For the record, since I brought it up in the comparison post, I am also writing this at Starbucks. This time instead of an elderly couple arguing, there is some guy complaining loudly about the Parks Board and the new Subway opening around the corner.
New Icon
First and for some people very importantly, Genius Scan has a new icon which is much, much nicer than the old one:
Search Your Documents
Another new feature is the ability to search your documents inside Genius Scan. Personally I don’t use the app for document storage in any real sense. I use it to scan a document and upload it somewhere, so this feature doesn’t do much for me, but I can see how it might be useful for some people.
Tags
Genius Scan now adds the ability to tag your documents.
As I said, I don’t use the app for document storage, so initially I didn’t think this feature would be for me. However, they did something great and made it so that the tags you apply carry over to an Evernote export when you are using Genius Scan+. I use this feature all the time now.
Sexy New Export UI
My favorite part of the new Genius Scan is the nice new user interface for exporting. Here is a screenshot of the new one:
Here’s the old one from my review last year:
As you can see, much nicer. A nice touch is if you have Genius Scan+, the export options order themselves in recently-used order. Now that is nice design.
The Scan
I don’t believe the scanning itself has changed too much in this release. If I was smart, I would have kept the paper from my iOS scanning app comparison post and re-scanned it this time, but I have never claimed to be smart.
Here is a scan with Genius Scan 2.2 from Mazda magazine about my former home on Vancouver Island. They called the town I grew up in a “busy, ugly lumber and fishing town”. Not cool Mazda magazine, Port Alberni is not busy.
(By the way, the light streaks are not Genius Scan’s fault. The lights in this Starbucks are crazy bright and the paper is very glossy).
Genius Scan is free on the App Store, and with it you can export your documents via Email or Wi-Fi. To export to other services such as Evernote, Dropbox, or many more, get Genius Scan+ which at time of writing is $2.99.
UPDATE 12/12/2011: As of iOS5, Apple killed the ability for apps to use the AirPrint menu, so this method no longer works. Here is an Apple forum thread about it.
I may have mentioned that I am a slightly off-the-rails practitioner of Getting Things Done.
One of the principles I do try to follow is if something can be done in two minutes, I try to do it right away so that it is out of the way.
I receive a fair amount of email receipts or other messages that I want to save to PDF, and this causes a problem when I am reading the message on my iPad or my iPhone. I’d like to deal with it right away, but since there is no built-in way to save to PDF, it had to sit around and wait until I am at my computer.
This causes email clutter and to-dos that really do not need to be there.
I recently looked for a solution to this, and the one I have been using for the past few weeks is called Save2PDF by EuroSmartz.
To be honest, the workflow I have now isn’t as smooth as I think it could be, so I am posting this both so that you can see how to save to PDF on your iOS device, and I am hoping to get suggestions on other workflows from you, my brilliant readers.
Save2PDF
So far, Save2PDF is working pretty well. However, I do have to point two things out.
First, the cost. The iPad version is $9.99 on the iTunes store, so it is certainly not the cheapest app out there. You have to really want to be able to print PDFs to justify it.
Second, the app is not universal. If you want to run it on your iPhone or iPod Touch, it is a separate app for another $6.99.
Personally I have not purchased the iPhone app as of yet, so everything in the rest of this post will be covering the iPad version.
Setting Up Cloud Transfer
While Save2PDF allows you to transfer files via iTunes and/or mount your device as a disk, my whole purpose of setting this up is to be able to export my PDF right away and be done with it.
Fortunately, Save2PDF has the ability to upload files to Dropbox, Box.net, FTP, Google Docs, iDisk, or WebDAV.
To set that up, fire up the app and under Files, go to Places & Cloud servers and hit the plus sign to add a new server. I am using Dropbox here.
Choose Cloud Server
Saving As PDF
Once we have our cloud storage set up, let’s actually create a PDF. You can do it from anywhere that has Print functionality.
In an email, hit the “back-arrow” button that you would use to Reply, and hit the Print button.
If you need to, tap the Printer button and choose your Convert to PDF Save2PDF printer[1], and tap Print.
Choose Printer
In a few seconds, a dialog box will pop up saying that the document is ready to print. Tap Continue.
Document Ready For PDF
Once you do, Save2PDF will open up and you can give the file a name, you can preview it, and you can change some page options. When you are ready, hit Save.
Uploading The Document
Here is where it gets a bit non-intuitive. You’ll be prompted to choose the folder that you want to save to and by default it will say Local files at the top.
You want to tap on the triangle beside Local files and choose Dropbox or whatever cloud service you set up earlier.
