VSD Viewer for Visio Drawings - Interview with the developer of a fantastic app

Did you have any prior development or coding experience?

Yes, I have been programming professionally since 1998. Before starting developing applications for Nektony, I was working in other Ukrainian companies as a software developer.

VSD Viewer was not the first application created with my business partner. At Nektony, we created several Mac cleanup utilities before developing VSD Viewer.

What was the most challenging aspect of developing mobile app?

Visio files are quite complicated. They represent a collection of drawing pages, masters, shapes, images, comments, data connections, and recalculation information relating to dynamic data connections. Visio drawings have binary data, and by default, Visio extensions are not supported on smartphones. Thus, the most difficult for us was understanding the binary data storage format in Visio files and creating the possibility to analyze this data in the mobile app.

_Nektony

The interviewee, Yuriy Varbanets, is the Development Team Lead and one of the founders of Nektony. Nektony comprises a "friendly team who share a big passion for making useful apps for Mac and iPhone users."

Name a few of your favorite apps and reason you love them.

I use many pre-installed Apple applications to complete my everyday work tasks. One of the things that Apple misses is the possibility to clean up digital junk, like caches and temporary files of previously removed applications.

That’s why my favorite apps are MacCleaner Pro, App Cleaner & Uninstaller, and Duplicate File Finder. Firstly, they are really helpful and allow you to quickly and safely remove all the junk. Secondly, I created them and have spent many years improving them, and know all their capabilities.

How long have you been working on this app?

We started developing VSD Viewer in the summer of 2012. It took about a month to introduce the first version in the App Store. Since then, we have been regularly improving the app and working on it.

What need of the user did you have in mind when developing this app?

Our idea was to create a tool that would help teams collaborate on their Visio documentation in a multi-platform environment. Microsoft Visio is a popular program, and many professionals use it for their work. However, you could only view the drawings on Windows-based computers. We understood that users might have needed to view the documents during business trips, or just while sitting in a cafe. Visio Viewer is the app that can help you open Visio files whenever and wherever you are, on devices with other operating systems.

In what way do you think your app is better than similar apps on the market? Please describe in detail what innovation you think you bring and what you are proud of in your app.

Unlike other applications on the market, our software has a better quality of displaying Visio documents, supporting all the details specified in the drawing. Also, our program allows you to switch layers, which is very helpful for engineers when working with graphics. Our know-how was applied to figuring out how to display pictures and OLE objects saved in the Windows Metafile format, which is not supported by other platform hardware. We are proud that our software supports displaying even OLE objects.

What are your future plans and expected features of the coming new versions of this app?

We have already released the next generation of Visio apps—VSDX Annotator for macOS. This application allows you to add new objects as annotations to existing documents. We want to add similar functionality for applications on mobile platforms. We also are planning to add the ability to create new Visio drawings right in the app.

Assuming new users of your app are reading this page. What do you want to ask them to do (contact you about X, Share the app, etc.)?

We were always selling one-time licenses for the app without providing a free trial period. However, for now, this model of selling limits the capability of application development. What do you think about changing the licensing model and providing subscription plans with the ability to try all the application’s features during a free trial period?