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Dropbox text recognition makes it easier to find images and PDFs
There's nothing worse than having to pore over a pile of PDFs containing documents scanned as images when you quickly have to find a specific file. Dropbox is making it easier to do that by introducing automatic image recognition, which extracts texts from photos and PDFs and makes them searchable. According to the cloud storage provider, there are 20 billion image and PDF files stored on Dropbox. Around 10 to 20 percent of those are photos of documents, so the new feature can be very, very useful.
Gmail can scan images to stop confidential data being leaked
Businesses do a lot to secure their operations, but often it just takes one rogue employee to send themselves confidential files and they're doomed. Google launched its Data Loss Prevention (DLP) service to help companies avoid such a calamity, and now it's getting even more powers to avoid data losses. With the update, Gmail will be able to scan documents with optical character recognition to make sure attached images don't contain sensitive information like social security numbers or passwords.
Microsoft Translator gets offline and photo-based features
Microsoft rolled out a pair of super-useful updates to its Translator app on Thursday. Unfortunately, the new feature you get depends on which platform you use.
Office Lens for Android is ready to scan your documents
Need to quickly capture that taxi receipt, or the notes from a meeting? You can now pull out your Android phone to do it. After several weeks of testing, Microsoft has released the finished version of Office Lens for Google-powered devices. As a recap, Office Lens' party trick is its ability to scan all kinds of documents (even at less-than-ideal angles) and translate them into usable files on OneDrive and OneNote -- it'll even make text searchable. The complete Lens app should work on a wide range of devices, so you'll definitely want to swing by Google Play if you're eager to give this scanner a spin.
Office Lens for Android and iOS turns your phone into a scanner
You no longer have to carry a Windows Phone if you want to quickly copy receipts and meeting agendas for the sake of your notes. Microsoft has just released Office Lens in both finished form for iOS and a preview for Android, letting you use your device of choice to turn photos into usable documents. The experience is familiar if you've tried the app before -- all you have to do is get a good snapshot, and the app will convert the output into OneNote-friendly text and image formats. Both Office Lens releases are free, so don't hesitate to give them a spin if you'd rather take pictures than jot down memos.
Scannable app supercharges Evernote scanning on the go
It's been a year since Evernote's Phil Libin (a/k/a TUAW's favorite CEO) responded to user criticism by vowing to double down on the quality and performance of the "outboard brain" cloud app's core functionality. Despite the occasional misstep, the company's managed to improve the basic Evernote platform while continuing to introduce new features, apps and brand extensions -- including a partnership with LinkedIn, expanding the Evernote Market and delivering all-new versions of the Evernote app for both the Mac and for iOS 8. Now the elephant factory has pushed its latest mobile app out of beta and into production. Scannable for iOS delivers quick and easy scanning to Evernote with a minimum of configuration. Whether you're snapping Post-It notes or capturing business cards, Scannable is intended to make it as fast as possible (and get it all into Evernote, of course). When you launch the Scannable app, the camera immediately begins looking for a "document" -- something vaguely rectangular that stands out against the background. As soon as it finds the edges and you hold still enough, a round countdown icon appears over the highlighted document onscreen; then, poof, it's scanned and saved. No shutter button needed! A simple timeline of past scans shows up for you to approve, share, export and upload as required, but you can set Evernote upload as the default/automatic action and the app will simply push your scans to the service. The edge detection, cropping and deskewing that Scannable does is quite impressive. I'm a fan of powerful document scanner apps like Jotnot which allow you to manually define the edges of a document, turning a rhombus into a nice rectangle; Scannable simply does this on its own, with no real intervention needed. Sometimes if there's a particularly dark top or bottom edge on a document it might overcrop a bit, but in most cases it's spot on. If a specific document proves too baffling for the edge checker, you can switch into manual targeting mode to capture whatever you need. Scannable goes beyond the iPhone's camera with its ability to remote-control the US$495 ScanSnap Evernote Edition sheetfed desktop scanner (a rebranded version of Fujitsu's well-reviewed ScanSnap iX500). If the phone and the scanner are on the same Wi-Fi network, you can walk up to the scanner, scan and then work with the results on your phone. I didn't have the chance to try out this feature, but in an office equipped with a ScanSnap EE it certainly seems like it would be a pleasant addition. The killer use case for Scannable, in my brief testing, is business card scanning. The last app I used consistently for scanning cards was LinkedIn's CardMunch, which shut down in May of last year (roughly simultaneous with Evernote's deal with LinkedIn). Now, by connecting a LinkedIn account to the Scannable app, you can power through a stack of business cards in seconds, with solid OCR and a very good hit rate for contacts connecting to their LinkedIn profiles. Evernote's standalone Hello app (for keeping track of who you meet and when you met them) does one-off business cards reasonably well, but Scannable is much faster for a bulk scanning job after a trade show or day-long meeting. Once they're scanned, it's one tap to save them into your iPhone's Contacts list. With Hello, Food, Skitch and the flagship Evernote app all offering various scanning capabilities into the Evernote ecosystem, not to mention all the third-party apps that support Evernote as a destination, users have nothing but choices when capturing a whiteboard, flyer or business card. Scannable's value is the streamlined, single-tasker approach it takes to getting things captured quickly and in a near-touchless manner. For that, it deserves a try-out spot on your homescreen.
