Wednesday
Jul042012
Hands-On: Viewing Visio VSD files on your iPad and iPhone with Nektony VSD Viewer
Wednesday, July 4, 2012 at 8:05AM This cool little app was released yesterday: VSD Viewer by Nektony. In short now you can see VSD files on your iPhone or iPad.
My thoughts:
- As promised, it does a decent job of showing VSD files. I tried some of my more heavily-formatted VSD files and they showed up fine. Basic colors, gradients, and transparencies, seemed to work fine.
- Because fonts are not embedded in VSD files, the viewer has to fall back to fonts that exist on the iOS device. For example, I use Segoe UI for most of my Visio diagrams. This falls back to Times New Roman on my iPad. Take that into consideration.
- It failed to load a “complex” VSD (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/saveenr/archive/2008/11/28/visio-an-interactive-demonstration-of-the-pythagorean-theorem.aspx). I didn't expect the diagram to be interactive, but did expect it to load. Instead when I tried opening the file, the app seemed to disappear.
- Usage of the app can be confusing at first. One you install it you don't launch the app to view Visio VSD files. Instead you try to open a Visio VSD file perhaps in email, dropbox, etc and then you have the option of vieweing it in the viewer.
- I tried the viewer with the Microsoft SkyDrive app and can verify that the viewer can be launched via that app.
- I was frustrated by the zoom feature. I could neither zoom in as close as I wanted nor zoom out as far as I wanted.
Reader Comments (2)
finally, made my day!
Interesting app -- hadn't seen this one before today. I tried it out with a few of my Visio files and found it to be very hit or miss. With simple files, it had most of the formatting correct, but none of my more complex VSDs loaded. For now I think I'll stick with Lucidchart which classifies itself as the Visio alternative online. It works pretty darn well on the iPad for a web app.