Google announced yesterday that it will be launching a PowerPoint competitor, and that the product would be based in part on technology acquired from Tonic Systems. I had been watching Tonic Systems and had written down a bit of information about the company, which may come in useful now that its website has been taken down.
Tonic Systems had been selling four products that aimed to enhance the usability of PowerPoint:
1. TonicPoint Filter - a Java library that extracts all text from PowerPoint presentations
2.TonicPoint Transformer - a modular Java library that converts PowerPoint presentations into images (e.g. PNG, BMP and JPEG), PDF documents, Macromedia Flash (SWF) and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
3. TonicPoint Viewer - a Java application that allows opening and viewing PowerPoint presentations on any platform.
4. TonicPoint Builder - a library that provides a 100% Java API to read, create and manipulate PowerPoint presentations (this includes the Filter and Viewer apps). Features include populating Powerpoint template slides with data from a database.
When I looked at the website, these products were being priced at an astonishing $995-$3000/user for a perpetual license. The TonicPoint Viewer was being offered for free, because Microsoft itself offers such a viewer free of charge.
In addition to these products, Tonic was working on an online PowerPoint editor. At the time, it was running in restricted private beta so I couldn’t get in to fool around with it. The editor was described on their site as implemented using JavaScript and SVG (no plugins), and at the time was only available on Firefox. Features supported included working with groups, resizing, inserting and formatting shapes, uploading files from PP, exporting files as PDF and initiating conferencing sessions around a presentation.
Tonic System’s point of pride was having the best third-party PowerPoint API out there – I assume Google acquired them for this API. There’s been a lot of hype around online collaboration scenarios and SaaS personal productivity applications, but this shows yet again how important the offline scenario. For virtually all users today, exporting to PowerPoint is the best and most natural offline scenario. Google is right in trying to ensure that the PP export-import functionality works as smoothly as possible.