Make a mess of your contacts with Business Card Reader Free
OCR - Optical Character Recognition is a very difficult thing to do right. Scanning pages of text can now be done fairly successfully, but business cards have always been a mess. Some are loaded with design elements, weird fonts, and non-standard placement of information. Business Card Reader Free is another attempt to do what might seem to be simple: use your iPhone's camera to easily import business card information into your contacts. The app requires iOS 7.0 or later and is compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This app is optimized for iPhone 5. I tested it on iPhone 6 running iOS 8.02. The application is free, but limited and includes displays adds (and they're rather intrusive). I have a love/hate relationship with business cards. On one hand they can be beautiful and in the past, back when they were expensive to produce, they were a sign of credibility. Now anyone can print off a few hundred cards they designed for a few bucks. On the other hand business cards are annoying little slips of paper that seem to breed and multiply. I use to have binders full of cards, physical Rolodexs, and other file systems. I bought one of the first Palm devices (still called the "Palm Pilot" at that time), to try and organize my growing stack of business cards. Later I worked for a calendar and contact management software company and looked at a lot of scanning solutions. Very few proved to be any improvement or provide any time savings over simply keying them in yourself. Think about it. It might seem like scanning should save you time, but in fact there is really very little information on a business card. It doesn't take that long to just key one in. It's when you have a stack it seems intimidating. I tested out Business Card Reader Free on a variety of cards. I was unsurprised to find that it had difficulty with even the most basic of cards. When I scanned in a clean, simply designed card it still required that I edit the scanned text, an act that takes longer than simply typing it in. On the more exotic cards (and far too many people have ugly, over designed business cards) it couldn't make much sense out of the card at all. The app does have links to the built in Maps app, can send the imported data to Contacts, and can look to Facebook and Twitter for additional information. That's all nice, but if you can't manage the initial scanning, there's no point in the other features. Beyond that, the free version is severely crippled. You can purchase an "unlimited" one month trial for $2.99 per month or $19.99 per year. The paid premium account gives you unlimited scanning, gets rid of the adds, allows you to synchronize to card databases, and exports to Salesforce. You can also buy "recognitions" in lots for 50 for $4.99. You can also disable the adds for 99 cents. Don't waste your time with Business Card Reader Free. Just set aside your stack of cards and when you have a few minutes, type a few directly into your selected contact manager. You'll save yourself a lot of frustration and heartache.
Scanbot for iOS gets an update and improves your scans
Scanbot (US$1.99) advertises it can pretty much eliminate your desktop scanner, and it's hard to argue with that. My colleague Steve Sande looked at an earlier version of Scanbot and was impressed (he scans all paperwork that comes into his home with Scanbot), as am I with this latest iteration. The app can image any document, whether it is one page or multiple pages, and get you a clear and usable scan quite quickly. Scanbot tells you to move closer if need be, or to check your perspective (move the iPhone or iPad more directly above the document) so nothing is warped. It then automatically snaps a photo, turns it into a PDF or JPEG file, and then uploads them to the cloud, saves to your camera roll, or allows sharing through mail and messaging apps. Supported cloud services include Dropbox, Box, Evernote, WebDAV, Yandex, Google Drive and a few others. Scanbot lets you turn color off for better images of black and white text, and it automatically enhances your text as well. The developers say the new iPhones are going to work even better thanks to the improved camera in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and the larger screens of those phones will help you get the document focus and orientation better. Scans are all 200 DPI or better. The only thing missing from Scanbot is OCR (optical character recognition) so you can turn your scanned document into editable text. But Scanbot offers a $4.99 in-app purchase for OCR. I bought the upgrade and tried it. The OCR feature worked well, but like most OCR'd text it needed some cleanup afterwards. Scanbot is not the only mobile scanning software out there, but it works very well and is great for saving receipts, whiteboards, notes, sections of a book, anything really. It's fast and reliable, and does an outstanding job for a low cost, although adding OCR brings the total app cost to $6.99. Scanbot supports many Asian and European languages, and it's universal. The app requires iOS 7 or after, and it worked smoothy under iOS 8. If you do a lot of scanning, or just need an occasional quick scan to create a JPEG or PDF, Scanbot satisfies. Soon I'll be taking a look at a competing product, Prizmo, which offers similar features but at a higher price of $9.99
ABBYY FineReader Pro is an unparalleled OCR solution
