One of our favorite things to do at LEAD is be a part of making the world a better place to live through our technologies. As an SDK company, we enjoy a much broader reach than our local community since we get to be a part of many projects and ideas that our customers are coming up with. For example, LEADTOOLS DICOM and PACS technologies aren't serving just a couple local hospitals, but thousands of hospitals around the globe. That's literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of X-rays, CTs, MRIs, and the like displayed by LEADTOOLS.

If you have been following the news at all the past several months, it's been rather violent. In response, local governing bodies are starting to do more to increase security measures through printing and scanning ID cards for children and families that attend public events, or implementing stricter ID protocols at bars. Our sales and support teams have been getting a lot of questions about how LEADTOOLS can help these municipalities and socially aware developers with improving security.

If you've been keeping up with us, you are already aware of our recent update to our Android, iOS, and OS X development libraries (if not, go read it!). Shortly after that release, our developers have been rolling out updates to all of our mobile demo apps available on the App Store, Google Play, and Windows Store.

In addition to updating our existing demos, we plan on adding new demos for credit card and passport recognition, so keep a close eye on that page if those features are of particular interest to you. If you can't wait (and we don't blame you), the source code for those demos ships with the main evaluation for each platform.

Do you develop mobile apps for iOS or Android? If so, read up because this is pretty exciting stuff. Even if you aren't currently a mobile app developer, chances are you've thought about it and this might pique your interest even more. LEADTOOLS 19 has been released for Android, iOS, and OS X development platforms!

Below is a summary of the big stuff included in this release. We'll go into more details on some of the features in the coming weeks, such as the improvements we made to the OCR and Barcode engines.

MPEG-2 Transport Stream is a significant feature in our Multimedia offering and covers a wide variety of industries and applications including UAV, digital television, and security. Today, we published an update that includes the ability to use push mode to capture and play from devices sending hardware-compressed MPEG-2 Transport Streams. This heavily requested feature gives developers excellent performance when interfacing with modern MPEG-2 Transport cameras and capture devices since the source stream can go directly to the LEADTOOLS MPEG-2 Transport Demultiplexer rather than forcing decompression or being limited to completed .m2ts files.

Additional Multimedia Updates

In addition to MPEG-2 Transport Stream, here are few more notable updates in today's Multimedia Release:

After being in this industry for a while, it's always fun when new hires and college recruits come in with varying degrees of experience. Some are well-versed in the SDK world, while others are dead-set on using notepad and doing everything from scratch. This gave us the idea to come up with 10 reasons to use an imaging SDK, or even just an SDK in general. So here they are in a semi-particular order, because many of them build off of or hinge upon the first two:

1. Save time. Many features found in imaging SDKs such as OCR, Barcode, Forms, DICOM, PACS, etc. would take years to develop on your own. Using an SDK can shorten your development life cycle to less than a month.
2. Save money. In the business world, most of us don't have the luxury of waiting years to develop a product. The time saved by using an SDK can easily recoup the development costs since you can start selling your product much earlier.
3. Two heads are better than one. SDKs let you borrow from another developer's expertise so you can focus on yours.
4. Nothing new under the sun. No sign of disrespect, but your project or something similar to it has probably been done before. A well-respected SDK with a wide user-base has valuable insight and experience that could help you with more than just calling its functions.
5. Dependable libraries have already gone through the wringer. This is especially true for established commercial libraries and oftentimes less for open-source. When an SDK is that company's line of business, you can trust that they have tested it and ensured its quality across a wide variety of platforms, images, and scenarios.
6. Expand your customer base. SDKs can give you a greater confidence in bidding on more diverse projects, tapping in to additional revenue sources.
7. Easy cure for feature creep. Usually looked upon as a negative in the development process, feature creep can be handled with grace and ease with the right SDK. Impress your bosses and clients with how fast you can go with the flow and expand your project's scope.
8. Easy to find help. The more popular an SDK is, the easier it will be to find help using it. This can be directly through that SDK's customer service, 3rd party forums, blogs, or even bringing in contract work for your project.
9. Compliance. Ever looked through the specifications for a file format? How about DICOM? Beyond the baseline complications of decoding and encoding information correctly, vertical markets such as health care and government require a high level of security and compliance that an SDK will help navigate and keep your product in line with.
10. Fun! This may be more subjective and personality-dependent, but I think the vast majority of us find great satisfaction in trying new things and creating a variety of projects. Rather than working on one thing for an extended time, using SDK can open up the door to completing many different projects over the course of your programming career.

If we've somehow convinced you in this post, or if you were already attune to the benefits of using an imaging SDK, you can take a deeper look and learn why you should choose LEADTOOLS as your imaging SDK provider.