FASTPDFKIT: PDF WITH MULTIMEDIA ON IOS APPS IN 3′

Posted by & filed under github, Multimedia, News.

A COMPLETE LIBRARY FREELY AVAILABLE FOR IPHONE AND IPAD

FastPdfKit is a framework that let you design, deliver and experience high level interactive multimedia publications, or a hundred year old manuscript digitalized yesterday, on every iPad and iPhone application, with simple pdf documents, preserving every feature of the format: text search, non lossy zoom and compact size.

 

Hi there,
my name is Matteo and I’m an environmental engineer with a passion for hi-tech. Every morning, while having breakfast, I do what most of us do: I read the newspaper. Two years ago, I left the paper behind and moved to the electronic version of the daily on my laptop. When Apple announced the iPad, I saw the breakfast of my future: reading the news on such a device would be just fun. Well, five days and a single tap later, I was reading the newspaper on my very own app. It blew me away how fast my reader was. Shortly thereafter, MobFarm, the company I co-founded, published FastPdf+: one of the first pdf readers available for iOS.Since then, MobFarm has been busy improving and expanding the features of the application. In January 2011 we chose to share with other developers what we had done. FastPdfKit was born.

After ten months, more than 1000 developers from over 20 countries are working with FastPdfKit. More than 200 apps available on the App Store are powered by it.

Today we are proud to announce FastPdfKit 3.0.

No longer a simple pdf reader, FastPdfKit has become an innovative tool to design, deliver and experience multimedia documents on iPad and iPhone.

By leveraging simple pdf annotations, you will be able to easily blend a dynamic multimedia overlay with the document static content. Isn’t it exciting?

Don’t take our word for it. Get the interactive brochure available on the App Store now. Take 5 minutes to play with it. We are sure that you won’t believe it is just a pdf document!

FastPdfKit is suitable for any kind of document, be it a multimedia magazine designed with the latest editing tools or an hundred year old manuscript digitalized yesterday, a collection of reserved industrial blueprints or even an interactive catalogue with an embedded e-procurement system.

As you probably know, there are many other tools that achieve similar results, but they require the conversion of the documents to plain images so you can’t even zoom and search for text, they don’t run on iPhone and every single publication becomes humongous in a world where bandwidth and storage do not come cheap.

No other competitors on the market allows you to do that, this easily.

FastPdfKit, fully featured, is available for free. Integration in your project requires no more than 3 minutes. Get it from github now!

Matteo Gavagnin

MobFarm

Multimedia on iOS with FastPdfKit

Posted by & filed under Multimedia, News.

In our first Hub page, we briefly introduced ourselves (MobFarm) and our hot new iOS SDK download, FastPdfKit. Think of it as your tool-shed for our PDF-reader, FastPdf+. FastPdf+ is the best and fastest PDF reader to be found on Apple’s mobile platforms, including Apple’s own iBooks and QuickLook. We also touched upon some of the features that you can build and use in your own customizable app.

In short, FastPdfKit allows you to build your own PDF reader and printer for use in your app. It has a static library with sample code and a PDF parser, works within the iOS framework, and so makes your apps compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. It also acts as a file viewer for those platforms.

On this Hub page we will quickly mention some of the rich multimedia capabilities of FastPdfKit. Videos, sound tracks, songs, animations, interactivity, and even HTML5 are now easily within your reach because FastPdfKit is built to handle large files. Always think Large Files when you think of FastPdfKit.

That’s how our approach differs from Apple’s. We’ve taken a problem and turned it into an opportunity — an opportunity to integrate fast multimedia capabilities into your customized PDF reader.

FastPdfKit Reader

Talking about multimedia means talking about accessing it and testing it. That’s where another solution of ours comes in: FastPdfKit Reader, our app that lets you use any standard RSS feed to access PDFs; get our updated FastPdfKit guides and documentation; and to let you easily try out FastPdfKit in a real app. FastPdfKit Reader includes the latest 3.0 static library with a new rendering engine and multimedia support. Whenever you want it, you can just clone its whole repository from github to test it in your apps.

How is FastPdfKit unique?

