@recontemplations,

The reason an iPhone can view the documents is that iPhones have that capability built in (it can view a number of popular file types). When you click on a file the view is actually downloading the file, then opening it up.

The analogous feature set would be if you had your browser set to "open this document with the appropriate application on my computer", and you had an application viewer - like clicking a mailto link and having outlook open up so you can send the email.

Twilight Zone...perhaps not, but welcome to the future of mobile computing :)

I am definitely curious to see how many other people think this is a "must have" feature - it's on the product backlog now, but it's always good to hear from our current and future customers.

Hope that explains it!
Best,
Jon

Perhaps I misundertood you, or you misunderstood me.

I did not mean to imply that a document feature couldn't be built into our web application, only that it has not. That's why I ask the question to other readers on their interest level in having native document viewing in our web application.

The iPhone viewer application is part of the iPhone SDK - when we get a file we say "open this" and the iPhone knows what to do with it. It downloads the files (into memory) and opens them itself in its viewer application. This is the same feature that opens mail and MS Word docs as well as PDFs. The fact that the iPhone can open any number of documents for preview is a function of its capabilities, not ours. In that same application there is an icon on the lower left corner that allows you to save to your phone (move from memory to disk storage).

The analogous part is that neither of our clients (iPhone and web application) have the native ability to view PDFs or other documents. I hope that clears things up for you; I wouldn't be surprised if other people have similar questions, so hopefully this will be of some help to them as well.

J