Choose Save Location
Once you do that, your Dropbox folder structure will download and you can choose where in your Dropbox (or other service) you want to save the PDF.
To navigate into a folder, hit the triangle. To choose a folder to upload to, tap the actual folder.
Once you do, the document will upload to the cloud and you’re all done.
Document Uploading
Any Suggestions?
This workflow isn’t as complex as it might read. Once you get used to it, it is fairly fast, but I would love to hear from you if you have another way of saving things in iOS to PDF.
I have barely scratched the surface of what Save2PDF can do, but this is all I use it for.
Leave your suggestions and ideas in the comments. I’m happy to be schooled on this one.
One area of computing that has really exploded in the last year or two is document scanning on mobile devices. Both cameras and apps are getting better and better, and the quality and price (sometimes even free) is pretty remarkable.
I’ve had a number of document scanning apps on my iPhone 4 for quite some time, but have never put them head-to-head until now.
Use Cases
Everyone has different use cases for these types of apps, but here are mine:
Scanning Magazines: When there is a one or two page magazine article that I want to capture, or just part of a page, I just use my iPhone to grab it and send it to Evernote. If it is longer than that or I want really good quality, I will typically cut it out and scan it with my ScanSnap S1300.
Single Or Attached Documents: If I get something I want to quickly capture, or if it is something that wouldn’t easily go through a scanner, I will use my iPhone. Good examples of this are my son’s swimming and skating lesson report cards. When he (eventually) passed Sea Turtles, I didn’t care about the rest of the booklet, just that one page.
Notebook Pages: Sometimes I like to write or sketch in a notebook, and I want to capture this information but don’t necessarily want to rip pages out to scan them. Document scanning apps are great for this.
The Contenders
I have four document scanning apps on my iPhone, so these are the contenders:
I used the four iPhone document scanning apps mentioned above to scan the following documents. To put it in a “real world” environment, I did the testing and am writing this from my local Starbucks. The elderly couple arguing beside me may or may not influence the results.
Two pages from Mazda Canada’s “Zoom Zoom” magazine – glossy pages with rich colors.
One black and white page from a school handout
A old sketch from my notebook: the first time I sketched out what would eventually be DocumentSnap.com
The Criteria
Here is what I looked at for each app:
Quality
Adjustment Tools
Export Options
File Size
OCR
Ready? Let’s go.
Quality
Since Quality is somewhat subjective, I will let you judge for yourself. Here are links to the PDFs from the four contenders:
For the magazine, Scanner Pro and JotNot seem to look the best, and Genius Scan is good too.
For the black & white document, JotNot and DocScanner look the best. In all cases I used Black & White mode (more on that in a moment).
For the notebook sketch, Scanner Pro and DocScanner look the best to me. This was one document where adjustment options really helped.
Adjustment Tools
JotNot has a huge selection of adjustment options that you can see in the screenshots below:
DocScanner also has some simple adjustment options. You can adjust the size, “whiteness”, and sharpen.
Scanner Pro has simpler adjustment options as well. You need to be careful with these and make sure that you set them for every page or you will get some surprising results.
Genius Scan has the simplest adjustment options of all: None, Color, and Black & White.
Export Options
In most cases, a document scanning app is pretty useless if you can’t get the document off of your mobile device.
The usual method, which all document scanning apps support, is to email the document as PDF somewhere. Different apps support different options, so here are the export options for each app:
Clearly Genius Scan resulted in the smallest files, but DocScanner is pretty good. You can download the PDFs and judge for yourself if the size savings are worth it.
OCR
Of these apps, only DocScanner supports Optical Character Recognition, which means it can make the document searchable.
Having said that, in my tests the results were pretty abysmal. If you want your resulting PDFs to be searchable from a mobile app, you are probably better off doing it on your computer or (if you are a Premium Member), sending it to Evernote.
Wrapup
There you go, a smackdown of four iPhone scanning apps. Of these, JotNot seems to score the highest most consistently, but also produces large files. Genius Scan gives good results and is free, but doesn’t have finely tuned adjustment options.
Do you use a mobile scanning app on the iPhone or Android? Which is your favorite, and what do you use it for?
This post from is part of the paperless stories feature at DocumentSnap. Some stories are from readers that have successfully gone paperless, some are still going through it. Would you like to share your story too?
Today’s featured DocumentSnap reader is Brandon Smith from Keizer, OR. You can find him on Twitter @brasmi.
What problems were you trying to solve by going paperless?
My issue surrounded availability of paper documents in my file cabinet. I am a city councilor, so I get stacks of reports to read, and generally filed those in labeled folders in a cabinet. The problem is, those documents weren’t available unless I remembered to take the folder with me. I bought an iPad in April, and use the premium version of Evernote for document storage.
