爱苹果，爱生活

I’m a user from China.

ReadCube is an amazing cross-platform application. Although it’s not a full-size reference manager, the experience of searching, organizing and reading was not worse than other similar softwares. It also has a remarkable interface. And every user can get it free of charge. However, I don’t think that developing ReadCube based on Adobe Air is wise, especially for Mac. I’ll explain why:

• Adobe Air allows developers to build cross-platform applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML and AJAX. There has been a very great argument about Flash which seems to perform poorly at least on OS X. I just opened ReadCube and Skim to read an article when I noticed the full-battery icon of my MacBook Air (Mid 2011). About two hours later, the icon turned into red. Obviously, Adobe Air needs as much power as Flash.
• Applications based on Adobe Air lack a few features that native ones should have. For example, ReadCube can’t check spelling, look up words in Dictionary or search for something in Google. They’re important to non-English speaking users like me. As a result, I have to spend more time, and power, in switching between several applications.
• Portable document format (PDF files) is a wonderful product of Adobe. But Apple always specialized in text-rendering. I’ve captured two screenshots below (click to enlarge), one from ReadCube and the other from Skim. It’s clear that the text which Skim displays is more elegant than which ReadCube does, just like real prints. Most users of Mac prefer Mac’s text-rendering for comfortable reading experience.

• Adobe Air provides terrible support to Chinese. Many applications based on the technology, including ReadCube, can’t even display Chinese accurately. Look at the screenshot, the Chinese characters are confusing and ugly. Because simplified Chinese is mixed up with tranditional Chinese. Sometimes I wasn’t able to launch the input method for Chinese.

Since you’re trying to make ReadCube perfect, you should consider the better form for Mac. Anyway, I’ll appreciate all the improvements. Thanks for your masterwork. I like ReadCube.

2011 年 12 月 17 日更新：ReadCube 官方似乎不打算让我的文章出现在 Feature Requests 中了，至今仍在审核中。

2012 年 1 月 18 日更新：关于本文，ReadCube 社区经理 Lucas Schlager 已经以私人邮件形式，向我作出正式回复。