The software development landscape is increasingly diverse, which is both a blessing and a curse for development teams. The many devices and platforms provide endless paths and opportunities to imagine, innovate, and develop. Coders experience the excitement that various new technologies can create. However, Project and Dev Managers may feel more pressure due to the overwhelming decisions they have to make and the implications that arise from producing modern apps.

If your project requires multiple platforms—and it likely does or will—there are several ways you can go about it. You can write separate native apps for each platform, use tools that convert code between languages, write shared code with a cross-platform mobile framework such as Xamarin, or even a mix somewhere in between. Deciding on this approach depends on your team, budget, and deadlines.

As if that wasn’t difficult enough, what happens when you add to the mix the need for specialized functionality like OCR, barcode, or image processing? Perhaps you have found a great library, but what if it only supports one of your platforms? Now you must double your efforts in finding, learning, testing, and managing those SDKs. Each library likely has its own licensing agreements, increasing your time investment; and some libraries may be open-source, which brings upon further questions and doubts about reliability. With so many development platforms, devices and operating systems on the market, is it even possible to get an efficient solution to your SDK problem?

Comprehensive Feature Set + Comprehensive Platform Support = Successful Apps
If you need to integrate raster, document, medical, or vector imaging into your application, LEADTOOLS has you covered. This SDK gives developers the most flexible and powerful imaging technology, offering development support for OCR, Barcode, Forms Recognition, PDF, Document Conversion and Viewing, Document Cleanup, Annotations, DICOM, PACS, HL7, File Formats (150+), Image Compression and Processing, Viewers, Scanning/Capture, Printing, and more. A LEADTOOLS toolkit literally puts millions of lines of code at the fingertips of application developers. Whatever your programming needs, LEADTOOLS has a toolkit specifically designed to give you the best imaging technology available. On top of the vast feature set, LEADTOOLS includes APIs for nearly every major development platform and language on today’s diverse market, including .NET Framework, .NET Core, .NET Standard, Xamarin, HTML5/JavaScript, Objective-C, Swift, and Java.

This is a dream come true from the Project or Dev Manager’s perspective! One SDK for every platform my project requires. My development team can write code for whichever platform they are most comfortable with. I can better ensure consistent quality and results of my app on each platform. My future relationship and costs are simplified with only one vendor relationship, one license agreement, and one support contact.

If It Sounds Too Good to be True…Never Mind, LEADTOOLS is Legit!
Does that sound too good to be true? Let’s look at a couple specific examples. You need to create an application for UWP, iOS, and Android that takes a picture and uses OCR to convert that text into a searchable PDF. You have a purely .NET development team with little to no native Apple and Android development experience. LEADTOOLS for Xamarin fits the bill perfectly and allows your team to code everything in XAML and C#.

Now let’s say you need to develop the same application but you have a mixed group of developers with varied expertise on their respective platforms and languages. LEADTOOLS has your team covered in that scenario as well with fully native libraries allowing your programmers to code in Objective-C or Swift for iOS and macOS, and Java for Android. Your developers may not be able to help each other with the nuances of their syntaxes, but they can still work together when implementing LEADTOOLS because the API differences are minimal.

Lastly, for teams that want to find some middle ground between the two paradigms, LEADTOOLS offers several web services. You can still design and code native UIs and offload your imaging requirements to a common server. You can host the services on your own servers or take advantage of everything Microsoft Azure has to offer.

LEADTOOLS + Microsoft Azure = Tomorrow’s Imaging Apps
Speaking of Microsoft Azure, the next evolution in the LEADTOOLS product line is a per-page Web API fully hosted on Microsoft’s cloud platform. Literally any app with an Internet connection will be able to use LEADTOOLS Cloud Services, with popular languages including .NET, JavaScript, Python, PHP, and Perl. You can get a sneak peek of LEADTOOLS Cloud Services at Microsoft Build, with a product release slated for mid-2018.

We could go on and on with more scenarios and solutions. This goes to show just how much LEADTOOLS can help tip the scales heavily towards the blessings. The only curses on your mind will be why you didn’t start using LEADTOOLS sooner.