So we merged PDFpen for iPhone and PDFpen for iPad into PDFpen for iPad & iPhone. But when customers ask, we deliver.Ī bit later Apple came out with universal apps, single app purchases which ran on both iPhone and iPad. We hadn’t intended to make one, an iPhone screen being quite small, even smaller in 2012. I miss Macworld and its camaraderie, but I don’t miss the long tradeshow days.Ībout 9 months after PDFpen for iPad we launched a version on iPhone. Standing on concrete for eight hours a day, it really makes a difference. We are a developer of software for editing PDFs.Ī tradeshow lesson: after our first few years of tradeshows together, Greg and I decided when we set up a booth to include the luxury of extra (read: any) padding under the carpet. There is no “pen.” We are not a developer of styluses for your iPad. I received this question at Macworld in 2012, and our support still receive it occasionally today: I manned that iOS kiosk myself, showing off PDFpen for iPad, the rest of the team took shifts at the Mac booth. We dropped OnMyMac from our company name, shifting from SmileOnMyMac to Smile, so as to encompass our spread to more platforms.Īt that Macworld we had two booths, one for our Mac products and another in the iWorld section. I suppose we were on the same page there, as adding iOS apps to our product line prompted us to rebrand as well. That’s the year IDG re-branded the expo as Macworld/iWorld in order to include the growing iOS presence. Once Apple created the iPad, and we gave it a chance to get powerful enough, we launched PDFpen for iPad in time for Macworld 2012. ![]() ![]() A lesson in this case, a higher price does mean higher quality. We’ve since updated to use Nuance’s, which has the benefit of higher quality output, though at a higher price tag. So we hunted for a decent engine.įirst, we used Google’s, which is what we have in PDFpen Scan+ today. That meant adding an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine into PDFpen. Philip with the retail box On OCRīeing able to take a scan, which is normally treated as static image, and turn it into a more editable PDF where you can copy text, seemed a valuable feature to have. Now retail software is no more and everything is downloaded. It was great to have that experience and super exciting at the time! While not super successful financially, it was great advertising. PDFpen was even shipped as a physical retail product and appeared on the shelves of the Apple Store in 2006. Our deadline was Macworld 2004, January! We were solving issues and building the product the morning we shipped! I can only remember it was a little hair-raising. ![]() The goal was to make it easy to use and easy to sign contracts. Our first release of PDFpen was focused on document assembly and signing. We figured we could fit somewhere between those two extremes. Next, looking at the PDF editor options in 2003 there appeared a huge gap between Apple’s Preview, in which PDFs were read-only, and Adobe Acrobat, which was much more than most needed for everyday use. Plus, faxing was slowly ceding ground to email in general. By cutting that process completely and signing the fax directly as a PDF, we could send it back by either fax or email. PDFpen was conceived because we were tired of printing and signing and scanning documents we received as electronic faxes from PageSender. Smile’s 15th Birthday means PDFpen’s 14th Birthday was in January! In our first year as SmileOnMyMac when we embarked on PDFpen, the second product Greg and I were to work on together. In this series we’re looking back at some of our history. On June 12, 2018, Smile celebrates our 15th birthday.
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