It is not a surprise news when a lot of people knowing that Google has acquired Tonic Systems, as reported by most of the blogs and online news. Tonic Systems, also known as Java PowerPoint Specialists, a company operated since 2004 and based in San Francisco and Melbourne, Australia. Most industry pundits believed this acquisition will further complement Google Docs & Spreadsheets family towards a complete Google online office suite that might roll out in the next few months. Tonic Systems’ product line consist of four (4) main products, i.e. TonicPoint Builder that used Java library to programmatically read, create and manipulate presentations, TonicPoint Transformer, an application that also use Java library to convert presentations into high quality images and PDF documents, TonicPoint Filter, a Java library to extract text from presentations with full contextual data, and TonicPoint Viewer, PowerPoint viewer application for Windows, Mac, and Unix operating system. Also, a product that called Jar Jar Links, utility that makes it easy to repackage Java libraries and embed them into an user’s own distribution. In matter of fact, Jar Jar Links is used to developed one of their popular product, TonicPoint Builder. All these products developed by using Java technologies and this well explained why they trademarked their company as the above mentioned slogan, “Java PowerPoint Specialists.”

As I visited Tonic Systems’ home page, almost all of its product pages are now redirect to Google’s “not found” pages other than the “Google has acquired Tonic Systems” landing page. While I still could accessed to its forums and view some of its online discussion posted by the users. The latest product released by Tonic Systems was TonicPoint Transformer 1.5.1, a month go. It seems that the major products that Tonic Systems working on prior to the above mentioned acquisition were TonicPoint Transformer and TonicPoint Builder. Furthermore, what interest me is their core product, i.e. TonicPoint Builder does not support Microsoft PowerPoint 2007.