If you want fine-grained control over OCR and unmatched export options to a plethora of formats, ABBYY FineReader Pro for Mac is definitely worth a close look, but the current version has some significant caveats which you should consider before spending US$100 on it. FineReader's Exceptional Features If the most important feature of an OCR app is how well it does at recognizing text from a PDF or image file, then FineReader Pro is, by far, the best OCR app that I have ever used. I have thousands of journal articles saved as PDFs. Some of them are pretty good quality, but a few of them have image hovers best described as "a hasty Xerox made on a Friday afternoon before Spring Break by a work-study student who was far more interested in literally anything else." Crooked, dark, speckled, you name it. Time and time again, FineReader came through. Its automatic analysis was generally good, but when I took the time to use its more advanced features, it rewarded me with output that was as near-perfect as anyone can expect from an OCR application. FineReader then gives you an unparalleled assortment of export options, including four different options for PDFs alone: "Text under the page image" is what most people usually expect and want from an OCR app: the OCR'd document looks the same on the screen, but you can copy/paste from it into any other application. However, the option for "Text over the page image" will allow you to keep the formatting close to the original, but edit the results, if needed, and see it on the screen. This is especially useful if you want to edit the resulting PDF to correct any OCR mistakes, which will still happen, regardless of which app you choose. Export as Word (or RTF or ODT), Excel, CSV, or PowerPoint Exporting as PDF is only the beginning. You can also export to Word (.docx), including four layout options (exact copy, editable copy, formatted text, plain text), plus options to retain page numbers, headers and footers; keep line breaks and hyphenation; keep page breaks; keep pictures; keep text and background colors; high line uncertain characters; and keep line numbers. (All of those options are also available for RTF and ODT/OpenOffice.) I was surprised and somewhat perplexed to see options for Excel (.xlsx) and PowerPoint (.pptx) files, but that was mostly due to the fact that I rarely use either application. However, now that I have seen it and thought about it some more, it does now seem something like that could come in extremely handy for people who do need to process scans of documents which were originally produced in spreadsheet or presentation apps. If your scan is tabular data, you might also consider exporting as CSV. FineReader includes an option to ignore all text outside tables when exporting to CSV. Export as Ebook FineReader also supports two ebook formats, but probably not the two you would expect. You can export to ePub (as you'd expect) and FB2, which is a format that I had never even heard of, but is apparently for something called FictionBook. Options for ebooks include setting metadata such as the title, author, keywords, and an annotation (I do wish exporting to PDF had similar options). You can also use the first page as the book cover image and preserve/embed fonts (the latter option is for ePub only, not FB2). Those hoping for MOBI support should probably consider exporting to ePub and then either using Send To Kindle for Mac or some other solution. Export as Image I'm not sure who uses an OCR app to export the finished document as an image, but if you're one of those people, you can choose from JPEG, JPEG–2000, TIFF, PNG, BMP, JBIG2, PCX, and DCX. (What? No option to export a multi-page document as an animated GIF? Apparently the FineReader developers aren't familiar with Tumblr!) Export as Text or HTML The simplest way to use the text from your scan is to Export as TXT. (Markdown fans: take special note of the option to use a blank line to separate paragraphs). To those who are hoping to take complex print magazine formatting and reproduce it on the web, I have two messages: a) please don't and b) no, really, don't, but if you do, don't rely on FineReader for it. There are some options here for "fixed" vs "flexible" layout, and there's even an exciting-until-you-see-what-it-does option for CSS, but the end result is fairly ugly and convoluted HTML that will make tidy laugh and validators weep. (Or vice versa.) Seriously, if you really want an HTML copy of your document, export it as text, convert that to Markdown, and generate your HTML from that. The world will be a better place. Who shouldn't buy FineReader Pro As excellent as FineReader Pro is, it is not the right OCR tool for everyone. If you are just trying to clear off your physical desk of office office or household paperwork (mail, bills, memos, letters, etc.) then you probably just want to drop them all on your scanner and have them saved to the computer as fast as possible so you can shred/recycle the originals and then get on with the rest of your day. If that is what you want to do, don't buy FineReader Pro. Instead, use whatever came with your software, or buy PDFpen for $60 and use AppleScript to automate OCR and save $40 (or buy PDFpenPro instead). You'll probably get more use out of PDFpen/PDFpenPro's features than you would from FineReader Pro. FineReader Pro is exceedingly non-scriptable. It will not fit into any sort of automated process. In fact, when you open a PDF in FineReader Pro, it does not open the original file but instead imports the PDF into a new, untitled document. After processing, you can save the file as a FineReader document (.frdoc) which will save all of the customizations that you made to the various scan areas <h3 id="" i'mstillnotconvincedthatfinereaderproisreallyfull-onnerdyenoughforme...whatelsedoesithavetooffer""="">"I'm still not convinced that FineReader Pro is really full-on nerdy enough for me... what else does it have to offer?" Area Types: Designate parts of your document as a Text Area, Table Area, Picture Area, Background Image Area, Barcode Area, or Recognition Area. Text Functions: