April 07, 2013Performance updatesWe have moved our apps to a new server with more cores, so our apps should be running as smooth as ever for all users. In addition, we optimized our apps for handling large files, so our Pro users should see a large boost in performance improvements for handling PDF files up to 200MB in size. We hope these upgrades will benefit all our users! Posted by Gunnsteinn Hall at 01:41 in news updates0 CommentsOctober 13, 2012Introductory OfferWe have now gone live with our new Pro Plans ! We are offering an introductory offer, where the first month for the Pro Plan is free. To give it a try, you can apply the coupon code "ONE-MONTH-FREE" (without the quotation marks) when you set up the subscription ! Try it out for free ! After the free first month, the standard charge of $4.99 per month will apply. You can cancel at any time. This offer will expire in a month. Posted by Gunnsteinn Hall at 20:57 in news promotions11 CommentsOctober 13, 2012Terms of Use and Privacy Policy postedWe have made some changes to the site. Along with these new updates, we have posted our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. We hope that this will be useful and make everything more transparent for all our users. Both are listed on the menu at the bottom of each page. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments. Posted by Gunnsteinn Hall at 20:52 in news general legal2 CommentsSeptember 26, 2012Introducing Pro PlansIn early October we be launching Pro Plan accounts. Pro plan users enjoy various benefits, such as secure uploads (via HTTPS), an ad-free site with no 3rd party advertisements appearing anywhere. Furthermore, Pro plan users can work with PDF files up to 200Mb in size at a time. The price for this additional service will be a monthly fee of 4.99 USD. Our goal is to enable small and medium companies to use our service to a larger extent as now all uploads and downloads go through a secure channel, increasing the overall security of the apps. In addition, we will be encouraging all users to sign up for accounts. Registered free users will be able to use larger file sizes than anonymous users. At the same time, we will be publishing our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy that will appear at the bottom of all our pages. We emphasize that these changes will only minimally affect our free users. The basic service will still remain free. A login bar will appear on top of our pages, but the apps can still be used anonymously without logging in. We are reducing the file size down to 30 MB for basic services (anonymous), but that can be extended up to 50 MB for free by registering an account. This can then be extended up to 200 MB for the Pro plan which comes with other benefits as well. The table below compares the Pro plan with the free registered and anonymous plans respectively.
We hope that our users will benefit from the new services and we encourage you to leave us feedback in the comment section. Posted by Gunnsteinn Hall at 10:25 in news services general legal3 CommentsJuly 23, 2012Chrome webapps launchedWe have launched new Chrome Webapps for all of our 4 services, that can be accessed free of charge at the links below: FoxyUtils ProtectPDF Chrome App The Google Chrome apps are basically quick access links that appear under Apps whenever a new tab is created. This makes it faster to access our apps than ever before. We hope that our Chrome users will find this functionality useful. We would like to thank Robert Lee who encouraged us to publish our webapps as Chrome Applications and sent us a prototype implementation that we have extended to all our apps and made publicly available. Posted by Gunnsteinn Hall at 10:01 in news webapps general3 CommentsApril 02, 2012What is PDF? Why PDF?This short entry gives a brief overview of what PDF is, and the motivation for its creation. In addition, our goal is to to cite other and more comprehensive sources that can provide more information for interested readers. Much of the information in this article came from the Wikipedia article on PDF files (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_32000-1), but information from multiple other sources has been weaved into the article, along with the author’s own experience. What is it? The Portable Document Format (PDF) is an open standard published by Adobe Systems for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. A PDF file is simply a file that adheres to this standard and can be opened by any standard PDF file reader. As an example of free PDF readers, Adobe Reader (available at http://get.adobe.com/reader/) and Foxit Reader (available at http://www.foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Reader/) are among the most commonly used. A more complete list of readers can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software#Viewers. Each PDF file basically contains a full description of a document, including the text, fonts, graphics, and other information needed to display it. The way that this information is structured is specified by the PDF specifications (a very long and detailed document), which can be found on Adobe's site: here. Why was it created? Before PDF was established in 1993, there was a clear lack of an easy way of sharing documents. A common way for many (only on Windows systems) was to share Microsoft Office .DOC files. However that format is not nearly as general (and has been known to change from time to time). The real strength of the PDF file is that it appears the same on all systems and is an open standard, so anyone can create a program that outputs PDF files. Another format was the PostScript (PS) format, which actually has many things in common with the PDF format. It