What were the biggest stumbling blocks you faced when going paperless?
Developing an easy-to-use system, along with a quality scanner.
Tell us about your paperless workflow
99% of my documents go through my ScanSnap S1300, then into a “to be shredded” box.
When the box reaches approximately 10 lbs, I take it to a local non-profit, Garten Foundation, which employs those with disabilities, and performs shredding services at a very reasonable rate.
Scanned documents automatically go into Evernote, where they are dated, titled and tagged for either immediate action or future reference. These documents are then available on my iPad or iPhone anytime thanks to support for offline notebooks.
Anything more we should know?
I am a husband and father, a member of the Keizer City Council, a workers compensation claims adjuster, and a 2/3-time college student, so organization is vital to meeting all of the demands of my time.
Thanks Brandon, the only thing I didn’t see in there is when you sleep. I love the idea of letting your shredding build up and then have a non-profit do it for you. If you have questions for Brandon about his workflow, leave them in the comments and I’ll try to get them answered for you.
Longtime readers of my newsletter will remember the update that I wrote while sitting on a mall floor, waiting in line for an iPhone 4. I didn’t actually get an iPhone that day (missed the cutoff by 4 people, not that I am bitter), but I did eventually pick one up.
Prior to having an iPhone, I was pretty skeptical of document scanning apps on mobile devices. Did they really work? I personally didn’t believe it.
Now that I have my baby phone, I have been giving some of the apps a whirl.
First up is Genius Scan from The Grizzly Labs. Why did I start with Genius Scan? The basic version, which does most of what I’d need is free (my favorite price!).
How These Apps Work
Document scanning apps work pretty much the same. You use the iPhone’s camera to take pictures of the pages of your document, and then they do some cleanup and processing and in most cases export as PDF somehow.
Taking A Picture
When you first start the app up, you have a choice whether to import a document from the camera or your library, you’ll also be presented with a list of your recently-taken documents, of which I don’t have any here.
In our case we’ll take a picture so I’ll hit Camera.
You’ll be tempted to put the iPhone over top of the document and take a picture straight down. In most cases this won’t be ideal because you’ll create a shadow on the image. Try to take it at a slight angle. Don’t worry, the software is going to correct that.
When you are happy with your image, hit Use.
Adjusting
Once you’ve taken the picture, Genius Scan will try to guess at what part of the image contains the actual document. Usually it is pretty good, though in this example it only picked out a bit of it.
Not a problem, just use your finger to drag the orange part over the whole document, and it will look like this.
Once you’re done, hit Select.
It has now cropped out the rest of the image and brought the information forward. You can click the Enhancement button and switch between Color and Black and White. Since this document is B&W, I am going to change that.
At this point if you need to rotate it, go for it.
If you are ready to send it to someone (or yourself), you can hit the Share button on the bottom right, but I am going to save it as a new document by tapping the icon on the bottom-left.
Once you do that, you can rename it and then at that point you can either export it to Email or iBooks, or add a new page.
Taking Multiple Pages
To create a multiple-page document, the easiest way is to hit the plus sign icon in the bottom left after saving the first page. After you take the image, tap the folder icon at the bottom left (like you did with the first page), but this time choose “Save To Current Document”.
Notice that in this screenshot I had forgotten to set the second page to Black & White like I had the first page. Whoops. If I hit the Edit menu, you can see that I can delete or move around the page. In this case I will delete and re-take the page.
Sharing
Taking a bunch of pictures of documents doesn’t do you much good if you can’t get them off your phone. There are a number of ways to share.
Share By Email
You can email the PDF from your device. When you are looking at the document, hit the share button in the bottom-right corner. Tap “Email” to share by email. The document will be sent as a PDF attachment.
Share By Wifi
When you are at the main Document menu of Genius Scan, tap on the little Gear icon up in the top-left. From there, you can set Wifi Sharing to On.
If you have a computer on the same wifi network, you can use a web browser to go to the listed address. Unfortunately I am writing this at Starbucks and I think they must be blocking the port so I can’t get to it to show you a screenshot.
Upgrade to Genius Scan+
If you want more sharing options, you can upgrade to Genius Scan+. Aside from getting rid of the ads, it allows you to save the document to Dropbox, Evernote, or Google Docs.
Since my love affair with Dropbox (and Evernote for that matter) is well-documented, in the interests of science I will upgrade and try it for you.
Note: If you are going to upgrade, make sure you do it by clicking the link inside the app. If you buy Genius Scan+ through the app store in addition to plain old Genius Scan, you will have two apps and your documents will still be in the free one.
