they’d still have a problem with offline use and heavy inbox addicts…