Future plans

Submitted by mronkko on Wed, 02/15/2012 - 19:46

Because ZotPad is a native iOS app, there are many development options available that would be difficult to implement in Zotero for Firefox or Zotero Standalone. For example, while Zotero has a full-text search capability for PDF attachments, it would be difficult to highlight the search results in the PDFs. Also, it would be cumbersome to show the parts of the PDFs where the search terms are found. This is something that I would like to have in ZotPad in the long run. The previews could work in the same way that they work in Google Books.

In an ideal case ZotPad would have the following three features:

  • Full text search of PDF attachments
  • A full-featured PDF viewer
  • Support for annotating PDFs and synchronizing these back to Zotero server

While Apple has a really great development environment for iPad, they do not include a PDF library that would make it easy to implement this functionality. I have been looking at different third-party libraries. These commercial libraries cost thousands of euros, so it is not feasible include one with the current price point. One idea that I have been thinking about is to have a more expensive "Pro" version of ZotPad that would be powered by a commercial PDF library. To check the feasibility of this idea, I am doing some market research in the form of a small poll on this site.

Comments

rufi

Tue, 02/21/2012 - 15:48

Hi, FYI I have an account but did not find how to vote on your poll : I cannot click on an option.

My answer is I would pay for 10 euros for ZotPad Pro with these features (e.g. pdf viewer/annotation) and 15 euros for more features (e.g. two way zotero and webdav sync when it will be possible, interface tweaks and frequent updates).
Another option might be to release a pro version at 5 or 10 euros, then offer in-app purchases for more specific (but more costly) features (a few euros each for example) that maybe not everyone would want to pay for and need.

mronkko

Thu, 02/23/2012 - 05:44

Thanks for reporting this. The poll permissions have been fixed.

The idea behind the two versions is that the Pro version would use commercial software libraries and the normal version would only use free libraries. I would need to pay a license fee for each sold copy of ZotPad for the Pro version and because fo this it would need to be priced higher.

Two-way sync with webdav will be implemented in the normal version after Zotero supports it. Also I will not be charging extra for frequent upgrades. The upgrades will be as frequent as I have time to code, maybe four time a year. (This is not a full time job for me and I have not been able to recruit more developers yet.)

I am not going to implement in-app purchases because this will just make things more complicated.

bpb

Mon, 02/27/2012 - 13:35

As a current ZotPad user I'm fine with paying ~20 Euro for this, as it is a killer feature. However, I'm not tied into Zotero - in fact I have recently switched from Papers to Zotero simply to make my papers magically appear in ZotPad! (I tried Mendeley, but I couldn't get it working). So I'd be happy to pay anyone a decent price for an app that magically syncs my papers from the cloud, and allows annotations, with a decent design interface. ZotPad is a great start though, good luck!