Is That a Scanner in Your Pocket?

The iPhone 3GS's autofocus camera and macro capability allow you to take crisp clear pictures of all types of text documents. We are starting to see applications that take iPhone document imaging a step further. OCRTOOL ($4.99) is an application that showed up on App Store last night. The description is vague, there is no URL for the developer (listed as mkanda). I took the plunge and purchased it.


OCRTOOL leverages the camera or you can bring an image in from your photo albums, the concept is simple: take a picture of a document and OCR it on your iPhone, then copy & paste the resulting text into a document editor or email it to yourself. My testing so far, the application has failed miserably. The screenshot below shows what the results were for a 14 point single word image. Result were slightly better with 11 pt font from a memo on a 8.5x11 sheet of paper, although the output was not usable. Maybe future version will show improvement.


Don't get me wrong, the iPhone 3GS is an excellent acquisition device - yes, that is a scanner in my pocket (and/or a fax machine!), you just need to know its limitations and how to work around them. For example, if you have OCR software on your syncing computer then use your iPhone as an acquisition device, take a picture, then sync the image to your computer and process OCR using your desktop software. Or if you are interested in archiving the document for retrieval, take a photo of the document, then email it to your Evernote account and let Evernote work their OCR magic in the background and index your document for easy retrieval.

Bottom Line: OCRTOOL is not recomended at this time, but I suggest you think through how your iPhone can augment your current imaging tools and workflow.

Dictionary.com for iPhone v 1.0

Just over one month ago I reviewed Wordbook, my review of Wordbook was positive and I ended up recommending that you add Wordbook to your iPhone. I standby that recommendation, but as usual, the iPhone application landscape is changing. The popular developers behind the website dictionary.com have just released the iPhone application Dictionary.com for iPhone (free).
Dictionary.com for iPhone has 275,000 definitions and 80,000 synonyms loaded onto your iphone in the 35 mb application. One of the advantages that Dictionary.com has over Wordbook is that you do not need a network connection to access the dictionary data. Dictionary.com for iPhone is no-nonsense, there is a search page for Dictionary and Thesaurus, a Recent screen - where entries are identified as Dictionary, Thesaurus or Word of the Day and a Word of the Day screen. By comparison, Dictionary.com does not have as many extra features as Wordbook, specifically the external links to Wikipedia or the crossword solver to name a few. Dictionary.com requires a network connection for Word of the Day and audio pronunciation. Audio pronunciation on Dictionary.com is vastly superior to pronunciation on Wordbook.
Conclusion, I plan to keep both applications on my iPhone at least for awhile, I like the idea of having all the data on the phone for offline work, and the definition/synonym screen layout and linking is cleaner in Dictionary.com than in the Wordbook application. That being said, the external linking afforded by Wordbook is useful from time to time. Keep them both! Then decide.

Updated Google Calendar for iPhone [Updated 4/8/09]

Wow, Google has completely re-architected the gCal and gMail mobile websites. Resulting in better performance, a refreshed user interface and great new gCal functionality on the iPhone. Google claims "the full impact of this new architecture isn't visible yet, but it will enable us to significantly improve performance and quickly roll out new features in the near future."

The new code requires iPhone OS 2.2.1 or higher, with aggressive caching, gCal and gMail will be usable even with inconsistent data networks.

Google calendar on the iPhone now allows you create, edit and delete events and meeting requests right from your iPhone. The interface is clean and intuitive, gCal is giving iCal a run for its money on the iPhone. This is competition that is good for all of us. Go to: google.com/calendar/gp from your iPhone browser to see your schedule, edit an event, add or remove guests... all from your iPhone.

If you are a gMail user, the new web interface matches Apple's mail.app on the iPhone, allowing batch processing of emails with a search feature that is missing in the mail.app (until 3.0 arrives).

If you are a gCal or gMail user, this is great news and worthy of a shortcut being added to one of your home screens (Note: the Google mobile app has been taking me to the old version of gCal, it looks like Google will need to update the mobile app).

