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!

I heard some exciting news from engineering today in regards to our WinRT barcode engine. Just over a month has passed since we released the WinRT SDK, and our hardworking document imaging experts have already revamped the barcode recognition algorithm in several key ways:

• Enhanced the barcode engine to produce optimum results in pictures taken from mobile devices
• New image preprocessing that resolves extreme shadows, lighting and 3D perspective skewing in images capture from cameras
• Faster recognition when reading barcodes from a video stream
• Enhanced internal binarization for color images and videos

All of these add up to superior accuracy and speed to what was already an outstanding product! To be more precise, the new algorithm is presented as a setting which means this has no impact on the previous algorithm if you are still using our barcode engine on scanned documents. These updates, as well as a free demo for the Windows Store, should be available shortly after the holidays!