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.