[Updated 4/8/09 11AM EST] The speed enhancement to Google calendar & Gmail are noticeable. I did notice while using the new Google calendar that there is still an important item missing. When creating a new appointment/event on the iPhone, you can not assign the event to a specific calendar, the event defaults to the "default calendar" - which happens to be the first calendar you created when initially setting up your Google calendar. In my opinion this oversight creates a usability issue, failing the RWU test. As it is Google calendar functionality is limited on the iPhone, you are better off creating events/appointments on your desktop, where you can assign them to a specific calendar.

Night Camera Brings Usability Features!

Night Camera ($0.99) from Sudobility is an iPhone application that is designed to "prevent the blur in the first place", as stated by the developer. Night Camera will not automagically increase the size or resolution of the iPhone's photo sensor, nor will it decrease the noise profile, or increase the dynamic range of your photos. Night Camera will not turn your cell phone camera into a digital SLR!

But... it does improve upon the "capture" functionality of Apple's Camera application. There are two options that I am particularly fond of:

1. Fullscreen Shutter - allows you to use the full screen as the shutter button, this is a huge improvement over the shutter button used in Camera.


2. Stable mode - uses the accelerometer to trigger the shutter when it detects that the camera is stable (3 sensitivity settings). This is ideal for shooting photos of stationary objects, if trying to take a picture of your toddler, you may become frustrated missing the shot or blur from the moving object as the shutter speed is still very slow in low light situations.

Night Camera also provides a timer option and auto shutter - meaning the camera will take a picture once the application is launched. You can also set an option to have the image auto saved, thus dismissing with the review and save procedure.

For me, the Fullscreen shutter option is worth the price of admission. In real world usage, I find that I use my iPhone camera to take pictures of products in various retail settings for further analysis when I return home. For this usage, I set Night Camera to Stable mode with Fullscreen shutter on, since the product is typically stationary, the Stable mode assures that camera shake will be minimized, resulting in a sharp image. If I am taking a quick snapshot of my 2 year old, I turn off stable mode and go into Standard camera mode and leave Fullscreen shutter enabled.

In conclusion, I have relegated Apple's Camera application to screen NINE and moved Night Camera to the HomeScreen, in essence replacing the build in Camera application.

Rocketron - Hands on Part 2

Two more days of using Rocketron...
Content: Rocketron's news content is updated continuously, and unlike the NYTimes application, there is no long extended wait for the content to update, somehow it seems like Rocketron is updating in the background - I like this magic! There is a refresh button in the upper right corner of the UI, it is used to update the content while you are perusing news articles. One nice touch I did not notice during the first day of use is that each article is time stamped and displays how long ago it was added (days, hours, minutes), making it easy to determine freshness of the news. Although interestingly it does not appear that the articles are sorted and displayed with the newest content always at the top of the page, it looks like there is an algorithm placing the popular/important articles as the headliners. Thus, you may find an article with an age date of 4 hours ago, followed by an article that is less than 10 minutes old. I guess if I had it my way, I would rather have the articles sorted strictly by post time, with the freshest at top, this consistency would make it more difficult to overlook/miss an article.

Sound quality/Listenability: First off, the text to speech is very good, with some inflection added, pausing at sentence breaks and decent reading of numbers. This technology has really improved over the years. Don't get me wrong, it is still apparent that this is computer generated audio, but it is nowhere near as monotonous to listen to as TTS was just a few years ago.
In my last post I mentioned that the audio seemed fuzzy/lispy via earphones, it is interesting, it seems like after the first 30-60 seconds of listening the "lisp" goes away? Not sure if it is acclimation or somehow the audio improves? Either way, it is not a show stopper.