Take a look at Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite, or Woodwing. As you know, these are platforms built to provide designers and media marketers with comprehensive, interactive cross-platform publishing capabilities. And as you also know, their products are geared to the high-end market, not independent freelancers. Also, being proprietary, they don’t provide the programming latitude for the creation of customized interfaces and interactivity functions. The result is a document that can only be accessed by their own readers.

But FastPdfKit takes the opposite approach. Its interface is fully open and customizable. It can handle any standard PDF — it reads them without converting them. That means that our own reader, FastPdf+, can display any PDF on any iOS device. And what that means is that you can replicate any iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch multimedia experience created with any of the high end suites.

That’s right — FastPdfKit adds multimedia overlays to your PDFs. Lots of overlays. The result is the look and feel of a professionally produced interactive reading experience, complete with search, zoom, cross-platform performance (the three iDevices that comprise iOS) and small file size. And no need to adapt your existing publications.

Want code?

Go here.

FastPdfKit reading features

Posted by & filed under Multimedia, News.

On these Hub pages we will first introduce the range of features available on FastPdf+ and implemented through our PDF sdk library, FastPdfKit. Both we here at MobFarm and our customers consider FastPdfKit to be the best reader available for accessing PDFs within a customized iOS app. FastPdfKit is Newsstand centric and far exceeds Apple’s own PDF readers, iBooks and QuickLook.

First, a concise description of FastPdfKit is in order: it is an iOS SDK download, containing a static library (with sample code) and PDF parser. It was designed specifically for iOS 3.2 and above, and is available free from github with a splash-screen logo and three additional paid versions (Basic, Plus, and Extra) each with unique enabled features, which can be purchased at our store.

Also new: a FastPdfKit Reader, available to test and play with the engine. It includes a Multimedia magazine.

FastPdfKit is compatible with the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch, and since version 3.0 it supports multimedia overlays from native PDF annotations on all three platforms. Our first version came out in January of 2011, and its genesis was the realization that the growing market for customizable PDF-readers for developers’ apps was not being served; and that Apple’s own apps were going to be substandard (as they indeed have turned out to be). FastPdfKit has won wide acceptance and now has about a thousand developers and resellers in over twenty countries around the world.

There are at present seven broad categories of features for FastPdfKit. We will treat each grouping on a separate Hub page on an introductory basis. Links will be provided for developers interested in further information. Or you can cut to the chase and view our Three Minute Implementation Guide, which details a quick start-up procedure, starting with a clone from github.

  • Reading (25 functions)
  • Multimedia and annotations (22 functions)
  • Kiosk (7 functions)
  • Text (11 functions)
  • Extensions (26 functions)
  • Miscellaneous (27 functions)
  • In development (3 functions)

Presenting the page to the user: Reading functions

They are comprehensive and designed for speed and simplicity for both developer and user. Pinch, tap, double-tap, tap on the side, zoom, precise zoom, switch pages, left to right and right to left reading, bookmarks, and native thumbnail extraction is a partial list. These core reading-functions will accommodate all PDF page-presentations for newspapers, magazine, books, manuals, and any standard documentation, with an emphasis on large files. This is why the actual PDF reader, FastPdfKit is now and will be the reader of choice for iOS developers going forward.

Go here for the full MFDocumentViewController class reference.

FastPdf+ and FastPdfKit: pack up your troubles

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Chances are if you are an iOS developer reading this page, you don’t yet know what FastPdf+ is or what it does. And if you’re still reading, chances are you want to find out. Simply put, FastPdf+ is the best and fastest PDF reader to be found on Apple’s mobile platforms, including Apple’s own iBooks reader. FastPdf+ is the flagship product of MobFarm, a group of developers based in Venice (that’s Italy, not Southern California). FastPdf+ is available from iTunes for $2.99. Choose it knowing that you’ll be getting the best PDF reader downloadable to your iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch.

If you have been a user of iBooks and assuming it was good enough, you might wonder what the need is for another PDF reader. If that’s the case, you probably haven’t used iBooks for larger files.

We said it was the best: here’s our truth algorithm:

  1. Download FastPdf+ to your device.
  2. Run it.
  3. Compare it with iBooks or any other iOS PDF reader.

Be sure to use large documents, at least 14MB. Here the difference will be obvious: even a 20MB file with FastPdf+ will open nearly instantaneously.