Is this section of text: Main Body Text, or a Header/Footer, or a Floating Text Block, or a Caption, or a Line Number, or the ever-vague Other? Need to scan a document where the text goes vertically instead of horizontally? FineReader can do that. Want to change the order that all of the recognized text areas are processed in? If you're planning to export to a non-PDF, you almost certainly do, to make sure that columns flow properly, etc. You can also choose from 186 different languages (although choosing more than 5 will present a warning that it will increase recognition time), but this comes in very handy if you need to be able to identify Latin terms, or even Greek or Hebrew, Nyanja or Papiamento! It even recognizes BASIC, C/C++, Java, Fortran, COBOL, Pascal, and "Simple chemical formulas." Sorry, no Klingon. A Quick Word Express vs Pro For the rest of this article, I'm just going to refer to the app as "FineReader" rather than "ABBYY FineReader Pro for Mac" but for the sake of clarity I want to make it clear that this is a separate app than ABBYY FineReader Express Edition for Mac. If you purchased that app and want to upgrade, this section will deliver the good and bad news. If you are a new FineReader customer, you can skip to the next section. ABBYY isn't going to win any customer appreciation awards from early adopters. Those who purchased the $70 ABBYY FineReader Express Edition for Mac can upgrade to "Pro" for an additional $80. Ouch. The description of FineReader Express in the comparison chart is definitely not the effusive self-praise ABBYY's marketing department gave Express back when it was the only product they were offering for Mac. The meager $20 discount is almost insulting especially when ABBYY's Why Upgrade? page ends with "Learn how to upgrade with a significant discount." The only worse news is for Mac App Store customers who, of course, don't qualify for any upgrade pricing at all. The Express version will continue to work, but I wouldn't expect to see any new features, especially since the Mac App Store version has apparently been pulled from the store. (N.B. Those who purchased it from the Mac App Store should still be able to download it from the "Purchased" tab from the App Store app.) Remember: OCR Is Hard. OCR is similar to speech recognition in that they both seem like something that a computer just ought to be able to do, and anything that falls short of 100% accuracy can feel disappointing. If you compare an OCR program's ability to the combination of an adult human brain and eyes, the OCR program is going to lose every time. Human brains are remarkably good at making sense out of gibberish, not to mention easily moving between different font typefaces and styles, navigate language changes with casual savoir faire, and can almost always tell the difference between a capital I and a lowercase L by subconsciously evaluating context. However, if we think about what a computer has to do in order to perform OCR on a document, we can recognize a number of elements which can affect the outcome: the quality of the original document typeface(s) of the original document (i.e. a single word or phrase in italics; limited character spacing (aka "kerning") which can make it difficult to distinguish an "n" from an "ri" etc. Not to mention the use of large initial capital letters in some print magazines where the first letter might be the equivalent height of several lines of the rest of the text.) layout (multiple columns in magazines) settings used when the document was scanned (DPI set too low or too high can cause problems) the language(s) used in the original document (or multiple languages, or technical jargon) hyphenation and line justification (should that word be hyphenated, or was it only hyphenated to keep the fully-justified column of text looking pretty?) determining what is important and what isn't The last one is so difficult that most programs don't even attempt it, they just scan everything, which is probably OK in most cases, but there is often superfluous information on the page, such as the title of the article or the author's name in the header of each page, which the human eye easily dismisses, but a computer cannot. Then, of course, there's also the problem of stray marks on the page. Bugs and Shortcomings FineReader Professional for Windows is currently at version 12, and the Mac version that I tested calls itself version 12.0.3, but this is not entirely true. It is certainly true that the text recognition engine has been refined for years on Windows, and Mac users are getting a mature program in that sense. However, the Mac implementation of FineReader Pro is very new, and there are some bugs. By far the most severe bug that I encountered during my testing was a rare and difficult to reproduce problem where PDFs imported into FineReader Pro, analyzed, and then exported as a PDF would be missing pages. I only saw this 2–3 times out over a hundred or more scans. If I had to guess I would put the occurrence rate at less than 1%. Those times when I did see it, I could tell that there was a problem when the file was being imported. For example, an 18-page original was reported as only having 16 pages as FineReader imported it. When I retried the same document, it always imported properly, making it extremely difficult to reproduce this problem. I did report this issue to the developers at ABBYY who are investigating it. The problem, of course, is that if you do not notice the page difference when importing or exporting, you might delete your original PDF and be left with an incomplete copy. I hesitated to even mention this, as I am concerned that it will {overly dissuade/discourage} people from trying the app; however, potential data loss is almost always the most