What is PAD?..

PADŽ stands for the Portable Application Description specification and XML format, created in 1998 by the Association of Software Professionals. The proposed specification and format was designed to assist software authors and publishers provide a consistent and standard method for communicating content for product descriptions, requirements and other product-specific details to online sources, websites and catalogs. By using an industry-accepted standard format, webmasters and program librarians would be able to automate program listings. The PAD standard saves time for publishers in distributing their products and for webmasters in updating, maintaining, and publishing products on their sites. Today, over 50,000 publishers from around the world use PAD files to distribute over 250,000 downloadable apps on 6,000 websites, online directories, and catalogs that support publishers' PAD submissions. All of the current PAD Specification, support, resourcess and tools are managed by the ASP's PAD Committee. The latest PAD Specification, version 4.0, was announced on December 1, 2012

PAD v4.0 Released!
ASP and the PAD Committee are proud to announce the release of v4.0 of the PAD Specification. As part of this release, the existing v3.11 PAD Specification, including the prior PADGEN freeware tool, as well as the v3.11 PAD repository and online validator, have been replaced with a newly-created web-based solution on www.AppVisor.com.

Version 4.0 now includes support for publishers to add social network links (Google+, Facebook, Twitter, etc) and links for video content (YouTube, etc) while also incorporating authentication, certification, and other security features to protect publishers and their applications from PAD SPAM, fraud, and malware. PADGEN has been replaced with a web-based PAD authoring, editing and validating tool, immediately available at http://publisher.appvisor.com Publishers can easily and economically update their PAD v3.11 files in seconds after registering.

For more, see the PAD FAQ.

 

Resources

Author Resources
You are a shareware author wishing to create, edit, validate and upload PAD files. More...

Webmaster Resources
You are a download site webmaster wishing to implement PAD support on your web site. More...

Specification Resources
You are interested in the technical definition of PAD. More...

 

PAD News

PADGen 3.1.1.47 follows 301 redirects (June 12, 2010)
PAD Spec 3.11 and PADGen 3.1.1.46 with larger domain name fields (June 7, 2010)
PADGen 3.1.1.45 (May 25, 2010)
PAD Spec 3.10 revamped Program_OS_Support and minor Download_URL additions (Jun, 2009 posted Oct. 14, 2009)
PADGen 3.0.1.38 (Aug 04, 2008)
PAD Signing Tools 3.0.1.8 (Apr 11, 2008)

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