Zenreader by Leapian

Built with Qt

Produce Great Quality Work In Less Time With Zenreader

10x

Faster without compromising quality

1

Centralized place for all your documents

1000+

Active users

A New Way to Collect and Extract Knowledge is Here

Founded in 2015, the vision behind Zenreader was to create a suite of productivity tools that enable users to capture, extract, organize, and make use of knowledge effectively in order to streamline their daily work. Currently, Zenreader’s main function is note-taking from digital documents, but the ultimate goal is to expand on its capabilities, as well as make it a more collaborative tool, used by teams as well as individuals.

What sets Zenreader apart is that it is an all-in-one software that brings together a variety of productivity-increasing features and elements. The aim is to help users produce higher quality work, faster.

The next big step for the team is to introduce cloud functionality which will allow users to sync their data across all their devices, as well as share their work with their team. When everyone on the team has an up-to-date document to refer to, many of the most common frustrations can be eradicated, and the process streamlined.

Whilst Zenreader was only released fairly recently due to its extensive R&D efforts, it has already amassed over a thousand active users, with the number growing every month.

Read more about developing with Qt on desktop

 

“QML is the best UI framework we have worked with: it makes it very easy and clear to build components and re-use them efficiently; the connection between the backend and frontend is very clear and powerful.”

 

Carlo Minciacchi, Co-Founder & Director Leapian

Aiming for UI Perfection

Zenreader’s core functionality depends on its ability to analyze the contents of a PDF document. This required the development of a PDF reader with a QML interface, as well as proprietary algorithms.

The UI/UX needed to be tweaked several times in order to get the functionality just right – Zenreader worked closely with its users in order to find out how they were using the software, and how to improve their designs based on the feedback. Qt’s framework was extremely helpful in this because the team found it easy to update the user interface through QML – sometimes doing hot reloads in front of their users! 

Their biggest challenge, however, has been with developing the Cloud Sync functionality, as this required coming up with their own networking logic, event system, as well as implementation of conflict-free data types. Qt’s framework was able to address this by providing the QLocalSocket, Qt Network, and QWebSocket functionalities, around which the team was able to build their own logic and efficiently log messages.

“Qt gives us an edge over competitors because we can now develop beautiful applications across platforms very quickly. We can access any C++ library (there are many) and make use of them in our projects.”

Carlo Minciacchi, Co-Founder & Director Leapian

 

 
 

The Qt-est Choice

The Zenreader team decided to use Qt for their project to benefit from its cross-platform functionality within one codebase. Knowing that with Qt they could develop their software further and take it to other operating systems made it the easy choice.

The C++ backend meant that they could use a lot of C++ libraries in the development. The QML frontend meant being able to build attractive UIs quickly that were backed by the power and logic of C++, as well as being able to integrate JavaScript libraries to it as well.

Whilst they considered other frameworks for the build, Qt’s framework offers unrivalled and out-of-the-box functionality. Using it enabled them to achieve most of their UI/UX and functionality objectives quickly, whilst creating efficient cross-platform programs.

Currently, the team is using Qt Linguist and Qt Creator with the Qt build system, as well as QML for building the user interface. They love it for the easy integration between C++, JavaScript, and QML, giving a special thanks to the Layouting / Anchoring engine.

“Our favourite thing about Qt, besides the name, is QML and the documentation", says Carlo Minciacchi, Co-founder and Director at Leapian and Zenreader.

Try Qt for Your Mobile Applications

Qt Features Used

QML

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Qt Creator

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Qt Linguist

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QLocalSocket

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Qt Network

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QWebSocket

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Behind every great human achievement, there is research, hard work and finding creative new ways of addressing complex problems. Zenreader's products help people collect, organise and access their knowledge through the power of software and learning methodologies.

Their mission is to help unleash the full potential of each person to solve their challenges without spending all day working.

Have a brilliant idea, but don't know how to exeQte it? Get in touch and we'll help you out.

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