n o t e 1 9 . c o m

Adobe today released a beautiful looking online service called Adobe SHARE (beta). Share can be viewed as your online document library in the clouds. You can easily upload a document and share it with others. A thumbnail and an Adobe Flash preview of most document types are automatically created and the Flash preview can be embedded in most blogs. At this point the share service requires a browser with latest version of the Adobe Flash plug-in.

In addition, today Adobe also released the web services for SHARE. The web services offer a simple REST based API to access Share libraries. You can use the web services to create mash-ups. In my quest to learn Ruby on Rails. I’ve written a simple application (based on the RailsSpaces book) that allows you to view your Share library using plain old HTML. I wanted to access my Share library on my iPhone (which has an excellent support for PDF and other file formats). The current mash-up – http://web.sharepdf.com/ – is not speedy, nothing is currently cached and there are lots of other applications running on this server. You can see the source code here.

There are a couple of minor bugs in the current web services & this mash-up:

• The XML requests cannot contain any new line characters. For now, just send your XML request as one long string with no line breaks.
• Ruby returns the current time in seconds. Share API requires the time in mili-seconds, so consecutive calls may appear to be issued at the same time. Just add a sleep in between the calls, e.g., to insert “sleep 1″ when you iterate over the list of your documents.
• There is a typo in the API documentation, the URL to get the source document must end in src and not in source. See the definition of the method src.
• I tweaked the site.css file and now the application shows up as a tiny thumbnail on my iPhone. Just tap on the app and iPhone will automatically zoom it.