Firepad Inc. Friday picked up Adobe Systems Inc.’s popular PDF library to
let its Palm OS viewing software display PDFs.
Firepad’s President and Chief Operating Officer Kenneth J. Marshall claims
his firm has “mastered the art and technology” of Palm display software. He
said he made the play to make the FirePublisher suite attractive to the
enterprise and individual mobile workers.
Firepad wasn’t always Firepad. The seed for the handheld software maker was
planted in 1997 as Whitehorse Development LLC. In 1998, the company developed a Palm version of Sony Playstation’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf for Electronic Arts Inc.
Launched in 1999, the game was an instant hit. What’s more, the game
contained the first-ever Delta compressed animation for the Palm, and was
the first Platinum certified entertainment title for the platform, capable
of executing one million events without error.
Soon after, the firm ditched its video game roots, changed its name to
Firepad and began acquiring the rights to unique technologies to spruce up
its software offerings for the Palm, the increasingly popular line of
handhelds.
It bought Image Viewer, an independently developed application that had
emerged as the standard graphics codec for the Palm. It later grabbed
PalmCam, the leading technology for streaming and displaying video on the
Palm.
