Rising of multimedia PDFs

Posted by & filed under Multimedia.

It wasn’t so long ago that electronic files were limited to simple text and spreadsheet documents. These were clearly very useful for some purposes but not the most attractive of documents. The next big development was the explosion of desktop publishing and electronic layout programs. Suddenly newspapers and magazines were being designed and laid out electronically and the entire printing industry was changed forever.

Rise of the PDF

All of these new graphics, image manipulation and page layout programs created a problem however, as computer users with different computer platforms and application software could not share documents. The Portable Document Format (PDF) from Adobe addressed that need. With users able to view documents without access to the application that created it, workflows in publishing were much simpler and users on different platforms could share information.

Interactive pdf files

Standard PDF files are now common and a widely accepted document format. They contain text and images but with computer users now used to interacting with other media types online, such as video and audio, the demand was there to develop a PDF with multimedia capabilities. These multimedia PDF files would provide the user with a much more interactive experience and include media types like video, audio, images, flash animation and interactive buttons.

Why use a PDF with multimedia?

Creating a multimedia PDF gives you the opportunity to create a much more engrossing experience for the recipient. Instead of pages of text, ideas and information can be shared more vividly and succinctly by using video for example. Interactive PDF files also contain clickable buttons which allow the user to navigate around the document in their own time and according to their own preferences, selecting the information that is of most interest to them without the need to wade through pages of text.

Typical uses for interactive PDF files

A multimedia PDF is a great tool for designers and commercial organizations to show off their wares. It is far better to show a product or a design project rather than just write about it. Using a PDF with multimedia would allow such organizations to create a video about a product and then talk about it to support the product information contained in the text. Recipients requiring more information can then click on buttons to take them to more relevant content. Interactive PDF files are also a great way to bring a newsletter to life and can be used to guide and support users filling in a form within the document.

A computer file game-changer

Modern computer users are now used to using rich media formats such as audio and video online. Clearly they come to expect the same sort of experience when using documents too. The multimedia PDF provides a platform to do exactly that and it has changed the nature of what we think of as a document. Now a PDF with multimedia document provides a vehicle for the delivery of all sorts of information in a single, portable format.

Want to create your first multimedia-rich PDF? Visit http://fastpdfkit.com/

The possibilities are endless with multimedia PDFs

Posted by & filed under Multimedia.

Interactive PDF files and multimedia PDF files are innovative ways of incorporating a number of media into a PDF and enabling users to interact with those media. Links, dynamic graphics, and comments are all examples of media that can be incorporated into such a PDF.

What is really groundbreaking about interactive PDF files, however, is the fact that they enable users to change, comment on, or otherwise manipulate the PDF file without needing to be connected to the internet to do so.

This multimedia approach to the PDF file creates a number of opportunities for the user, and generating and reading interactive multimedia PDFs can also be great fun to do!
Interactive PDF files have really taken off in a number of workplace contexts.

People working in all types of professions from architectural designers to university professors has found that the use of interactive multimedia PDFs enhances their various projects. An underpinning reason for this is the way in which interactive PDF files can be manipulated by various users. Designers can change or comment on a design for example by interacting with the PDF file, whilst a professor can add notes, comments, and links to useful journal articles to a student’s work if it has been submitted in interactive PDF format.
Creating multimedia PDFs and interactive PDFs is actually a very simple process, and the resulting PDF file can be a very powerful tool, as we have seen, for conceptualizing a project and for interacting with other users.
Application for creating interactive PDFs is very learnable and user friendly; the key example of such software is arguably Fireworks.
Simple tutorials enable even the novice to create high quality multimedia PDFs that fulfill a very wide variety of functions.
When it comes to the development of the multimedia pdf file, the possibilities really are limitless.

One creative application of interactive PDF technology is the use of these files to create multimedia poetry. This relatively new genre of poetry incorporates sounds, images (both moving and static), hyperlinks, and other types of media into the words of a poem.