serious bug that an app can have. Given that FineReader leaves the original PDF alone and imports a copy, the only way that you could lose data is if you delete your original PDF manually. However, I assume that most people would do exactly that. The second-worst bug that I encountered was that occasionally (perhaps 1–2% of the time), the PDF that I exported from Fine Reader actually looked worse than the original. Marco Arment identified this problem back in 2011: The ScanSnap came with ABBYY FineReader, which does an acceptable job, but degrades the image quality noticeably when it saves the text-embedded PDF copy. It's enough of a problem that I'm not comfortable deleting the original, and I'd rather not keep two copies of every file around, so I tried to find an alternative that could output better-quality PDFs with text. Before anyone dismisses this as Marco (or myself) being hypercritical, I invite you to look for yourself. I took a screenshot showing "before-and-after" to illustrate this problem is clearly visible to the average human. (Be warned: that screenshot link leads to a 1.3 MB TIFF file. I didn't want image compression being blamed.) The FineReader PDF was created with the image quality set to the highest value and "Compress images using MRC" was turned off. The resulting file is undeniably worse which seems like something that should never happen. This problem has also been reported to the ABBYY developers, and I hope that they will improve it in an free update to FineReader. My last comments in this section aren't about bugs, but about usability problems. The first is that FineReader Pro's error reporting is extremely weak. I have run into several documents which generated an error saying "Some of the pages have not been processed" without telling me how many pages or which ones. I am not a developer, so I don't know what is involved in making that error reporting more specific, but as a user I can tell you that the experience was highly unsatisfying. From a user's perspective I assume that the application knows how many pages were imported or exported, and how many errors were encountered, and I expect that it will give me precise information so I can track it down. It was also unclear to me what "processed" meant. Did that mean that OCR had failed completely for some pages? Had some pages failed to export? What am I supposed to do with such a vague error? Secondly, when deleting a page or pages from the app, the confirmation window asks if I am ready to delete the selected "page(s)." Again, as a user, this seems lazy. If I am about to delete a single page, then the app should be specific, i.e. "Are you sure you want to delete page 8?" If I am about to delete multiple pages, I expect it to tell me exactly which ones: "Are you sure you want to delete pages 19–23?" Is this finicky? Perhaps, but if you are selling a $100 app in a world where people hesitate to spend 99¢ and if you are going to label that app as a "pro" app, I am going to hold you to high standards. (Aside: I think the app is worth $100, and I think it's extremely unfortunate that a $5 app is considered "premium" but this is the world in which we live.) FineReader vs FineReader In the comparison chart for FineReader Pro vs Express, ABBYY describes the "Recognition accuracy" in Pro as "Unmatched" whereas Express is "Superior." Presumably ABBY hopes that we will gloss over those Meaningless MarketingSpeak Designations and not ask how, in a comparison chart between two products, "FineReader Express" can be labeled as "Superior" when, contextually, it is obvious that Express is the inferior of the two. Instead, ABBYY wants us to read between the lines (or table cells, as it were) and interpret this to mean "Express is Superior Than Our Competition Although We Are Not Coming Right Out And Saying That Especially In Countries Which Forbid That Sort of Product Comparison. But Pro is Better." DEVONthink Pro Office uses ABBYY FineReader Engine 11 for Mac for its internal OCR. Owners of recent ScanSnap scanners get an app called "ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap" which can be used to automatically OCR scanned documents. The final product of those two options will be good, but not as good as FineReader Pro, especially if the original document has a more complex layout such as multiple columns. This is not surprising, considering that FineReader Pro is a new product. I would hope that the FineReader Engine will be updated and DEVONthink Pro Office users will be able to benefit from it. Here again the trade-off automated batch processing against the advanced features of FineReader Pro. Excellence, Not Perfection For complex documents, FineReader is your best option at turning a scanned file into a usable OCR'd document or convert it into a Word document or something else. It's a professional tool at a professional price, and while it lacks automation features, it is great at what it does. My only hope is that it will continued to be developed and improved, not just sit around for a year before a "new version" comes out. If that is the development model they are using, they'd better come up with better upgrade pricing than their current system.
This Chrome add-on lets you copy and erase text inside any image on the web
What would you say if we told you that it's possible to copy, translate, edit and even erase the text inside any image you find on the internet? Well, you can, and it's a lot easier than you might think. All it requires is a new browser extension, called Project Naptha, made by developer Kevin Kwok. It uses a number of optical character recognition (OCR) algorithms, including libraries developed by Microsoft and Google, which quickly build a model of text regions, words and letters from nearly any image.
Windows Phone's Office Lens app wants to replace your scanner
Need a quick and dirty copy of a receipt, document or restaurant menu? Your smartphone's camera can make a rough facsimile -- but Microsoft thinks that it can do better. According to a Windows Phone Store landing page, Office Lens leverages Microsoft OneNote, optical character recognition and your smartphone's camera to put "a scanner in your pocket." The page seems to only be a placeholder for now, but the idea is pretty straightforward: snapshots are synced to the cloud, saved to your device and automatically adjusted for color and readability. Printed documents can be edited and searched, thanks to the aforementioned OCR technology and the app even has glare and shadow removal features to clean up pictures of your office whiteboard. Unfortunately, the demo page reveals very little about how well the program works, featuring only a single screenshot that reveals... the beta tester's tabletop. There's no word on when this app will be available to the public, but feel free to score a quick tease at the adjacent source link.
OneNote for Windows 8.1 now uses optical character recognition to search scanned images
It's been about four months since the OneNote app for Windows received a significant update. Today, though, Microsoft is adding several key features, with the biggest being the ability to scan images and then search them using keywords. This new Camera Scan feature, as it's called, automatically crops and rotates photos, removing shadows and sharpening the image where necessary. Then, it uses optical character recognition (OCR) to search for words in scanned images, making it easy to find those meetings notes you took the other day. Additionally, the update now allows you to save things using the Share Charm. And if you want a shot of the entire screen (and not just a specific item, like a recipe), you can use the Share Charm in a Windows app and then select" screenshot" from the Share Charm drop-down. (In desktop mode, screenshots are already the standard option.) Finally, the app now has both a full-screen view and a "Recent Notes" option, which shows all your notes in the order you last used them, regardless of whether you were viewing them on Windows, iOS or Android. These are accompanied by short previews, making it easier to zero in on what you want. And that about sums it up -- to get the latest version, hit up the download link below.
Daily iPhone App: SharpScan for iOS quickly and effortlessly scans your documents
SharpScan is a free (with in-app purchase options) iOS app that makes document scanning a snap. Select your camera to snap a document or choose an image with text already saved in your camera roll, and you'll quickly get a sharp image of your document. The app helps knock out noise, shadows and those inevitable distortions that arise from shooting at a slightly off-center angle. The image can be cropped manually or automatically. Scanned documents are then shareable as an image file or a PDF. The free version is ad-supported, and it also adds an unobtrusive watermark to your scanned images. You can upgrade to the pro version for US$2.99. I ran SharpScan through a variety of tasks, and it worked quite well. I even scanned an address and turned it into a label that I printed and attached to an envelope. Text was sharp, and the app focused quickly on the documents I was scanning. Help is built-in, and there are video tutorials available, but I think most users will never need them. In my opinion, the only negative thing about SharpScan is that there is no optical character recognition (OCR) capability. You're always going to wind up with an image, not editable text. For many users, that will be enough. For those who want more, I suggest a look at Image to Text (free), a clever app that scans documents and performs recognition to convert those images to editable text. I've also been impressed with Prizmo, a $4.99 app that scans, does OCR and can even read a document to you aloud. If you want quick scans, SharpScan is very useful. I didn't mind the small ad or watermark in the free version. If your scanning needs are more ambitious, you will find many alternatives at the App Store. The app requires iOS 6 and is optimized for the iPhone 5. It also ran fine under iOS 7 beta 6.
Microsoft shows off optical character recognition for Windows 8
Microsoft already showed off a new Bing platform and 3D maps for Windows 8 today at Build 2013, and now it's revealed that optical character recognition (OCR) is coming to the OS as well. Of course, OCR has been available on Windows Phone for some time, but the feature has now finally made it to Win8 as a part of Bing's new capabilities. In the demo, Microsoft showed a Surface tablet using OCR scanning Spanish text on a sheet of paper, then translating it to English. A quick verbal command later, and the info was added to an itinerary within a travel app. Of course, we assume with all those new APIs, devs will be able to find many other ways to use this newfound feature. Time to get creative, people!
Contact Snapper is an easy way to turn business cards into contacts
Contact Snapper for iPhone is the most clever app I've seen for the purpose of turning a business card into an editable digital contact. The app, which you can test for free, has several in-app purchase options I'll discuss later in this review. Contact Snapper is simple to use, and that is the most powerful aspect to the app. Hold a business card up to the iPhone camera while the app is running, touch the screen, a picture is snapped and the recognition engine goes to work. If the app is confused about any of the words they appear in red text that you can correct. Then poof -- the card is in your Contacts database. Contact Snapper handles double-sided cards, and depending on the version of the app you purchase, it can grab a photo of the card and add it to to your contacts. The app recognizes the usual contact info, plus websites, email and SMS info. Contact Snapper can even provide geolocation of your contact addresses and also recognizes QR codes. It does not require a data connection, as the text recognition engine is built into the app. I gave Contact Snapper some tough assignments in my testing: vertically oriented cards, a card with a dark green background and orange text and one with a photo. In each case, the recognition was perfect. In one instance, Contact Snapper missed a letter, but it turned out the card wasn't fully centered in the camera view and the letter had been inadvertently cropped. There are other apps that recognize business cards, but I haven't seen one with such a wide feature set, such accurate recognition and such perfect linking of text to the correct contact fields. Contact Snapper also supports LinkedIn integration and works in 200 countries, allowing for differing regional contact formats. %Gallery-184530% The one negative of the app is its confusing pricing structure. You can try Contact Snapper for free and save up to three contacts. After that, you need to spend some money, and I think there are just too many available options. There are six in-app purchase options, including photo and text at US$5.99, picture and text with unlimited country coverage at $7.99, text only for $2.99 and other variations on that theme. This should, in my view, be simplified dramatically. There are also an assortment of upgrades from one level to another for a total of 10 options. Most people will probably choose a price option between $2.99 and $5.99. Contact Snapper is a terrific app. It does what it claims to do quickly and accurately. I'd like to see the in-app purchasing simplified, but don't let that stop you from grabbing this app if you are constantly being handed business cards and are tired of typing them manually into your iPhone. Contact Snapper requires iOS 5 or greater. If you'd like to try something free, check out the ad-supported CamCard. It gets good reviews from users, but has some limitations on the number of cards you can scan. SamCard is also free and gets positive reviews.
Livescribe Sky WiFi Smartpen review
More Info Livescribe unleashes new Echo smartpen Livescribe outs the Sky WiFi Smartpen Smartpen leads to airport chaos For a relatively niche company that has only been around for five years, Livescribe has grown quickly. Its smartpens -- which cleverly digitize handwritten notes and audio -- have already attracted a million users. However, just because these customers prefer to write their notes the old-fashioned way, that doesn't mean they aren't also obsessive about technological progress. In fact, many of them have been waiting on one new feature in particular: a totally wireless workflow, which would allow them to write a note with their smartpens and then -- without any docking or syncing -- see their scribbles appear in the cloud and on their mobile devices. Well, as you've probably guessed by now, that is precisely the gap that the new Sky pen is looking to fill. The first half of its operation is identical to that of its predecessors, the Pulse and Echo: it contains a camera and microphone, which enable the capture of handwritten notes and time-linked audio files. (You can choose between 2GB, 4GB and 8GB of built-in storage.) But what happens next is totally different. You use "buttons" printed inside Livescribe's proprietary stationery, in conjunction with the pen's OLED display, to select a local WiFi network, enter the password and sync your files directly to Evernote. The popular online note-taking platform then handles everything else, automatically filing the text and audio in the cloud using a time stamp, making it available on whatever devices run Evernote's apps or web interface. What's more, it makes the note searchable through optical character recognition (OCR) of your handwriting. If there's a downside to users getting what they've been asking for, it's that they are the ones expected to pay for it. The Sky's base model matches the Echo's $170 launch price, but that older pen came with twice as much internal storage, and can also now be had at a discount. Moreover, the 4GB and 8GB Sky pens rise to $200 and $250, respectively, which means this is only likely to be sensible if you really, really dislike writing or typing on a screen. Even assuming that you're totally stuck in your pen-and-ink ways, could a $170 pen ever be worth it? Read on to find out.
Prizmo is a powerful OS X scanning app
Prizmo 2 is a scanning application with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and several unique features that will attract those who do moderate scanning. Additional options are available from the Pro-pack via in-app purchase. Prizmo 2 is currently available from the App Store for US$24.99, which is a limited half-price sale. Prizmo recognizes most scanners, and also works with digital images and PDF files. To get started, select New from the File Menu, then drag-and-drop your file onto a target. If you have a scanner, you can initiate a scan on that hardware. Press the recognize button and you are on your way. %Gallery-170414% Prizmo 2 can recognize business cards and differentiate between text, images and numbers. You can output your capture as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, PDF, RTF or plain text. You can also export to Evernote, Dropbox, Google Drive and WebDAV services. In addition, the system recognizes 40 languages, can translate 23 languages on the fly and read documents aloud via text-to-speech. I tested Prizmo 2 with PDF files, screen captures and my Epson XP-400 printer/scanner. The results were highly accurate and the OCR speed was very fast. The app took about 1.5 seconds to recognize the text in a single document. The text-to-speech was easy to understand. As it reads, the software highlights the words it is reading on-screen. If you are a more heavy duty OCR user, there is a $24.99 in-app purchase that adds batch document processing, Automator actions and some custom export scripts. The basic version will be fine for most general users. The only thing I would improve is the use of the non-intuitive File>Open command. Since I'm not much of a documentation reader, I scanned a file into a JPEG, and used File>Open to import it. That's not what you do. Instead, you choose File>New to import files. It was easy when I figured it out, but a bit non-intuitive. Other than that, Prizmo 2 is powerful and reliable. If you need its features, I can recommend it without reservation. You can find a detailed feature list and video demos at the Prizmo website. The company also has an iOS scanning app which I reviewed in 2010. It was also useful and reliable.
