We've been hinting at it for a while and the rumors are true: LEADTOOLS Version 18 (A.K.A LEADTOOLS Anywhere) will be released in January of 2013! I'd like to spend the next couple of weeks talking about what you'll see on the shelves come January.

This week I'm starting simple, and highlighting the changes to the product line. Overall, Version 18 is a slimmer offering in terms of actual products, but there are more features and development interfaces than ever before (which I'll cover next week)!

When LEAD Technologies set out to create its HTML5 SDK, we wanted to do it right by making LEADTOOLS the fastest and most interactive toolkit available. Thanks to our many customers investing in and developing with this technology, we take that as a vote of confidence that we have succeeded in attaining that goal.

There are many ways to design a zero footprint application, and unfortunately the performance and quality often suffer due to many applications simply pushing all of the image processing to a server. With the LEADTOOLS JavaScript libraries, you can gain all the advantages of zero footprint development without losing the user-friendliness of an application that can provide instantaneous visual feedback.

This week I'd like to highlight another example project one of our support agents developed in response to a customer request. Group annotations are a necessary feature in any application utilizing annotations and markup. In fact, the LEADTOOLS HTML5 SDK includes support for group annotations out of the box by simply clicking and dragging with the select tool. However, this customer had a requirement to create and edit group annotations programmatically.

Here is how you create the annotations and then place them in groups. After that you can use the mouse to select, move and resize each group as if they were a single entity.

Most image viewing applications and controls are designed for viewing a single image at a time. However some images and documents, such as TIFF and PDF, have multiple pages. Since these documents are typically full of text, it is very natural to keep reading on to the next page without the need to press a button to load the next page. We have received several requests for this feature and one of our developer support agents has created an demo showing how to implement continuous multipage scrolling with our HTML5 viewer and RESTful Web Services.

The basic idea works similarly to an image slider or carousel you might see on a homepage. There is an outer container which, when scrolled to a specified location, will asynchronously create an additional HTML5 Viewer for the next page and allow you to keep scrolling until you have reached the end of the document. Below is the JavaScript snippet which modifies the DOM with jQuery and calls the LEADTOOLS Raster Web service to retrieve the image.

After a successful and productive exhibit at AnDevCon, we have had a rewarding time talking to our many customers using the LEADTOOLS Android SDK. It is growing rapidly in popularity, and developers are putting it to use in many exciting ways. Fairly soon, LEADTOOLS should literally be in the palms of millions of hands around the world.

While the LEADTOOLS Android Java class library provides powerful imaging technology, some customers require native only apps or are simply more skilled and comfortable with C/C++ development. Recently, we have had several customers ask if it was possible to use LEADTOOLS C/C++ to create native Android apps (using the Android NDK) instead of using the Java class library. Never backing down from a challenge, our Developer Support agents created a sample project that shows off this functionality. Here’s a snippet of the C++ code that exposes L_IntensityDetectBitmap through JNI: