When Evernote first released Scannable, their standalone scanning app for iOS, I have to admit I didn’t get it. After all, their iOS (and Android for that matter) apps do a good job of scanning documents and business cards. Why create a totally separate app?
I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I’ve found myself using Scannable more and more for mobile scanning, particularly for business cards.
At first the business card scanning was basic, but they’ve been improving it with each new release.
When you hold the app over a card, it will detect it and automatically snap the picture. It then does a remarkably good job of cleaning up the image and making it as readable as possible.
If you have logged in to your LinkedIn account, it will try to look up the contact details of the person. If you tap on the card image, you can edit each field. A nice new touch – when you tap into a contact field to edit it, it will zoom in on the image from the card.
If you tap on the LinkedIn icon, you can view the person’s profile or connect with them. If you hit Save Contact, it will save them to your phone’s contacts.
After you hit the Share button, you can mail the person, Message them, save the contact record to Evernote, or use the standard iOS share sheet to send the card to any other application.
If you choose to save to Evernote, it will create a nicely formatted note in Evernote with the contact’s details.
Hopefully Scannable will come to Android soon. For me, there are two things that’d make Scannable a near-perfect business card scanning app:
- The ability to tag a note before saving it to Evernote
- The ability to include the back of the card in a business card scan (maybe there’s a way to do this that I haven’t figured out).
Those limitations aside, I find myself reaching using the app for more and more of my mobile scanning. What do you use?