Doxie One portable scanner rolls in for $149, plays well alone and syncs with Mac, PC and iOS
Doxie has added another portable scanner to its heart-logo'd lineup, the Doxie One, which can digitize documents and images to an included SD-card with nary a computer in sight. Doxie says that'll let you travel light with the "paper-towel roll sized" device to scan and automatically generate Abbyy OCR-read PDFs, then sync up later with a Mac, PC, iPhone or iPad. From there, you can use the included app on a Mac or iDevice to transfer the scans to Dropbox, Evernote or iMessage. The device eschews the WiFi option of its recent Doxie Go sibling, but carries a lesser $149 sticker -- check the PR for the full dope.
IRISNotes 2 is like a cheap version of Livescribe minus the special paper
Companies have been trying for years to make it easy for users to write on a standard notepad and capture that text in a digital format. I.R.I.S., a company that specializes in optical character recognition software, is back at it again with its new IRISNotes 2 lineup of digital pens. The battery-powered pens capture text and drawings using a receiver clipped to a sheet of standard paper. The receiver records the motions of your hand as you write and uses OCR technology to convert the handwriting into electronic text. Each pen can store up to 100 pages of text and can download the data to your computer or iOS device. The IRISNotes system is similar to the LiveScribe smartpens, but is less expensive and lets you use your own paper. The IRISNotes pens are available now in two different models. The $99 Express 2 uses standard batteries and includes an aluminum carrying case. The Executive 2 costs $149 and has rechargeable batteries, an executive design and a 30-pin cable to connect to your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Executive 2 owners can also use the IRISNotes app to mock up a photo taken with their iOS device and share that image on Facebook or Flickr. [Via Engadget] Show full PR text Just in Time for Back-to-School, I.R.I.S. Digitizes Writing with IRISNotes 2 Intelligent digital pens that transform handwritten notes into editable text Delray Beach, Fla. – August 21, 2012 – I.R.I.S., a leading innovator in optical character recognition (OCR)software, is excited to announce the availability of their IRISNotes 2 lineup, digital pens that capture handwritten notes and convert them into edible text on a computer. "Our IRISNotes 2 lineup saves time by eliminating the countless hours it takes to transcribe notes," said Jean-Marc Fontaine, Director of Sales and Operations, Americas at I.R.I.S. "IRISNotes 2 are the perfect solutions for students taking notes, businessmen transcribing meeting minutes, designers quickly sketching a new concept and more." As simple as putting pen to paper, the IRISNotes 2 captures notes and drawings anytime, anywhere without a computer. Using a battery-powered pen and receiver clipped to the top of a standard sheet of paper, hand movements are tracked and recorded. No special paper needed! The receiver stores up to 100 pages of text, downloads the information to a computer and then I.R.I.S' Optical Character Recognition application converts handwriting into electronic text that can be sent to Word, Outlook, Notepad, etc. It's available in two different versions: Express and Executive. The IRISNotes Express 2 is a battery powered pen that comes with 4 replacement batteries and aluminum carrying case. The IRISNotes Executive 2 has an executive style finish and comes with rechargeable battery, leather carrying pouch and 30-pin connector to share notes directly to your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. With IRISNotes Executive 2, users can write and draw on photos taken with their iOS device and can be shared immediately on Facebook or Flicker. The IRISNotes 2 Express and IRISNotes 2 Executive are now available for $99 and $149 respectively at www.irislink.com/usa.
IRISNotes 2 looks to undercut Livescribe, digitizes your scribbles for $99
IRIS is trying to make a big name for itself in the OCR world. But, top notch software alone isn't going to put its name on the tips of consumers tongues. For that they're gonna need something sexier, more... tangible. With its portable scanner line already on shelves the company is pushing out an update to its digital pen series IRISNotes. The IRISNotes Express 2 and Executive 2 are very similar to the intriguing Livescribe that, while compelling, never seemed to fly off the shelves. IRISNotes ditches the special paper required by its more popular competitor, and instead uses a small receiver that clips to the top of a standard sheet to record your scrawl in digitized form. IRIS hasn't specified how much storage is on board, only saying that it can save 100 pages worth of notes before you'll need to download its contents to a PC. The $99 Express undercuts Livescribe's cheapest offering by $20, but it's worth noting that it doesn't have support for voice notes or a stable of applications that tie into its ecosystem. The Executive model retails for $149 and sports a more elegant finish, befitting its name. It also comes with a 30-pin adapter that lets you dump your missives directly to an iDevice. Both are available now, and you'll find complete PR after the break.
