Our company, Hovitate, just won the Most Innovative Product award for Vuzit at the Ben Franklin Emerging Business Awards, also known as “The Bennies”. Below is the article published yesterday in the Philadelphia Business Journal newspaper, and the online version can be found on the PBJ website. We are excited by the recent recognition we are receiving from our City of Brotherly Love. Thank you!
The number of blog posts may have slowed down over the past month or so but things have been moving very fast for the Vuzit team. I have a few announcements that I’ll be slowly leaking out over the next couple of days.
To start things off we were chosen as one of 12 companies for the the inaugural round of the DreamIt Ventures investment program. For those not familiar with DreamIt it’s very similar to Y Combinator, another early stage venture capital organization.
Here are a few articles about DreamIt from the Philadelphia Business Journal:
The team and I are honored to be chosen for this program. The DreamIt founders which are composed of David Bookspan, Michael Levinson and Steve Welch are all entrepreneurs of the highest caliber and we look forward to working with them this summer. The other chosen DreamIt teams are packed with very talented individuals and we’re eager to work closely with them.
We recently pushed out an update that improves the imaging back-end. Here are some notes about the update:
It is also worth noting that the MediaWiki extension written by Evan Sultanik now has a new home in the MediaWiki extensions directory.
Evan Sultanik has written a simple extension for MediaWiki that allows you to display documents inside your MediaWiki instance! MediaWiki is the open source software behind the Wikipedia online encyclopedia which claims 5% of all internet traffic. We are grateful for the time Evan spent developing and documenting the extension, and this just shows the power of the developer community when they are given an open development platform.
Here are the links:
- Vuzit MediaWiki Extension - includes installation instructions
- Example - Evan built the extension to display his Curriculum Vitæ
After installation, the following snippet is all you need to embed a document with the default settings:
<vuzit>http://www.welcomingcenter.org/documents/PMP.pdf</vuzit>
We are anxious to see the search and Flickr mashups that get developed using our Image APIs. If you have some ideas, please let us know.
Update (4/25/2008): This is now listed in the MediaWiki extensions directory. Thanks Evan!
Vuzit now has the capability to embed documents using a small snippet of HTML you can easily paste into your website or blog. It is built on our REST-based API so you can easily set the default zoom-level, page number, and even the X/Y position of the page you want to display.
Here is a document about the excellent open source database, Firebird:
Switch your document links to the Vuzit online document viewer instead of the bloated alternatives, and your users will thank you. By including a small snippet of Javascript you can breathe new life into your document links.
By default, a small icon will be displayed to the right of the link letting your users know the document has been enabled with Vuzit. Here is a very simple example of what your link will look like once you enable your website with Linkit.
Fedora Commons at DLF Panel in Philadelphia
Wireless Philadelphia Initiative
Taking Philadelphia’s Temperature
Philadelphia airport guides travelers with Mac-based solution
This worked on my first attempt with Wordpress!
We are letting document images roam freely. Our new developer tools include the ability to access an image of a particular page in 4 different resolutions including the thumbnails. These are enabled by the Document.getUrlImage() and Document.getUrlImageThumb() functions of the Javascript API. You can view our example as rendered html or go right to the code.
Here is an example thumbnail:
Here is an example page:
Many of our users asked for the ability to display Vuzit in a full screen landing page. We have added an example of this to our examples page which you can view as rendered html and code. It’s worth noting that all of our examples are compliant with the XHTML Strict standard.
Now you can create a full screen Vuzit viewer on your website and direct all of your document links to that landing page and take advantage of your own advertising and analytics tools.
We love all the feedback we have been getting from all of our users. Please keep it coming.
A few of our users have asked for simple shortcuts to navigate through their documents. The shortcuts are a combination of commands used by many popular programs including the vim text editor, GMail, and Google Reader. The mouse must be located over the viewer in order for the shortcuts to work. We chose keys that would not interfere with the user experience afforded by the major browsers, but please let us know if we missed something.
Here is the complete list of the shortcuts:
| Shortcut Key | Action |
|---|---|
| <Page Up> | Move up the length of the viewer |
| <Page Down> | Move down the length of the viewer |
| n | Move to the next page |
| p | Move to the previous Page |
| + or = | Increase size by zooming in |
| - | Decrease size by zooming out |
| <Down Arrow> or j |
Scroll down slightly |
| <Up Arrow> or k |
Scroll up slightly |
| <Left Arrow> or h |
Scroll left slightly |
| <Right Arrow> or l |
Scroll right slightly |
| <Home> | Move to the first page |
| <End> | Move to the last page |
We just released a new version of Vuzit. This release includes the Vuzit JavaScript API, which includes two objects: Viewer and Document. They will give you a lot of control over your documents. Read on.
Viewer Object
The Viewer object controls the document viewer. Use it to change pages, zoom levels, and more. Here is a list of some capabilities:
Viewer usage: See this example.
Document Object
The Document object allows you to load various properties of the document like the number of pages, title, URL, and more. Here is a list of some capabilities:
Document usage: See this example.
We built the documentation using Natural Docs, the best document generator for JavaScript (in our opinion). It’s free and open source.