General Use: Beware! If you are using Rocketron to read the news traditionally, be aware, that each time you launch a new article a short audio advertisement will play through the external speaker of your iPhone if you do not have headphones attached. This could be disruptive depending on your environment! It is easily remedied by turning the volume down on your iPhone.
I do not have feedback on the "customization" feature, I added a couple of terms to "news I want" and "news I don't want", but it is difficult to tell how well the filters are working, I guess time will tell. The stability seems to be good for a 1.0 release, I did have one application crash when launching an article, upon relaunch of Rocketron everything seemed OK.
Since you need to keep the iPhone from going to sleep while listening to Rocketron news, you will see a drain on your battery, this impact can be lessened by dimming the screen brightness or if using Rocketron while driving, getting yourself an iPod power adapter for the car.
A unique and useful feature of Rocketron, is the ability to record your feedback and send it back to the Asyncast from within the application with the touch of a button, the feedback process is well implemented on the About page of the application.
I have not yet had a chance to trial Rocketron on my wife's first generation iPhone via the Edge network, I hope to do that soon. Overall, I plan to keep Rocketron on my iPhone and move it to my news screen with the USAT, AP and NYT news applications. Rocketron will be my "go to" news provider when I want news on demand while driving!

R E C O M M E N D E D

Using Rocketron - Hands On

A couple of hours of using the Rocketron iPhone application, hear are a few findings:

How it works:  The Rocketron iPhone application requires a persistent network connection to stream the text to speech (TTS) audio, thus the TTS conversion is processing on Rocketron's servers and streaming to the iPhone for playback.  Per the Rocketron FAQ, the Rocketron application requires a 3G or Wifi data connection, I can vouch that the streaming audio works fine with 3G (10-20 sec initial load time) and Wifi (no perceivable load time) - I plan to test with an edge iPhone tomorrow.

Audio quality:  On the way home from work I played Rocketron audio through my car stereo, the audio quality was fine for spoken word.. AM type quality with no drop outs, the only complaint I had was that the 5-10 second commercials that play between articles are noticeably louder than the TTS audio - I hope the folks at Rocketron address this, the ads themselves are not that annoying.

Once home, I listened via a standard set of Apple earbuds, the audio was fuzzy with the esses lisping, I plan to do more testing - as it was tonight, it was close to unlistenable for more than an article or two at a time.

Play Mode: Gives you quick easy access to the audio articles, the text of the article is not displayed... this is the "driving & jogging" mode.  You choose a category and touch the big play button, you can skip to the next article just as easily by touching the equally big "next article" button.  

I used "Play mode" during my test drive home from work all was fine until I had to stop at the super market, thus, I shut down Rocketron, unfortunately I found out that the application/server did not queue to the article where I had left off, play mode re-started at the top article again, forcing me to have to manually skip forward through the articles I had already listened to - not a huge deal, but Apple has really spoiled us with audio books on the iPod.  Since you are logged onto the server every time you launch Rocketron it seems reasonable that a future enhancement will be to queue up at the article you left off at - sounds like a great 2.0 enhancement!

Content:  Reuters, News corp and the UPI appear to be the main sources of articles for Rocktron.  Articles are added throughout the day at a leisurely pace, at this point it does not look like you will be using Rocketron for up to the minute breaking news stories.  So far no complaints with the content, although it would be great to have this technology available for the NYTimes Op-Ed articles!

Customize:  You can also "customize" your news feeds by feeding "News I Want" terms and "News I don't want" terms into your settings.  An example I am testing, I placed "baseball" into the "News I don't want" setting, in theory articles about baseball should be dropped from my feed.  This is something I plan to test over time and report back the results.

I have not moved this App to my "News screen" yet or even decided if it will find a permanent home on the iPhone, but after a couple of hours of using it.. I am liking it, and given the price, I recommend giving it a try... Back to testing!

Geotagging, Creating Location Aware Digital Images!

How to leverage your iPhone to geotag (add GPS location data to digital images taken with your point & shoot or dSLR [note: the iPhone 3G automatically geotags images taken with the iPhone]) your digital photos and save yourself $100.

• Install a GPS datalogger application on your iPhone 3G, I can recommend using "Trails" ($2.99). The data logger is used to create a GPS track of your movement, placing the data into a GPX file.


• Make sure to sync your camera's clock to the date & time on your iPhone.


