It was just asking for it. The front page for SlimPDF states

Get The World’s Smallest Desktop PDF Reader

and

10% of the size of Adobe Reader but views 100% of PDFs

Can this be true? Just as good as Adobe Reader but one tenth the size? They even show a comparison on their site, reporting SlimPDF as 1.43MB and Adobe Reader as 26.12MB¹?

The thing is, they’re measuring download size. Don’t most people download, install and then delete the installation program? Shouldn’t they be measuring the installed size? Ironically, if they did, it would be even better for them – 211MB for Adobe vs 4.69MB for them (2.22% the size of Adobe Reader!).

The thing is, though, SlimPDF lacks a lot of basic features. If you just want to read a short, simple PDF then it’s probably fine. However, SlimPDF doesn’t show page thumbnails, or shortcuts – so those long, indexed documents are going to be difficult to navigate.

The toolbar is also quite cluttered – sadly, if you reduce the window down in size then the toolbar simple starts disappearing from the right hand side. And as various button to launch their commercial offerings come to the left of the search, the latter disappears first. Adobe, in comparison, wraps the toolbar to a new line in this situation, so that all options are still accessible.

Small text is very hard to read in SlimPDF and scrolling is slow. Links, whether to other parts of the document or external URLs, don’t work.

So, let’s just go through the listed “Features and Benefits”

• “Eliminate Bloatware and help your computer run faster”. My favourite. No details of why they regard Adobe as “bloatware” as it seems to contain an awful lots of features that SlimPDF doesn’t have. A bigger download size doesn’t mean it’s bloated.
• “View any PDF File just like Adobe Reader”. No. Not like Adobe Reader. Adobe – got your lawyers ready?
• “100% Free”. It had better be.
• “The smallest desktop PDF Reader in the World”. With matching features. Although I suspect Cool PDF Reader, at 650KB download, may have something to say (and small fonts look better in it as well). Again, is that the rustle of lawyers and paperwork I hear?

Summary

All I can hope is that people see past the hype, which really doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny, and realise that this is a feature-lacking PDF viewer which WON’T let you view a PDF like Adobe Reader does.

1. should I point out at this point that the current size of the Adobe Reader download is 52.55MB [↩]

My WordPress plugin, Simple Draft List, has been updated.

Until now it’s been of use to display draft posts on your site. However, I’ve now added the feature to also include scheduled posts that have not yet been published. By default this feature is switched on but can be turned off via a new parameter.

As usual, all details can be found on the Simple Draft List page.

Back in, oooo, the mid 1990′s, I set up about writing a new system at work. Named “Mole” it was designed to be a knowledge-base system with extensive search capabilities. It was written on the company mainframe, using an online language called RPF (Roscoe Programming Facility). At the time, we hadn’t long had PCs, so the mainframe was still where most development occurred.

It was text only but I wrote intelligent search capabilities matching and, I think exceeding, those provided by the internet search engines at the time. I launched different versions, with names echoing those of Microsoft at the time. For example, Mole RX (which stood for “reduced indexing” – the number of index files was greatly reduced giving a greater search performance). The final version had a Beta search facility that really was (even if I do say so) exceptionally good.

Indeed, Mole was a big hit. The support teams loved it and I even one an internal IT award for “Innovation”, beating a lot of other high-profile entrants.

Sadly, the manager of the IT Help Desk (who was likely to be the biggest user) didn’t like it. The mainframe wasn’t the way forward – PC applications, particularly one built into their call logging systems was the way.

Now it’s 2010 and the same Help Desk still lack a half decent knowledge-base – nothing was ever delivered other than the most basic facilities.

A few months ago, I archived the Mole code away into a dataset. Sadly, unbeknown to myself, the dataset has been “housekept”. All that was left of Mole has gone. The manual I can no longer find. Not even the Mole logo.

I’m quite sad about it really – it was something I put a lot of time into and I was very proud of.