DocScanner for iPhone; Document Scanning and Recognition in the Palm of Your Hand
by Craik Pyke on 01/02/10 at 5:00 am
Craik Pyke is telecommunications architect and software developer specializing in mobile applications and an editor for iPhoneCTO.
Approximately four months ago, I purchased DocScanner 
(version 1.8.2 at the time) so that I could, you guessed it, capture documents to PDF. The application itself, then and now at version 3.0, is quite usable. On the pedantic side, the interface has several screens that feel like they’ve been pulled together from separate applications. In and of themselves, each screen is fine. But the flow between them is a bit weak.
On the less pedantic side, there are a few things that irk me about DocScanner:
- The application has poor recognition of page boundaries and setting those boundaries all the way to the screen edges can be a pain. You can zoom in on the image, which helps, but it doesn’t solve the problem since you can’t move the boundary away from the screen edge. At least a quarter of the time, I inadvertently hit the trash icon while trying to get to the lower left, and had to start again!
- If you select “Scan” it doesn’t create a document within the application by default. Instead, if you want the scanned document to persist within the application, you need to go to Documents and create a new document, then scan an image. This seems a bit lazy to me, but perhaps the author had a good reason for such a workflow (simple one-page scan versus multi-page?).
In the category of “I wish it did this better”, the character recognition isn’t all that great. I scanned the image below on my the desk in my well lighted office. I could move the phone no closer without losing page content. After spooling the image through the character recognition, it could only recognize a single instance of a word that occurred multiple times and the occurrence it did recognize was in a larger font. That being said, the application does better than others I’ve tried and the author indicates on his blog that they are improving OCR in the next release. In this case, I think the application suffers from the limitations of the iPhone 3Gs camera and lack of flash. One other point to be made here, you can only search the recognized text directly on the device; there’s no means to export the recognized text.
On the rather more pleasant side, I did find that DocScanner was very well suited to capturing whiteboard images. I had been using WB Pro for keeping a record of whiteboard scribblings from my various meetings. In reality, WB Pro was little more than a bolt on to the camera that would “white out” the image. With DocScanner, the image is actually quite a bit better and I have more options of what to do with the scan (upload to iDisk, email it as a PDF or JPG, send to Evernote). DocScanner doesn’t allow for adjusting the white balance as WB Pro does, but the difference in image quality makes this an necessary feature.
One additional feature I’d like to see in DocScanner is the ability to add text notes to a Document right within the application. I know I can do it in Evernote , or even in email if I’m mailing the document out, but it would be useful to keep the notes in the application with the document itself.
Overall, I’d recommend DocScanner 3.0. For me, it has become indispensable as a meeting tool for capturing whiteboard brainstorms, soft-copies of documents. Wile the application has room for improvement, it’s encouraging to see that the developer is still actively moving forward.With DocScanner, the image is actually quite a bit better and I have more options of what to do with the scan (upload to iDisk, email it as a PDF or JPG, send to Evernote).
evao
Mar 30th, 2010
It does sound quite complicated but is obviously an invaluable tool for those on the move!!
Evao
Mar 30th, 2010
It does sound quite complicated but is obviously an invaluable tool for those on the move!!