• Launch the datalogger on your iPhone, the iPhone will have to remain in "awake" mode to track your movements, I suggest shutting down wifi, 3G and dimming the screen brightness to save battery life if you are planning to shoot for several hours.


• If you are using "Trails" touch the "+" to create a new track, place your iPhone in your pocket and...


• Start shooting digital images as you normally would, you can pause and re-start datalogging at anytime. Keep in mind, as long as Trails is logging your location to a track and you are simultaneously taking photos, the GPS data can then be synched up to your images.


• When you are done shooting, halt your GPS tracking in Trails and email the resulting track file (GPX) to yourself.


• The last step is to sync the GPX file with your digital images, resulting in location aware digital images. There are a few applications out there, HoudahGEO ($30) is very popular, I use Maperture Pro beta (currently $0) as a plugin for Apple Aperture. If you are an Aperture user, I recommend using Maperture Pro as it fits in nicely with Aperture workflow, you import your images (RAW or jpeg) as you normally would, then you select the images that you want to geotag. Then launch the Mapeture Pro plugin and drop the GPX file onto the Maperture Pro interface... and presto your images are updated with location information. No need for a separate $100 GPS data logger.


• In conclusion: 3 easy steps... 1. TRACK (iPhone 3G with Trails) -> 2. SHOOT images(your camera) -> 3. Sync GPS data to Images (HoudahGEO or Maperture Pro).

What can you do with you location aware digital images? With Aperture or iPhoto you can display your images on a google map and sort/organize by location. Additionally, there are a number of photo sharing web sites that support displaying geotagged images on a map such as Picasa Web Albums, Smugmug, Flickr and Panoramio.

Serendipity! The Spice of Life!?

In a round about way I found http://givemesomethingtoread.com/. It goes something like this: I switched from Twitterific to Tweetie, then installed Instapaper on my iPhone to maximize the Tweetie feature set, fell in love with Instapaper and purchased Instapaper Pro. While reviewing the Instapaper blog I saw mention of the "Give Me Something To Read" website. This website is now an icon on my "news and information" homescreen and I visit this website daily for unique reading.

Instapaper and/or Instapaper Pro are must have applications if you are a reader of web articles, for an overview of Instapaper functionality... see the excellent Macworld.com review. Briefly, Instapaper Pro is my "go to" application for reading any web article longer than a couple of sentences. Tweetie has built in functionality for sending a web article to Instapaper, NetNewsWire has Instapaper compatability coming soon and with a simple addition of the "Read Later" bookmark in mobile Safari you are seconds away from loading article upon article into Instapaper for review at your leisure. (Note, the $9.99 pro version is worth it for the "tilt scroll", switchable black background [great for bedtime reading] and marking your place in the article if you have to exit Instapaper mid-read)

The "Give Me Something To Read" website leverages the back end of Instapaper, collecting article selections from among the most frequently bookmarked articles... this is kind of like Digg without all the childish gaming! There are traditionally 5 articles added per day, and I usually find at least 2 or 3 articles that are of interest. Each article has a link to the original article, a brief 2-3 sentence teaser and the "Read Later" button, if the article is of interest just touch the "Read Later" button and send it to Instapaper for reading at your leisure.

I really enjoy the mix of topics, with recent titles such as: "Technology is Heroin", "How to Save Your Newspaper", "Obama's Vietnam" and "Eminem: The fall and rise of a superstar" to name just a few. From sources ranging from the Boston Globe to the UK Independent to nymag.com, you name it! As you can see the topics cover just about every gamut from tech to politics to religion to light fare! If you have a curious hunger for serendipity... Give Me Something to Read is a website worth checking out.

