Some of you may have noticed already, but our web-based .NET documentation has gone through a major renovation and upgrade. Our documentation team has been collecting feedback and requests for a while and had a chance to start implementing the enhancements after Version 18 was completed. Some of it is cosmetic, but there are some pretty neat features and user interface updates that have greatly enhanced the webhelp. Here are a few of the major features added or enhanced in the new webhelp:

• New toolbar and TOC (Table of Contents) with larger, modern icons
• Visually pleasing keyword indexes
• Embedded chat page to facilitate communication with Support
• New search options
• Smarter and more efficient TOC
  • Dynamically generated TOC increases speed and navigability
  • Persistent state remembers which branches you have opened
  • Sync button highlights where your current article is located in the TOC

• Always visible direct link to the currently displayed article for easy sharing and bookmarking
• New option to email link to the current page
• Ability to show and hide the webframe
• New icons that show which platforms are supported by a function, property or event

We hope you find the documentation more thorough and easier to navigate, giving you more time where you need it most: in your code. As always, if there are any more features you would like to see, let us know!

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.

In order to show off the new LEADTOOLS Anywhere ™ technology, LEAD recently published several free apps for WinRT on the Windows Store. Today, we are announcing three new Android apps approved for Google Play. Showing off nearly identical features as their WinRT siblings, these apps showcase not only the award-winning imaging technology for formats, image processing, OCR and Barcode, but show how easy it is to create native apps for multiple platforms with LEADTOOLS Anywhere™. The source code for each of these demos is available in the main LEADTOOLS evaluation to help get developers started on their LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ projects.

• LEADTOOLS Image Processing
• LEADTOOLS OCR Demo
• LEADTOOLS Barcode Demo
• LEADTOOLS DICOM Viewer Demo
• LEADTOOLS Medical Web Viewer Demo

We have more apps for iOS on the way and should hit the App Store any day now. If you're an Apple iPhone, iPad or iPod user, stay tuned for our next announcement for these exciting and free apps!

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.