Opinion: WindJack's AcroDialogs enables users with only the barest understanding of JavaScript to add customized dialog boxes to their documents.Have pity on WindJack Solutions, the little plug-in vendor whose latest product, AcroDialogs, has been encountering more marketing roadblocks than those devices commuters employ to defeat law enforcement's radar-detector scanning gear.
WindJack's first hurdle is explaining what a dialog box is to the average person (typically, we see them as pop-up error messages such as "Are you sure you want to restart, yes/no" from the operating system, or "You are entering a non-secure site, OK?" from a Web browser). It's one of those "everyone knows what they are, but no one knows what they're called" syndromes.
The second hurdle is explaining how AcroDialogs is for Windows users of Acrobat only, but that the PDF dialog boxes that the software creates work on Macs and PCs.
The third hurdle: Justifying the $249 price for the plug-in. It should be easy, because it enables people with a mere cut-and-paste knowledge of JavaScript (that's most of us) to create graphically pleasing dialogs, when they wouldn't be able to make even the ugliest, most basic dialogs without it, because the hard code-writing involved in doing that is either too difficult or time consuming.
Click here to read how an architectural firm is stretching its dollars by using low-priced PDF creation tools.
"Up until Acrobat 6.0, this capability wasn't in Acrobat at all," said Thom Parker, WindJack's president. "You've got your regular alert dialogs; they are very limited in the amount of text you can have, and you can't select your own image. They're nice to have, they're a very convenient user interface mechanism, but you can't put [much] on the buttons. … With custom buttons, you can make names that make sense, that fit better with your document."
In Acrobat 6 and 7, fancier JavaScript dialog boxes are technically available for use in PDF documents, but implementing them is not a process for the faint of JavaScript heart. So along comes AcroDialogs, making adding custom dialogs a drag-and-drop and then cut-and-paste-the-code process.
Once WindJack has made all this clear to potential customers, AcroDialogs should stand out as a tool that can make PDFs vastly more usable. It's a tool that will appeal to the PDF developer crowd as well as to technologically curious people who are charged with smoothing forms workflows—or who for other reasons must strive to make their companies' PDFs more user-friendly.
Technical documentation, forms, and any other kind of PDF in which a little helpful explanation is needed for the end consumer to finish a task—all will become vastly more usable with the addition of a few dialogs.
Image-conscious people who want to inject another level of logos and branding into their PDFs will also find AcroDialogs worth a look.
Some examples:
• In a software manual, dialogs can offer novices quick explanations of jargon or even whole phrases that otherwise might gum up a passage even for experienced users.
• AcroDialogs can generate pop-ups in PDFs that look like logo-branded splash screens for software utilities and applications—complete with fancy end-user license agreements with "I agree" and "I disagree" buttons that won't let people in if they don't agree to the terms.
• In forms, dialogs can offer end users who are unsure or unaware of what to put in a field a more detailed explanation—anything from "Please enter a whole number between 1 and 99" up to many-step operations that link dialog boxes one to another with "next" and "last" buttons in a wizard-like interface.
On that last note, Parker says one of his customers actually uses the wizard metaphor to promote accessibility. About 25 of this customer's employees suffer from vision impairments. He's built a wizard-like series of AcroDialogs—which are compatible with the company's particular brand of screen reader—that fill out the forms on behalf of the end user, enabling productivity where it wasn't there before.
(Note that AcroDialogs are not compliant with U.S. Section 508 federal accessibility regulations—scripts aren't allowed.)
Next Page: A minimal understanding of JavaScript will suffice.
Dialog boxes are ubiquitous, except in PDF documents. AcroDialogs—while it does require a bit of "101" JavaScript experience—brings a familiar software communication tool to PDF documents that should be instantly helpful to anyone who needs a lot of people to use his or her PDFs.
Not only does the plug-in enable a wider audience to create PDF dialogs, but because we already see and use these dialogs everywhere else on our daily computing lives, end users will find them instantly recognizable and intuitive to use.
Click here to read how a printing house used a plug-in to speed its production of PDFs, complete with color conversion.
Still, none of this makes dialogs any easier to explain. Sort of like brake fluid, which to me would seem to make my car's brakes more slippery and less prone to slow down the vehicle. Yet it's there, it works, and, like a dialog box, it helps me get from point A to point B without crashing.
"If you want to be clear to your users, you need the freedom to use your own icons, to put your own text on the buttons," Parker said. "Dialog boxes give you an incredible level of flexibility … but they're near impossible to do. With [AcroDialogs], you don't have to know anything about the complex dialog box structure—but you do have know a little bit about JavaScript."