The interface: tap, double-tap, swipe, pinch – everything you would expect from Apple’s iOS. With a finger you can sort your documents, read them in landscape or portrait mode, zoom, search and select, bookmark, adjust for brightness while reading, and also share, transfer, and synchronize through iTunes. For the complete list of features, go here. iTunes also offers a preview.

If you’re a developer looking for a PDF-reader for your app, you already know that there are lots of PDF readers for the iPad/iPhone. And you know that they squew slow and kludgey and seem more representative of the PC world than Apple’s iOS.

You don’t want them in your own app. You also don’t want to code your own reader either. (Who’s got time for that?)

Providing a fast, customized PDF reader is the problem.

Our new kit-bag

The solution is FastPdfKit, a complete static library, sample code, and PDF parser that lets you embed a fast, professional, and thoroughly customized PDF reader into your own iOS 3.2 (and above) app.

PDF documents are the standard for print visualization, and a world-wide market of millions of customers expects continually better and more affordable ways to reduce or eliminate their paper, printers, copiers, and shippers. That an opportunity available for immediate attention.

Smile, smile, smile

We’re not just blowing smoke. FastPdf+ 3.0 was accepted by Apple just three hours after it was submitted.

Interested? Take a look at our upcoming Hub developer pages. And then join the gathering corps of developers and resellers already using FastPdfKit in their own apps. There were almost a thousand of them the last time we counted, scattered around (to mention a few) the USA, Canada, Mexico, Brasil, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, China, Turkey, Portugal, Italy, Norway, UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, and Malaysia.

See you there.

FastPdfKit is the first Siri-controlled application

Posted by & filed under github, Multimedia, News, Siri.

I’ve decided to run FastPdfKit Reader on another device because the Siri interface on iPhone covers the whole screen and you cannot feel the real power of the implementation.

The procedure can be replicated for every other app in a couple of hours.

In few words: a proxy server (SiriProxy) intercepts the siri commands sent to Apple (we are in the middle), a plugin add some new commands to the list of accepted ones by Siri, takes the answers and open a tunnel with a chat server. The chat server sends immediately the command to the iOS app that is logged as user. The application listen for messages and if receives something parses the content and react accordingly.

What we did is listed below.

First of all clone the SiriProxy repository on github from plamoni: nothing would be possible without that proxy, many thanks.

Follow all the steps reported in the readme. There are also very detailed videos.

I got an error the first time I tried (issue 26) so you can alternatively follow this method to create the certificates. Thanks dus6.

Instructions here.

Start up the proxy and configure the DNS on the iPhone 4S.

Then I’ve followed this tutorial from Cesare Rocchi: many thanks even to him.

Read the whole article to find out how to establish a connection between you computer and the app. Basically you need to create a server with python and start up a chat. My hack was to let the SiriProxy communicate to the application through the chatroom.

I’ve written a ruby plugin for SiriProxy (you can find it here on github). The process is very simple as it starts a telnet connection to the localhost and pass some commands with custom prefix. The iOS app part is very easy, again inspired by the Cesare’s article. I’ve created a listener for commands. Few methods on this gist.

That’s it.

If you are interested in the next days I can be more detailed and help you to explore these new possibilities.

Please file an improvement request on Apple’s radar asking for public Siri API.

In the meantime enjoy FastPdfKit 3.0!

To find out what can be done with FastPdfKit, download the FastPdfKit Reader app from the App Store.

This is our press release for FastPdfKit 3.0.

What is FastPdfKit

Posted by & filed under News.

FastPdfKit is a library that let you show pdf documents in iOS applications bypassing all performances and missing features problems related to QuickLook.

Side scrolling, search with highlighted results, preview and thumbnails, text extraction, overlay views, embedded multimedia, optimization for every device, single and double page are just some of countless features included.

For more information, look at the FastPdfKit website and the Support pages.

Welcome to our blog

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Welcome to the brand new FastPdfKit blog.

We’re in the process of launching FastPdfKit 3.0, so we want to use the blog as a way to keep you informed.

We also plan to use the blog to post development tips, as well, so if there is a topic you’d like to see, please let us know!