Evernote - The Virtual Shoebox (RWU)

Do you have intentions of keeping all of your newborn's keepsakes/milestones organized for years to come? I did with our 2 year old... and failed miserably. Since the birth of our first baby I have started using Evernote both professionally and personally - Evernote is a digital junk drawer and an extension of your brain. It is the perfect medium to capture those special moments!
Our second baby is due February 2, 2009, my plan is to leverage Evernote as a virtual Shoebox for baby number 2! A place to track all of the milestones, laughs, giggles and everything that goes into raising a child!.
If you have not a had a chance to explore Evernote, I suggest you do so. It is a cloud application with clients for the iPhone, web, OS X and Windows, you store data in the cloud which is then synced to your various clients. With Evernote you can store text, pictures, files, video and audio clips. Your iPhone or mobile device, such as a laptop, can be used as the capture device. To capture first words, funny phrases, first steps, etc, then upload these events to Evernote.
As an example, for child number one I created a text note labelled milestones, I update the evernote as events occur, usually just a short sentence. You would be surprised how much fun it is to review these comments 6 months later!
With a scanner you can easily scan and upload birth certificates, newspaper birth announcements or anything else out there in the analog world that you want stored virtually (How to scan directly into Evernote: see the Evernote Blog). Uploading digital photos from iPhoto or Aperture is as easy as emailing! With Evernote, an email address is provided, email a photo to your email address and that photo lands in your Evernote account. I use this feature to add one picture every every month, creating a virtual timeline where you can observe "how fast they grow up."
You can keep all of this information secure, or you can publish the folder for open web access so that friends and family can view. At this time there is no option to publish with password, I am hoping that this feature is added soon.
A basic Evernote account is free, or a premium account is available for $45 per year and provides for 500 mb of data transfer per month.

A Bigger Brain! Leveraging Evernote

Twenty years ago when I entered the workforce, my modus operandi was to maintain a "brain book" - basically a 9x7 spiral project planner notebook. I entered information that I thought I would need to pull up in the future, as time went on I got pretty good at determining what information belonged in my brain book. Data entry was easy, finding the info - was not so easy!

As time progressed I replaced my brain book with a Palm Pilot, the Palm had decent search and data entry was OK, but it was missing a web component and the data was limited to text only.

Along came Evernote - the information "junk drawer", Evernote has Windows and OS X native clients, a web interface and now an iPhone application. Ubiquitous access to the information that you store in Evernote is the key to its usefulness. One of the best ways to think of Evernote is to compare it to your "junk drawer" of information with the caveat that mostly anything in that junk drawer is searchable (audio notes excluded).

Info In - the iPhone app lets you add text notes (this functionality will be more useful when Apple adds copy & paste to the Touch OS), pictures directly from the camera or camera roll and audio notes. You can also forward emails and documents to your Evernote account via an Evernote provided personal email address, for example email a PDF to Evernote and you now have access to it anywhere you have web access. With photos the Evernote servers will perform OCR on any text in the photo... taking a picture of a white board is an ideal use for this functionality, as the text is now searchable and you have a permanent record of the data on that white board. If you have a scanner at your desktop machine, scanning articles and uploading to the cloud is a snap! Getting data into Evernote is as simple as clicking a shutter button!

Info Out - the keys to a successful data storing system is having ubiquitous access to the data and having a fast, accurate search capability. Evernote answers on both fronts. With the iPhone app, as long as you have a data connection, you essentially have your complete information junk drawer in your pocket. On a laptop using the native client, once the data is synced down to the client, you do not need a data connection to peruse your information collection - ideal for those long flights. Evernote provides for tagging of individual notes, the ability to create static folders and to create smart folders. You can search across all of you documents, information retrieval is what you would expect from a first rate application.

The Cost? - The iPhone application is free, as are the client applications, there is a a free service that provides for 40 mb of data transfer per month, the free service will be good enough for a majority of folks, as 40 mb equates to 20,000 text notes or 400 mobile photos, although you may find Evernote such a useful tool that you may feel compelled to purchase the premium service. The premium option is $45 per year and provides for a data cap of 500 mb per month.

In conclusion, many folks have moved Evernote into one of the highly coveted "Dock" locations on their iPhone, I keep Evernote on the first home screen and find myself launching Evernote at least once a day. Moving forward - look for quick snippets on the blog of real world uses for Evernote, both stand alone and in combination with other cloud applications.


HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!