Crocodoc (YC W10) Sets Its Sights On Adobe Acrobat With New Update | Hacker News Reader

Crocodoc (YC W10) Sets Its Sights On Adobe Acrobat With New Update

techcrunch.com

65 pointsrdamico13 comments

Finally! Now ... umm ... certain people I know won't have to pirate stupid Acrobat. I hate that program.

The funny thing is that Adobe could probably make the same thing in about three weeks, but they won't because they hate change.

Foxit is a great desktop replacement for Adobe Acrobat. I love their products..

Skim on the mac side is excellent, open source, and free.

This is exactly what I've been looking for -- I've been trying to find a way to collaboratively edit a draft PDF of a newsletter, without dumping a lot of money on Acrobat.

This kind of evolution to the cloud is inevitable, I'm glad to see a team making it happen for a piece of software that is so essential to business.

Hmm, they're taking a bit of a risk with being flash-based for pdf-export. Hitting your platform vendor for one of their (presumably) cash cows is asking for a response.

It's not like Adobe has some kill switch for Flash apps or can deny them new versions of Flash or anything.

If they were putting something that competed with Apple/AT&T in the App Store, that would be one thing because Apple could find (or invent) some TOS violation and then flip a switch and delete it from all the iPhones everywhere.

But Adobe can't do much to kill a Flash app they don't like. I guess they could add some "if domain = crocodoc.com {crash()}" type line to a Flash update, but it would be hard to do in a way where they wouldn't get caught, and that would be a horrible anti-trust case for them.

Besides, for a very long time, Crocodoc won't be taking appreciable market share. Plus I don't see Crocodoc as much of an Acrobat competitor. Acrobat is for creating and editing PDFs; Crocodoc is for marking them up with edits. I doubt very many people that actually need Acrobat could get away with just using Crocodoc.

Hm, a bit slow on my top of line MacBook Pro, Chrome, latest Flash... just trying to draw on a small PDF...

crocodoc developer here. This generally depends on the complexity and number of pages in the PDF. If your PDF has a lot of images, graphics, etc or has a lot of pages (more than 60-80) or some combination thereof, Flash becomes...shall we say, unhappy.

Feel free to contact myself or crocodoc support about the issue and we'll take a look at it.

I always appreciate active customer support/outreach like this. Keep up the awesome work

Very encouraging. I tried to "print to PDF" a sample doc I had been plying with, but it just reported some unnamed error.

Assuming that sort of stuff gets fixed and polished up, this site solves a few real problems for me.

Looks good! Are notes added on the site compatible with Acrobat Reader, though?

I'm a developer with crocodoc. Yes, all annotations you make in crocodoc will show up in Acrobat Reader, Foxit, etc.

More detail: Sticky Notes and highlight comments are saved as native PDF comments. All other annotation types (highlights, strikeouts, and drawings) are drawn in to the PDF file.

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