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IRL: Scanner Pro, Mophie Juice Pack Helium and the Native Union Pop Phone
Welcome to IRL, an ongoing feature where we talk about the gadgets, apps and toys we're using in real life and take a second look at products that already got the formal review treatment. It's safe to say we're a little picky around here: Darren's trying out yet another scanner app, and Edgar has settled on a smartphone battery pack (because everyone knows we can't agree on which is the best one). And Philip's been playing with a retro-styled "handset" because, well, why not?
Documents by Readdle: Free and easy content management for iPad
Readdle is a development firm that has made a name for itself with apps like Scanner Pro (US$6.99) and PDF Expert ($9.99) that make creation and markup of documents a snap. Now the company has released Documents by Readdle (free), a significant update to the earlier ReaddleDocs app that is essentially a completely new app. The iPad app is, according to the company, about 80 percent new code. The company launched the app as an update to ReaddleDocs, as that app currently has over 230,000 existing users and this will make their transition to the new app as painless as possible. Several of us at TUAW had an opportunity to beta test Documents by Readdle, and it is a polished and speedy app. Documents combines a fast document viewer with a media player and file manager. There's a built-in browser, so you can view web pages or other online documents within the app, then save them in folders on the device or in the cloud. %Gallery-176531% Once saved, you can call up the documents at any time, annotate them and share them easily. But Documents by Readdle not only handles PDFs and Office documents, it also lets you look at and store images, play music or watch videos. Documents by Readdle syncs with Dropbox, Box and iCloud, but works with many other cloud storage solutions. In fact, it's hard to find a service that doesn't work with Documents: I tested it with a WebDAV server on a web host, Google Drive and FTP and SFTP servers with no problems, and it also works with CloudMe, Storegate, Filesanywhere, MyDisk.se, SkyDrive, Office 365 Sharepoint and SugarSync. Since Documents by Readdle is free, I don't think it's going to be a "hard sell." Go out and download it to give it a try. If you're not sure that you'll need the app, download it anyway; you'll be amazed at how quickly you start moving documents into this well-implemented app.
Scanner Mini from Readdle is a lightweight scanning app for your iOS device
Scanner Mini from Readdle is a lightweight scanner app for iOS users who want the ability to capture a receipt on the fly, but don't need extras like faxing and Dropbox syncing. Similar to its bigger brother Scanner Pro, Scanner Mini lets you use your iPhone or iPad as a portable PDF scanner. You can scan a document using your iOS device's camera or pull an image in from the camera roll. A resizable box lets you crop the image manually or you can choose from a variety of presets for business cards, legal-sized documents, letters and more. A "Find Borders" button will let the app pick the borders for you. Scanner Mini improves the resulting output by letting you choose whether the image is a color photo, a black and white document or a grayscale document. The "document" setting is great for black and white documents as it removes any off-white or yellow coloring. The resulting pure white background and black text makes the document look fake, however. If you don't like the look of the document option, you can choose the grayscale or photo setting and tweak the brightness and contrast to improve the appearance of your scan. When you are done tweaking the image, you can add another photo to the scan or name it and save it to the Scanner Mini app. The app supports folders so you can organize your scans in a useful and meaningful way. You can also sort scans by name or date and find scans using the handy search feature. Readdle is positioning Scanner Mini as a basic scanning app for iOS customers who want a scanner that is fast, easy and free. As a result, options for sharing scans are limited in Scanner Mini. Scans can be optionally backed up to iCloud or transferred over to your computer via a USB cable. There is no option to send a scan via email or upload it to a third-party service like Dropbox. To get those advanced features, you have to upgrade to the US$6.99 Scanner Pro. Scanner Mini is available now for free from the iOS App Store.
Readdle's anniversary sale and iPad giveaway
Readdle started developing iOS apps three years ago as of yesterday, and to celebrate they are discounting all of their apps (a rare occurrence for them) and offering up three iPads in a giveaway for Twitter followers of the company. More details can be found here. For you math students out there you may realize that three years of app development on iOS means Readdle actually provided a document reader app before the App Store opened. Their apps are quite awesome, although they sometimes suffer from too many features (if simplicity is your thing). When we reviewed Scanner Pro, for example, the UI was a little overwhelming for TJ. Still, Readdle Docs is one of the best document viewers out there, and Flash Drive offers up some nice features like ZIP compression support. We reviewed BookReader here. All of these apps (and more) are on sale for just $.99 until later today. For more info on the iPad giveaway, check Readdle's page here.
