Archive for April, 2009
The Truth About Installers in PDF Security Solutions
For those of us who build software, creating a new software product is usually fun and exciting. There are new challenges, the opportunity to use new tools and techniques, and there is a special thrill of seeing something work for the first time. But unless you have the luxury of building software solely for your own entertainment, once you’ve got that great new product built, you have to figure out how to get it to your customers. At Vitrium, much of the software that we build is web-based, so the issue of delivering software to our users is really just one of ensuring browser compatibility.
But if you work at a company that delivers software for the desktop, you typically have to build an installer — a second piece of software whose job is to get your actual software successfully running on the users’ machines. There is no joy in writing in installers. I’ve worked at companies where we had to build installers for our software, and it’s amazing how much time and effort was required to build and maintain them.
The reason for that is that the installer is a piece of software whose primary responsibility is to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the millions of computers out there. Different operating systems, different utilities, firewalls, proxy servers, pieces of software that have been removed or modified by the user — the list goes on. These are all things that could potentially cause your software not to work on a given computer. So the installer has to identify and, where possible, resolve these problems. And no matter how hard you try, there will always be a steady stream of issues that come up: combinations of software that the installer doesn’t handle, configurations that have never been seen before, software versions that behave in subtly different ways, even gracefully handling upgrading from previous versions of your own software.
That’s why, at Vitrium, it has always been our goal to produce software that doesn’t need installers. Our applications are delivered over the web. The PDF’s produced by our products use standard Adobe software that already exists on almost every computer on the planet. The result is that we have essentially no support costs related to getting our products onto people’s computers. And that is good for us, and for our customers.
Go Green With eBooks
1. No Paper: eBooks are “green” because it doesn’t require printing unless you really want to print it to read it. You can read your eBook fully online or through the new hand held eBook readers that let you carry a large amount of eBooks around in a digital format.
2. Easily updated: Instead of having to reprint a whole book you can easily update your eBooks but simply going into the file, making the update, reconverting the eBook to PDF and uploading it again to the site. No full printing of the book again saving a lot of paper.
3. Less ink. eBooks are green because they use less ink than required in a printing process. Printing books requires more colored inks too. You can use colorful illustrations in an eBook that don’t have to be printed in color and save on that resource. Even if your readers choose to print, they can do so on grayscale instead of using colored ink.
4. Protect Profits. Now eBooks can be protected from piracy eliminating lost profits by using a PDF protection system, like protectedpdf. Unlike other PDF protection technologies, protectedpdf does not make it difficult for legitimate readers to access your PDFs. Authorized readers can view your protected documents using Adobe Reader V6.0 or higher, just like normal PDFs. There is no need for readers to download any special plug-ins, proprietary readers, viewers or other additional software.
5. Printing Costs. eBooks are definitely green because they save on the process of using the printing press to create a book. You don’t have to use the electricity or employee power to print an eBook as it is delivered directly to the desktop or eBook reader of the person reading the book.
6. No Inventory. You don’t have to stockpile eBooks. They are the real print-on-demand type of writing that can be downloaded when the person needs and want it. No inventory means no wasted printing or use of storage space.
