LEADTOOLS Version 18, also known as LEADTOOLS Anywhere™, is designed with the purpose of opening new opportunities and easing the development of high quality imaging applications that can run anywhere. Since V18's release earlier this year, we have published several articles on The CodeProject showing the benefits of using LEADTOOLS to create multi-platform, native apps for .NET, WinRT, iOS, OS X and Android.

This month we are continuing that series and have written an article showing the beauty and simplicity of using LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ for barcode recognition. For each platform, it only requires a few simple lines of code to detect and recognize barcodes from still images and video streams. Head on over to The CodeProject, grab the latest evaluation for LEADTOOLS V18 and see for yourself how LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ can increase your mobile app's ROI.

Annotation and Markup has been a staple feature in LEADTOOLS Document Imaging SDKs for almost two decades. Over the years it has undergone several transformations, some cosmetic and some structural. LEADTOOLS Annotations, which started as a CDLL API, were also ported to new technologies as they came along: C++ Classes, .NET, WPF, Silverlight, HTML5 and more. Not only did we add new interfaces with the release of LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ in Version 18, but the Annotations library took on another big change that will not only future-proof the library, but also make cross-platform application development a breeze.

Compared to our current offering, the new annotations design and format in LEADTOOLS V18 most closely resembles the .NET interface. Developers using .NET, WPF, Silverlight, HTML5/JavaScript, WinRT, iOS, OS X and Android now share identical libraries. On top of the uniform programming interface design, the annotation file format which LEADTOOLS loads and saves has been standardized as well, allowing annotations to be loaded and saved in any LEADTOOLS application, regardless of its development platform.

With the recent release of Version 18, there is much to show off. I can't think of a better way than to dive into the new LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ libraries on The CodeProject. Check out our latest article in which we introduce Version 18 to The CodeProject community and show how to use OCR to extract text from an image on multiple platforms: .NET, WinRT, iOS, OS X and Android.

Our existing .NET customers are already aware of how simple it is to OCR an image to searchable text in only a few lines of code, but did you know we brought that same programmer-friendliness to all of the new Anywhere™ platforms? One of the most impressive things about LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ is how hard our engineers worked to construct each development interface as similar as possible, making it easy to port your applications to multiple native platforms with less time and a greater ROI.

This is a slight rabbit trail away from our LEADTOOLS Version 18 preview series, but very exciting news nonetheless. We have published a new article on The CodeProject showing how easy it is to use our new iOS imaging SDK to perform OCR and Barcode recognition on your iPhone or iPad.

You might be thinking to yourself, "how is this possible? Version 18 isn't released yet!" Several customers have shown interest since the announcement of Version 18 and we have created a beta trial package of our iOS and OS X development libraries! Check out the main iOS and OS X SDK page to see what's included and how to get your hands on this exclusive beta program!