is still widely used in publishing and it is the native language for many printers. However, it never become very popular among the public, even though it was created long before the PDF format. Perhaps because that the PDF format was released and popularized in the relatively early days of the Internet. In addition the PDF format has many features over PS, such as being self-contained, containing all fonts, images, and so on in a single file. For interested readers, a comprehensive comparison between PS and PDF can be found here. How does the future look? The PDF standard has continually been upgraded since its initial release and many new features have been added. For example: password protection, interactive fill-in forms, digital signatures and multiple others. We can therefore expect to see many more features added in the years to come. Recently the PDF standard has become an ISO (International Organization for Standardization) standard, and Adobe Systems is no longer responsible for maintaining it. Furthermore, in 2008 Adobe published a Public Patent License to ISO 32000-1, granting a royalty-free rights for all patents owned by Adobe that are necessary to make, use, sell and distribute PDF compliant implementations. Conclusion As an open and still evolving standard, it is likely that PDF will maintain its role as a leading document exchange format for (at least some) years to come. Please share with us your view of the PDF format and how you think it's going to hold up in the future! Posted by Gunnsteinn Hall at 23:09 in pdf general8 CommentsOctober 16, 2011New webapps launched: Unlock PDF and Protect PDFWe have now launched our new webapps, UnlockPDF and ProtectPDF. As announced in our blog entry in September, we have been working hard to get the new services ready for launch. The new services enable users to lock (add password protection) and unlock (remove password protection) from PDF files, and are a great addition to our already established suite of online PDF webapps. Every day thousands of users merge and split PDF files, and we hope that many of our existing users will find the new additions useful. As always, we encourage comments and bug reports, so feel free to leave us any feedback or bug reports in the comments or via e-mail. Enjoy the new webapps! Posted by Gunnsteinn Hall at 17:46 in news services30 CommentsSeptember 11, 2011Planned: Unlock PDF and Protect PDFWhile we are working hard on improving our current services, Merge PDF and Split PDF, we are also planning to launch a couple of new services. We thank all our users who have given us valuable input in improving our services. We have submitted a lot of updates in the past few months. Please keep sending us bug reports when you encounter a failure, either through the comments or through email. The new services will complement our other services, allowing users to remove passwords from PDF documents (UnlockPDF), as well as adding protection to their documents (ProtectPDF). The PDF standard supports two kinds of passwords for each file. An owner password can be specified which allows adding protection such as limiting viewers' rights to print and/or edit the document and so forth. A user password is more restrictive as it requires a password to open the document. UnlockPDF will be able to remove passwords from documents with owner passwords, even without specifying the password. However, for documents with user password, a password will be required to unlock the PDF file. It will also be possible to enter multiple passwords and our program will go through the list, trying each password until it finds the correct one. This will help if you do not remember exactly what password you used when the protection was added. ProtectPDF, on the contrary, will allow users to add user and/or owner password to documents. The level of restrictions can also be specified, such as whether printing is allowed, and/or document edits, and so on. If you have any suggestions for these planned services, please let us know and we will try to incorporate them, if possible! Posted by Gunnsteinn Hall at 23:32 in news services9 CommentsJune 13, 2011New websites launchedWe have now launched a new (and we believe improved) Merge PDF and Split PDF webapps, with increased file size limits, and support for more PDF files than before. In the past there have been issues with certain PDF files, but most of those now work with the new sites. FoxyUtils is the company behind the Merge and Split PDF web apps. With the new sites we make this connection more apparent, which will be a good basis for launching more services and creating an integrated suite of online webapps in the future. For those who have been requesting SSL and more security for uploading their documents, we will be launching a paid ad-free service with running with SSL (https) shortly. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us. Posted by Gunnsteinn Hall at 09:20 in mergepdf news splitpdf69 CommentsJune 13, 2011Press Coverage of Merge PDFOur Merge PDF webapp has been widely reviewed by the online community since its release in 2008. Below is an overview of a few of those. Review on lifehacker.com Video Review on Chris Pirillo's blog Review on MakeUseOf.com Review on KillerStartups.com Review on MyDigitalLife.info Review on wwwhatsnew.com (in Spanish) Review on 4xPDF.com Press release on pr.com Tutorial on WikiHow.com Posted by Gunnsteinn Hall at 09:19 in mergepdf press news5 Comments |
Recent PostsAbout FoxyUtilsWe specialize in creating and maintaining web apps for PDF. Our current products are services to merge, split, lock and unlock PDF documents, see our Apps page for details. Archive Follow us on twitter
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