When you have ever searched the app stores for apps related to document management or PDFs you will know the feeling: thousands of apps, almost all of them poorly done and either full of ads or crashing in the worst moment or missing exactly the feature you needed to finish working with the document and then you are back at square one. 😰
Super glad that now the company behind the widely used PSPDFKit SDK launched their own PDF viewer. Worth giving a try and from now on one of the very few apps that I keep permanently installed. 📱💘
@__tosh Thanks for hunting! Super proud to finally share this with the world, we're looking forward for loads of feedback to make this even better. Don't hold back! We know that there's still a lot to improve, but we're already using it every day and didn't want to hold back any longer.
Yes, the app is free, has no ads and no in-app purchases. What's our business model you're asking? Check out our blog and follow up with any questions here.
https://pspdfkit.com/blog/2016/p...
Congrats on launching! Looks great!
I wonder how the process was regarding this app is on Android too. Is it native? Did you used something like shared frameworks across the systems? How was the process between the Android and iOS team (or was it one team) so that you have the same features in both?
@arno_app Great question! We've spent a lot of time trying to figure this out. The UI code for this app is mostly done in Swift 3. The PDF editing is powered by the PSPDFKit SDK which can also be licensed by other apps - that is mostly Objective-C++. And we share a common core with Android, which is about 500k LOC. We've blogged about the sharing a while ago - this is still mostly up to date: https://pspdfkit.com/blog/2016/a... - Android UI is also all Java and custom-built; you can't really share UI code without making compromises, so we rewrote it specifically for each platform. There's also PSPDFKit for Web coming later this month which also uses the common C++ core, but a completely new JavaScript-based UI. https://pspdfkit.com/web/
@arno_app@steipete PSPDFKit has been in the works for 5 years on iOS and almost 2 years now on Android. We have a team of over 30 people working full time on the SDKs. The apps took a bit over 6 months each but with some of the previous components, like the file manager, having a skeleton version of them already built. Obviously, the frameworks were the only reason we were able to put out the 1.0 in that short of a timeframe.
@alexeyplekhanov@arno_app Yes! We have a prototype for a year now but sync has a lot of edge cases (and syncing view state in real time/presentation mode) so we're working hard to really get it perfect before it's out.
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What's the difference between this and Adobe?
I'm a little biased because that's what I have always used 🙀
@dredurr - That's a great question. Thank you for asking!
The major differences come in the UI and UX of the two apps and what you get for free versus what you have to be a paying subscriber of Adobe to get.
Acrobat is honestly not great on mobile currently and not really built specifically tailored for each platform. For instance, finding various views of the file manager on Acrobat on iOS is difficult, importing from other cloud service providers beside DC or Dropbox is not easy, after you highlight a sentence of text you then have to reselect the highlight tool to highlight more text, etc. These are the little details that make all the difference in an alright user experience and a great one. We all know on mobile, if the UX is not delightful, people will just pull out their laptop.
The other difference is in paid versus free features. For instance, if you want to view a thumbnail summary of the pages, this is only available as a paid subscriber of Adobe's. Further, if you want to edit the document by rotating a page, deleting a page, or reordering pages, these are also not available without being a paid subscriber. We offer all these features for free and make it easy to use them.
I hope that helps you make the switch! I really hope you check out both apps and let me know what you like more about Adobe over us. Thanks again for the question.
@dredurr I've always used adobe for pdf annotation before too. It gave me chills every time I anticipate using it. The experience has always been sub par. I now rely on preview but that's only a little better. That said, I still really only annotate on my laptop and not mobile. Will give this a try for a new experience! @jdrhyne
@__tosh Thanks for the question!
While basic PDF functionality inside PDF Viewer will always remain free, we have plans to launch premium subscription-based features and services over the next year, such as the ability to create digital signatures, page text editing and others.
Probably our most exciting premium feature coming in the near future is our real-time collaborative sync solution. This will allow anybody that's a part of a team or with friends to annotate a document in real time whether online or offline. We really think this will change the way people collaborate on PDF documents similar to the way Google Docs has revolutionized word processing.
Again, the PDF functionality included today will remain free and we hope to provide valuable add on subscription services in the future.
Hello Product Hunters!
I'm one of the makers of PDF Viewer.
PDF Viewer is all about improving people's daily interactions with PDFs, whether it be reading your favorite eBook, needing to mark up a document or photo, fill out one of those great PDF forms, or signing a contract.
At PSPDFKit, we power many of the productivity apps you probably already use like Dropbox, Box, Hipchat or Evernote. We pride ourselves on delivering the best user experience by getting all those little details that make a difference right.
PDF Viewer is free and can be found on iOS or Android. Please check it out and definitely send us your feedback. It's always a community that builds an app.
We're on Android as well and Google is currently featuring us in their brand new "Early Access" section, which helps a lot to find eager testers. https://play.google.com/store/ap...
Does the app support scanning documents (& creating a PDF of it)?
That's one of the major painful use cases I regularly have. Especially then stitching the scans together and getting the file out of these scanner apps again.
@__tosh Yep, you can select an image and convert it to PDF. We don't yet do page/rectangle detection, but that's on our list. Getting that right is quite a lot of work; you want to add logic to easily add pages, ideally auto-name the files, auto-upload; apply filters and potentially also do OCR.
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