Scanner Pro updated, still powerful, still complex
Scanner Pro is a US$6.99 iPhone app by Readdle which will let you easily take a picture with your iPhone. We've looked at Scanner Pro before and now a new 2.0 version has been released with page edge detection, image stabilization, and German, Spanish, French, and Italian localizations. Unfortunately, it doesn't do much to address the UI issues that Erica pointed out in her original review. The UI is complicated, and it took me several attempts to even figure out how to take a picture. The screen shot at the right shows the "workflow" for creating a new document (tap the icons at the bottom, working left-to-right, to step through the process). After I took a picture of a page of text, another menu offered to let me "crop" the scan down to particular sizes. it took a bit of effort to get the margins lined up, and eventually I just hit the "Select All" button instead. Scanner Pro does offer a few advanced features such as the ability to create PDF files with passwords, landscape orientation, manual light/contrast adjustments, Dropbox support, and integration with Print n Share to print your scans. It also supports iDisk (or other WebDAV servers) and Evernote. I tested the Dropbox support and it worked very quickly and smoothly. However when you initially save a document, you are only offered the option to send the file to Evernote, your photo library, or Google Docs. Dropbox is inexplicably missing from the "Send to" menu, which means that you have to step back out of the process and go to another menu to upload it. Frankly I think the whole idea of using your iPhone as a scanner is flawed in the first place, akin to using a wrench as a hammer. If you don't have a hammer but need to whack something, a wrench will do in a pinch, but no one with any serious hammering to do would ever choose a wrench for the job. Likewise, the ability to use your iPhone to capture a piece of paper and send it to someone else or yourself could come in handy in an "emergency" but I wouldn't do it very often. For occasional, light use I still don't see any reason not to use something like Evernote which is free, or just take a picture from the iPhone camera app and email it to yourself later. If you find yourself wishing that you could print and password protect PDF scans from your iPhone, you're much more of a power user than I am, and may find Scanner Pro worth the price. I still wish that the App Store supported time-limited demos so that people could download an app and test it for themselves before buying. I suspect that there are plenty of power users who would be willing to learn Scanner Pro's UI and benefit from what it has to offer. For the average iPhone user, $7 is probably more than they are likely to spend on an app they'll seldom use.
First Look: Scanner Pro for iPhone gives you PDFs and eyestrain
Scanner Pro (iTunes link) from Readdle transforms your iPhone into a portable PDF scanner. For US$6.99, you can combine pictures (chosen from your iPhone photo library, or taken using your iPhone's built-in camera) into a PDF document that you can e-mail or upload via WebDAV. That's a really useful concept, and if Readdle had delivered a user interface as strong and usable as its underlying idea, I'd recommend Scanner Pro as a must buy. Unfortunately, the application desperately needs the tender loving care of a user interface design expert. [For a different -- and much simpler -- UI approach to the same kind of task, you might check out the $2.99 JotNot.] The UI is cluttered and confusing. You're forced into unnecessary screens by a poorly designed work flow. Here's an example; once you scan a new page, the interface asks you to either go back or to process the image. Tapping the Process button enters a processing screen, where you can then click an Adjust button. This finally reveals a pair of sliders for adjusting the brightness and contrast settings for grayscale and color. The screen shot at the top of this post shows the Adjust screen. The sliders do not provide any live feedback. You can adjust them all the way down and all the way up (the shot was snapped with the slider set to 100% Brightness) without any change to the image you're seeing. The enhancement gets applied after you click Apply. At the same time, the sliders disappear. Want to make a few tiny changes? You need to Adjust/Slide/Apply for each adjustment. That's bad design. As you can also see in that picture, the (hard-to-see) undo and redo options appear tied to the grayscale and color choices, but in fact they are not. That's bad design. The fonts used and the button choices throughout the application are pretty ugly as well. Consider the buttons at the top of the screen, the small slider labels at the bottom, not to mention the choice of all lower case for the grayscale/color segment controller. The entire application appears to have been designed by committee. There is one element though that I thought was pretty cleverly done, and that is the page layout and re-ordering screen. Using very, very big table cells, you can easily drag each page into the order required. I think the thumbnails are, perhaps, a little bigger than needed, but I thought the conception of how the page ordering works was pretty solid. In the end, Scanner Pro provides some great functionality. It delivers that functionality in an ugly and somewhat confusing package. Do I recommend it? Yes. I can see using this whenever I'm on the go, to collect receipts, transform written documents, and so forth. My 3GS's camera with its capable focus can definitely make the best use of this software. This is a terrific idea and I love the ability to carry that functionality around with me on an iPhone. At the same time, Readdle needs to step back and seriously evaluate their interface. Because that flawed interface is hiding a wonderful application that deserves better interaction. And if they don't do so, their competitors will -- as noted above, JotNot [iTunes link] will also do PDF conversion from the camera (single-page docs and whiteboards vs. the multipage support of Scanner Pro), plus Evernote and Wi-Fi integration, with a smoother UI and a lower price.