Now that I have upgraded, you can see I have a number of new sharing options.
Let’s try Dropbox. Once I authenticate and choose the folder, it uploads it to Dropbox.
There are a few drawbacks of these iPhone apps in general and Genius Scan in particular.
In general, these apps are really dependent on the light that you have around. In the magazine article above, there was a lot of sunlight coming through the window and shining on the page, which is why it looks a bit washed out.
With respect to Genius Scan, it does (in my opinion) a really good job at taking a skewed image and making it straight. Using that magazine article again, it wasn’t at all flat when I took the image.
Another drawback is a lack of OCR. Any documents that I take with Genius Scan that I want made searchable will have to be done later. Not a biggie, but just something to be aware of.
All in all, I like Genius Scan a lot. If you want to see a cool video that the company made to show the software’s capabilities, check this out:
Do you use a mobile scanning app? Which is your favorite? Let us know in the comments.
Instead of sending in your business cards, you can use the app to take a picture of them with your iPhone’s camera.
Of course, this does require a Shoeboxed account, but they do have a free plan. You don’t need a paid Shoeboxed account to use it.
Once you submit your business card image, you can see the status of the processing.
It does take a while for the processing to be done (about 20 minutes for me), but the reason for that is because the image is OCR’ed and then an actual real person (remember those?) verifies the data.
When the processing is done, you can view the information and add the contact to your iPhone’s contact list (you can choose to do this automatically if you want) and of course view the business card’s image. You can also save the image with the iPhone’s contact too.
One thing that would be nice is if you could export/email a PDF of the image straight from the app, but I guess you can’t have everything. If you do want to export it, you can log in to your Shoeboxed account via the website and do it there.
All in all, if you are someone who deals with business cards regularly, I could see this saving you quite a bit of time and the price is certainly right.
If you have any other great workflows for dealing with business cards on your mobile device, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
(Thanks to DocumentSnap reader Jamie for pointing to it in this business card post).
I recently had a problem with my iPod Touch after upgrading it to iOS4, so I thought I’d post it here in case it helps someone else someday. I assume it is the same issue with the iPhone as well.
After doing the (otherwise great) iOS4 update, I had a strange issue: whenever I viewed an email on my iPod that contained a PDF attachment, I could only see the first page of the PDF. I couldn’t tap the PDF to open it and read it. Only the first page would appear inline with the rest of the email.
After Googling around, I found that it is actually a bug that occurs when you have the apps Stanza or Air Sharing Pro installed.
Well, it turns out that I did have Stanza installed so that I could read Thoreau’s Walden, so that explained it.
Whether it’s Apple’s big or the app makers’, I do not know, but here is what I did to fix it:
* I synced my iPod Touch to iTunes to make sure things were backed up
* In iTunes, I deleted Stanza (I hear that simply unchecking it does not do the trick, but I didn’t test that to confirm)
* I synced the iPod Touch again to remove Stanza
* I held down the power button at the top and the home button until the Apple logo appeared to make it reboot itself
Once I did that, I could once again view PDFs that were attached to emails in the iOS Mail app. Would the problem re-appear if I re-installed Stanza? I’m not sure. The only reason I had it installed was to read eBooks, which Apple’s iBooks app also does so I switched to that.
If you’re a Carbonite online backup customer, they’ve released yet another way to get at your files when away from your computer. The company has released a Carbonite iPhone App (it works on iPod Touches as well).
From the CEO of Carbonite:
The Carbonite app gives me access to the backed up files from each of my computers, even if the computers are turned off. And I don’t have to be logged into a Wi-Fi connection or lug my laptop with me. It displays my photos, documents, and other important files and allows me to share any of my backed up files with someone else via email, right from the app. It’s fast and super-simple. I’m really proud of this Carbonite app and I hope you all will find it as useful as I do.
Any Carbonite customers want to comment? Have you tried it out? Do you see the trend towards getting to your files on a mobile device a useful one? Let us know in the comments.
OK, this has been out for quite a while. I realize that. However, I just had laser eye surgery and have been down for the count for a little while so you’ll have to cut me some slack here.
I still want to mention this because Dropbox is one of my favorite services, and their new free iPhone app is very cool.
Here is a blog post where they give a sneak peak of it, and you can get it from iTunes here.
It’s really cool to be able to access your Dropbox files on the go on your iPhone or iPod Touch (it has syncing capabilities for offline but to be honest I have not played with that yet).
Anyone else using it? What other DocumentSnap-ish iPhone apps do you recommend?
OK, this has been out for quite a while. I realize that. However, I just had laser eye surgery and have been down for the count for a little while so you’ll have to cut me some slack here.
