King’s student Max Kölb tells his story of developing an iPhone app which is set for a meteoric rise.
Recently, I was starting work on an application for my final year project in Computer Science. I had a few questions about iPhone development, so I contacted a friend who had been doing it for a year. We were talking about the general approach and premise to my application when he told me about a project he had been working on. It was called InstaPDF and the premise was simple: transform any and all mobile smartphones into portable scanning devices.
But it didn’t stop there. He had already built a cloud infrastructure that would take care of distributing the scanned document to all your devices instantly. I realised the potential and asked if I could join in the quest of building the scanner of the future.
We tried to market the application, but were always met with the same two questions: why does it cost so much? And is it secure enough? Instead of ignoring this feedback, we decided to double down on extending the service with the most requested features.
The results after two short weeks were very exciting. InstaPDF is now a free service. We have decided to realign our goals in building a scalable product that will fit the needs for business, student and private users alike.
In summary, InstaPDF is an iPhone application that lets you use your device’s camera to transform images into PDFs. Those documents are then uploaded to a cloud server that allows you to instantly see them via the native Mac app or your web browser.
For now we strive to realise InstaPDF’s full potential of replacing traditional document management. Imagine documents tagging and naming themselves through text recognition. Imagine automatic border detection whilst scanning a piece of paper. These are all very exciting features we’re currently working on for future versions of the app!
If you’d like to give it a try, download InstaPDF from the App Store today:
http://instapdf.me/appstore
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