Nextpoint Lab

Recently we’ve been focusing on improving the process of reviewing documents in the Nextpoint web application.  A core part of that process is reading the documents themselves, so we’ve been working on some big improvements to that experience.  We’ve always had preview images of documents to allow for quick viewing and searching within the browser and to avoid having to download documents for viewing in native applications or plug-ins.  They’ve been a big hit with our users.  With our newest release we’re taking our browsing experience to the next level.  The document preview now supports scrolling through pages just like Word or Acrobat, and you can now switch to full-screen “zoom” mode for an ideal reading experience.

One big benefit of scrolling through documents is speed.  There is no waiting for pages to load individually, because they preload while you’re reading the previous page(s) and are ready by the time you scroll down to them.  It’s more convenient and natural to read by scrolling down as well, since it removes the disconnect between pages.  We’ve ensured that these new features don’t slow down your existing work-flow, such as navigating between documents, by avoiding unnecessary preloading of other pages.  For example, if you quickly jump to another section of the document, we won’t waste resources loading all the pages in-between.

The other important aspect of the reading experience is size.  A few months ago we increased the size of our web preview images by about 50%, which especially helps when reading documents with small fonts or poorly scanned images.  This new release includes a full-screen “zoom” mode, however, which takes advantage of our Theater presentation-mode technology to show larger document previews on the fly.  Just click the zoom button, and the preview will fill your browser.  As with the non-zoomed version, we preload nearby pages so the high quality versions will already be in place as they come on-screen while you read and scroll.  To help ensure performance, we do limit the maximum size of these images (unfortunately they won’t completely fill your 30″ cinema display monitor), but if you need to zoom in on certain details, don’t forget that Theater is always available.

Like in the past, you can also switch to viewing the extracted text or OCR and users with Advanced permissions can also edit.

A couple particularly slick features are that we remember which page you were scrolled to even when you click the “refresh” button in your browser, so you won’t lose your place when you reload to see updates from other users or processing jobs.  And when you’re jumping between related documents in the Review screen, we keep each document’s preview hidden in the background, so you don’t have to wait for the preview images to reload when you switch back to a document you were previously reading.

We hope you enjoy the new and improved document reader in Nextpoint.  It’ll be available for all accounts as of February 18th, 2010.