Photo To PDF
- August 26, 2016
After nearly a year of development time the next app is finally ready for public release. Selected users already tried out the alpha versions in the last few weeks. The app has now reached a state of usefulness allowing making it available to the general public.
As the name implies the app deals with generating PDF documents out of photos acquired with the device camera. A quick search in the Google Play store shows there are already several similar apps so why write another one?
A marketing answer would be because this app has feature so and so which is better than the feature x in app y. The reality is the problem did not look that difficult and it seemed to be possible to write something workable within a few hours. It turned out to be more like three full days but then the basis for the app existed. Starting from this prototype I moved all scan related tasks needed for Muzurisana to the app. This way the app was continually tested and improved until the work flow was streamlined to the business needs of a small company.
The interesting part of the app as seen from a programmers point of view is the image processing. This is something I deal with occasionally in my other job and this seemed like a good chance to try out new things. The side effects of having to write a camera page from scratch, dealing with C++ libraries as part of an Android app and other distractions are getting ignored even though these took a lot of the time during the last year to deal with.
For now the app can be used to acquire photos, crop and correct perspective distortions and generate multi-page PDF documents. There are still lots of things to add to improve the app like more controls on the camera page, the option to scale down the images before exporting and more. These things will be added as part of the ongoing development in the next year.
The app is free with advertisements. This time the advertisements can be switched off using in-app purchases. A subscription model is used as the experience of the last apps showed there is no finished app and changes to the Android system make continuous updates to the app necessary. Without a constant revenue stream the Muzurisana company will have to shut down.
So why not give the app a try?
Download it now from the Google Play Store page