Weekend Reader
Leopard Leaps: If you have any interest in such things, you probably know that Mac OS X Leopard shipped yesterday; indeed, you may have been one of the hordes waiting anxiously for the delivery truck. If you’re still on the fence about whether to upgrade your own Mac, tuaw.com has been running a “24 hours of Leopard” series that highlights the most interesting new features. Personally, I don’t see anything that’s going to change my web working life (yet), but it sure is purty.
Shake Up Those Tasks: Lifeshaker is a to-do list app for OS X that features a grid view of goals that lets you get an overview of things that should be at the top of your mind, as well as various other funky visual and audio effects. Might be fun if you’re tired of the corporate look for your task list.
Throw Away Your Scanner: Well, maybe. If you have a high-resolution digital camera (including one on your mobile phone), you can send photos of documents to scanR and get them converted into nice PDFs for you. Turns your camera into an outgoing fax machine, too.
An API to Social Networks – Rapleaf, the service that’s trying to track reputations and memberships across social networks, now has a RESTful API to let others leverage their data. It’s free for up to 4,000 queries per day.
ScanR is a great concept, but you do need a high resolution camera. My cheap Samsung cell phone doesn’t cut it. I can photograph a document or business card and send it in, but ScanR just can’t make out the text.
Hmmm… another reason to get an iPhone. :)
Andrew,
High resolution, you are right, but also a camera with an autofocus. The issue when shooting a business card is that you need to get very close to the document, much closer than the minimal focus distance of these fixed-focus lenses (typically manufactured with a focus range of 3 ft – infinite).
Hint 1: try to take the picture form further away, you might be suprised by the improvement in the resulting quality
Hint 2: try to use http://www.qipit.com. We have been told by a number of users that our algorithms did a better job making text out on highly blurred images
Hint 3: if resolution is indeed a problem and you don’t have a 2 mega pixel camera (as required by the scanr service), try qipit with a 1 mega pixel camera.
I am very interested in your comments if you do try qipit as an alternative. We strive on constructive feedback!
Benoit (qipit)
P.S.: Andrew, the iPhone works great with Qipit on whiteboard, etc. However: - it does not have an autofocus lens, so it is not going to improve your scanning of close-up documents - its email client reduces images to a small size, thus killing the benefits of oits 2 mega pixel camera for uses such as mobile scanning with scanr (or qipit). The alternative is to upload the full resolution images (through iTunes / iPhoto) to a computer and email to — or upload from — the service.
To add to this constructive debate, there might be a way to avoid the e-mail resizing limitation on the iPhone, and it is by using a little iPhone app called SendPics.
What it does is picking any pending image that you shot and adding it to an e-mail without resizing it.
Though it works one image at a time, you can still recombine the result on Qipit.com by using our newly introduced “merge” function.
Hope this helps.
PS: For those who’d like to check the quality of an iPhone made qipit copy, we really recommend trying it by yourself :-)