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Show HN: Nextprev.it: Share PDFs & control what page the viewer sees in realtime (nextprev.it)

40 points by cooop ↗ HN
We just launched Nextprev.it — A project we put together over a couple of days.<p>The project stemmed from a frustration with PDF file transfers and screen-sharing when giving design presentations to clients through Skype.<p>Please give it a go and let us know what you think - @nextprev<p>Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

24 comments

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jongold
I've been testing this for the past week or so - used it for a couple of client presentations and it's absolutely fantastic.
sync
Neat idea. It'd be nice if you could see how many other people were viewing the presentation and perhaps even chat with them.
cooop
Definitely a feature we have planned for the near future as well as some handy pro features.

Thanks for the feedback.

gawker
Very nice. I did something similar as well a couple of weeks ago but didn't publish it. Good job!
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tehwebguy
This is very cool!

It's not really the same purpose but a cool feature to me would be a sponsorship / deck feature so you can send it out to see who views it individually. So you can see which potential sponsors actually look at the info you send, and which pages.

lewisflude
Pretty awesome, does it come in black?
dfamorato
Very very nice, congratulations ! Could you share a little bit of the technologies used ? How to you make every browser go to the same page ? Do you think this would be possible with video as well, like making sure everybody is at the same point on a video ?
heeton
We host the PDFs on AmazonS3, and use PDJ.js to render them on the page. To keep everyone on the same page, we use websocket events via Pusher. Video would be quite different, so we don't have any plans for that now.
roh26it
framebench.com does this for video, PDF and images.. syncs pan and zoom position as well. In private beta, collecting some great feedback for now :)

Great to see people building apps which leverage the power of sockets and enable real time interactions on the web. A trend which is much likely to catch fire soon.

(yes, I work with Framebench!)

hammock
I will start using this immediately. Question- do the links expire after a certain amount of time, or can I control how long the PDF is available at that link? That would be an important feature to me (as a way to protect confidentiality etc)
heeton
Yes, we'll delete files and links after 24 hours. That's not implemented yet, but will be happening by the end of the weekend.

We're also planning some pro features like account-level permissions, and we could serve the PDF file dynamically from our servers instead of storing it on S3.

I'd love to know if you have any precise security requirements, feel free to email me: alex@heeton.me

genwin
Great demo! I'd make the "You see this" "They see this" images larger. And add a favicon, if only so it's more clear that the "<>" at top left is a logo (and when the user clicks on the logo, go home).
diebuche2
Doesn't seem to work in Chrome. This is what I get: http://i.imgur.com/ps7LT.png
cooop
Ah, that sucks. Sorry about that. We haven't run into this.

This may be due to your PDF export settings or the library we're using to render the PDFs.

We'll look into it.

diebuche2
It's the example pdf, so it's probably the renderer. I'm using v22.0.1229.94 on 10.8
amalag
I am getting the same thing on Mac OSX, I have a stock chrome, and only 2-3 extensions. Version 22.0.1229.94 on Max OSX 10.6.8
phlyingpenguin
Are things broken right now? No matter the browser, when I try to upload one of my small PowerDot created presentations (90k), it just pops a banner up that says "Thanks for signing up" and nothing happens.
cooop
Yea, that's totally our fault. We added an email signup form, but screwed something up. It should be working now!
phlyingpenguin
Thanks, it looks like it works now. This will be great for my research group!
roh26it
Check up the compatibility.js file that comes with pdfjs. We edited some portions according to our need to have some PDFs render properly. Although we're not totally there yet too!
netghost
What are you talking about? The boat with three legs picture looks perfect!
gklitt
Love it. Great use of websockets to create a simple solution to a common problem.
francov88
Great work Alex! This looks very useful and promising.