2020: Year in Review

2020 has been a challenging year for everyone. It’s come with unprecedented uncertainty, change, and challenges on a scale very few people and businesses today have ever experienced. We’re extremely fortunate at PSPDFKit to have had some advantages on our side that have helped and continue to help us weather the storm.

Being remote-first from the very beginning means our regular day-to-day work routine saw zero disruption from our norm. Meanwhile, selling developer tools that help digitize workflows and enable virtual collaboration means we saw an increase in demand for our products and services.

Even so, while our business effectively stayed the same, we knew the people involved — our customers, our staff, and the communities we all live in — were definitely not the same. We have a core value we live by at PSPDFKit: “It’s always about people, our people and our customers.” And we knew now, more than ever, we’d need to live by this.

I’m so proud of our team, not just because of all we accomplished this year (and we accomplished a ton), but also because in difficult times, we came together to help one another, be there for each other, and continue to serve our customers and our communities to the best of our abilities.

Let’s take a look back at what happened over the past year.

New Products

We released some exciting new products and components, such as our headless server-side document Processor that helps users easily edit, convert, and redact information from their documents. We brought OCR to all our platforms to enable our customers to extract text from scanned PDF files. We shipped our Office conversion solution so that customers can convert Office files to PDF, and we released Image Documents on the remaining platforms so that our customers can support all the major available document types with PDFs, images, and Office files. We built upon our collaboration platform, Instant, by shipping Instant Comments, which enables users to collaborate in real time both by marking up documents and by commenting with sidebar text. We added to our existing accessibility features by releasing Reader View for iOS and Android so that users can focus on the content in their PDFs. Finally, we finished bringing two of the most powerful components of our SDKs, Digital Signatures and Redaction, to all of our major technology platforms.

We already have some big product ideas in the works for next year, but we’ll have to leave you in suspense for now. Stay tuned.

Awesome New Features

We also shipped many new exciting features for our existing components, further building on the value these amazing components already bring to customers. There are too many to list, but some of the highlights are trackpad support for iPad, SwiftPM support, support for XCFrameworks, an HTML-to-PDF conversion API on Android, page and annotation press events on Windows, and support for annotation notes on Web.

As always, one of the major value adds of subscribing to our SDK platform is our continued commitment to build on a rich existing feature set. We’ve done this from day one, and we’ll continue to support our customers’ variety of needs in the future.

New Customers

We’ve been so lucky to have had the opportunity to partner with some of the best companies and startups in the world. Especially in current times, we feel honored to be trusted by our customers — whether it’s to help them help teachers and students work virtually; save the planet by eliminating needless paper use; or bring the healthcare, banking, legal, and construction industries — among many others — into the digital world. We love to share in their successes and are constantly amazed by the things they accomplish.

Thank you to all our customers — both the ones we met this year and those we’ve had the privilege to have earned the trust of for almost a decade. We wouldn’t be able to provide the products and services we do without your support and partnership!

Here are a few of the new customers we met this year!

PSPDFKit in Numbers

Community

Earlier this year, we announced our commitment to sponsoring CocoaPods for the next two years, and we plan to continue sponsoring this amazing community for as long as we exist as a company.

Giving back to our community is important to us, and one of the ways we give back, apart from sponsoring, is through creating and publishing blog posts that can be used as a resource to answer questions, learn about a new technology, or gain insight from approaches we’ve taken in developing new features for our products.

Our must-read blog posts from the year are:

• Introduction to SwiftUI for React Developers Part 1 & Part 2

• The Case for Lists in UICollectionView

• Level Up Your Trackpad Support Using UIInteraction

• Introducing browserslist.dev

• IDEs and Text Editors for Writing C++ Code on a Large Scale

• Direct Calls with Objective-C

Future Outlook

While we continue to navigate these difficult times, our hearts go out to everyone who has struggled with mental health issues this year, been discriminated against, or lost a loved one due to the current political climate and pandemic affecting everyone throughout the world. We see you. We stand with you. We are you.

We’re extremely grateful to be in the position we are as a company, and we see such privilege as a responsibility. To that end, we’re focused on improving how we go about our work as a company, and how we can better serve our customers, our people, and the communities everywhere that we’re a part of. We have large plans for the next five years, and we’re excited to see our plans become reality. We still strongly believe that developers will have a massive say in what our future looks like, and we’re eager to be there side by side helping them build it.