PDFpen and PDFpenPro 11.1.1
Smile has released version 11.1.1 of its PDFpen and PDFpenPro apps, a small update that resolves a registration issue when upgrading to macOS 10.15 Catalina. In related news, Smile has also updated PDFpen for iPad and iPhone ($4.99 for a limited time) to version 5.1 with support for iPadOS multitasking (see “Here’s What Sets iPadOS Apart from iOS,” 25 September 2019). With multiple window capability, you can open, read, and reference two different documents simultaneously or view different parts of the same document in two windows. ($74.95/$124.95 new with a 20% discount for TidBITS members, $30 upgrade, 76.6/124.5 MB, macOS 10.12+)
I both like and use PDFPen, but paid $30 last year for an upgrade and now another $30 just so their software works with Catalina!!?? No functional upgrade worth mentioning, just a registration fix so that their software works properly. Now my version 10 thinks it’s in demo mode and watermarking any document. This makes me think very poorly of the developer and I will look at Preview again to see if it will do 99% of what I need.
This is just a tiny update—version 11 had quite a few significant feature updates, and this is a free update for all version 11 owners.
(Normally, such a small update wouldn’t warrant Watchlist coverage on its own; we were taking advantage of it to mention the more interesting iOS update since the Watchlist focuses on Mac apps and only mentions iOS versions alongside the Mac version.)
FYI, I have PDFpen via Setapp and “Nuance Power PDF for Mac” via a recent Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1500 purchase bundled license code.
They have almost identical interfaces, as from my investigations they seem to both use the same Kofax backend. Wonder whether the Pro version of PDFpen does anything the Nuance doesn’t…?
Earlier this year, Kofax acquired Nuance Document Imaging, a division of Nuance Communications, Inc. My guess is Kofax and Nuance PDF software are basically the same, just branding changes (there may have also been a licensing relationship before the acquisition).
PDFPen and PDFPenPro do contain licensed Nuance-Omnipage OCR software, Omnipage is a part of what Kofax acquired. I think that’s the only connection, PDFPen & PDFPenPro are made by SmileOnMyMac. It seems almost everything commercial that does document OCR either uses code from Omnipage or ABBYY Finereader.
You can compare PDFpen and PDFpenPro, both have OCR but only Pro has “batch OCR” and a few other features.
Ah, ok.
Yeah I knew Kofax bought Nuances imaging business (had to sort an issue with the licence code they included for the older EOL “Nuance PDF Converter for Mac” instead of the current “Power PDF for Mac”; dealt with Kofax representatives who sent me back to Fujitsu support to get it).
Perhaps that’s why the GUI for both looks almost identical, given they both use Omnipage.