Interactive PDFs have already proved themselves to be a very exciting innovation, and the future of the multimedia PDF file surely will be more exciting still!

Read more about interactive PDFs here.

Create custom widgets with FastPDFKit 4.0

Posted by & filed under github, Multimedia, News.

A new, faster rendering engine, optimized for the new iPad 3.

It reaches the same level of performance obtained on the iPad and iPad 2 that has made FastPDFKit 4.0 the fastest PDF reader on the market for IOS devices.

FastPDFKit 4.0 also has a new disk-caching system for faster page views.

  • 4.0 is capable of clear, small-sized documents thanks to its improved vector rendering;
  • 4.0 has improved handling in overflow mode that lets you scroll through pages vertically;
  • 4.0 has fully integrated multimedia widgets – simply choose which to include and you’re done.

So now everyone can create their own custom widgets.
You’re limited only by your imagination.
Widgets available now: image galleries, webpages, video – and sound – files, maps, PayPal, YouTube, and instant messaging.

  • Use simple hyperlinks;
  • Use authoring programs (from InDesign to Preview) to include multimedia in your existing PDF projects.

FastPDFKit 4.0 gives its best performance when used in combination with FastPDFKit Author, the application for Mac (and available free on Mac AppStore) to create, enrich, and synchronize PDFs with each device’s IOS.

FastPDFKit 4.0 and FastPDFKit Author supports every kind of widget available. Using them together you can:

  1. Create catchy, interactive, content-rich publications.
  2. Configure the settings of every page via hyperlink.
  3. Configure the behavior (single-page/double-overflow, zoom level, ecc.) of each document using hyperlinks…
  4. Together they are perfect for automatically making textual hyperlinks in PDFs.

The result?
With a simple click your customers and their readers can find your multimedia PDF on any Apple device, ready to be scrolled through at top speed.

Areas of app realization are unlimited. The following is a sample list:

  • Generic PDF readers
  • Applications with catalogs
  • Multimedia publications
  • Glossy-quality fashion magazines
  • Manuals for airline pilots
  • Company documents,
  • Corporate budgets
  • Newspapers
  • Applications with automatically generated reports,
  • Hospitals tests and prescriptions
  • Pharmaceutical companies and their advertisements
  • Scientific publications

FastPDFKit’s success as reported in a worldwide survey shows that:

  • More than 1500 developers in 30 countries are using it.
  • More than 300 applications using this engine are created and distributed for internal use.

Download FastPdfKit 4.0, the latest version from GitHub to personally experience this worldwide revolution in PDF apps.

FastPDFKit 4.0

Posted by & filed under github, Multimedia, News.

What is FastPDFKit? It’s a static library with sample code and a PDF parser that enables you to visualize files inside iOS applications.

It’s compatible with iPad, iPhone, and iPod Ttouch. It comes to you as an iOS SDK download.
For our developers around the world who are already using FastPDFKit, and for those who still waiting on the sidelines, MobFarm releases the latest update: version 4.0, with new widget-support out of the box and an improved rendering engine that delivers better-than-ever performances on the new iPad 3.
Do your customers need applications loaded with instantly opening graphics and page views?
Do you want to add references to a digital publication that you have created to be read inside one of those applications? If so, then FastPDFKit is the product for you and your customers.

FastPDFKit for iOS ships in four different ways:

  • As an iOS application on the App Store, called FastPDFKit;
  • As a standalone iOS framework to be included in your customized application;
  • As source code from GitHub;
  • As a test application for an iOS simulator.

You can download FastPDFKit’s source code without charge from GitHub and immediately start:

  • Developing apps;
  • Adding PDF visualization to existing apps;
  • Developing widgets.

So now for the first time you can quickly begin offering your customers complete IOS solutions. You can also purchase commercial licenses – Basic, Plus, and Extra, each with its own unique enabled features.

Just go to www.fastpdfkit.com to get started today!

 

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. FastPdfKitwas 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

Posted by & filed under Multimedia, News.

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.