The LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ cross platform libraries in LEADTOOLS V18 have been very popular since their release earlier this year. LEAD continues to expand its reach by adding new development platforms and interfaces for Windows Phone 8 and Linux.

Click on the headers below for more a more detailed list of all the features supported by each interface.

LEAD Technologies has a strong commitment to ongoing support and improvements to the current version. This isn't just the bare minimum bug fixing and workarounds like the rest, we're talking about new features and additions that are added to the toolkit at no charge or upgrade fee. Today we have released an update to the Media Foundation features within the LEADTOOLS Multimedia SDK.

At first glance some of these features might not seem like much, such as a live preview for the capture and convert controls. However, anyone who has attempted low level Media Foundation programming knows this is a pretty major undertaking. The near-magical work our engineers did will save LEADTOOLS customers countless hours of headache! Here's what's new and improved for the Media Foundation SDK:

LEAD Technologies has added two popular feature requests which will be available to all Version 18 customers free of charge. The h.264 Encoder now supports Intel Quick Sync Video hardware acceleration. On supported processors, the video encoding time is typically cut in half, with an almost 60% reduction in CPU utilization.

For processors that do not support Intel Quick Sync video, customers can also take advantage of new High Profile capabilities (in addition to the already supported Main and Baseline) for improved video encoding onto Blu-Ray media.

Displaying multi-page documents in a zero-footprint web application can be a challenge because of the limitations associated with the <img> tag, which can only display a single image. A common solution is to implement a separate thumbnail viewer and attach JavaScript listener events to change the displayed image in your main "viewer." A more advanced solution may involve detecting the scroll position and modifying the DOM to create a continuously scrolling viewer. Those are both great for any file with multiple pages, but what if you want to take full advantage of more advanced file format features such as PDF bookmarks and hyperlinks?

Many applications don't bother supporting the PDF file format and assume you want to use a third party plug-in to display it. However, the LEADTOOLS HTML5 SDK includes support for not only rasterizing the PDF into an image, but also reading the text, hyperlinks and embedded thumbnails so that you can develop a fully-featured, zero-footprint PDF viewer application! Our engineers are very proud of this functionality and have created the HTML5 PDF Thumbnails and Bookmarks demo so you can see the amazing technology LEADTOOLS has to offer. Additionally, it gives you a huge head start on developing your application since the source code for this demo (and all of our other HTML5 demos) is included with the free, fully-functional LEADTOOLS Evaluation download

Visual Studio Magazine has published its annual Reader's Choice Awards and LEADTOOLS was once again declared a winner for the 11th straight year. The survey was conducted in August with nearly 500 readers casting their votes and giving their opinions about their favorite productivity enhancers. In 2013, over 400 products were in the running, and LEAD Technologies is proud to have emerged as a winner in three categories.

• Gold Medal in Component: Imaging, Image Processing & Drawing Tools —
  LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro
• Silver Medal in Component: Text, OCR, Scanning & Barcode —
  LEADTOOLS Document Imaging Suite
• Bronze Medal in Mobile Development Tools and Frameworks —
  Windows Phone SDK technology in LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro and above

To see the full article from Visual Studio Magazine, you can download the PDF from their website.