David Jack Wange Olrik

I seem to have fallen behind on my weekly picks, Christmas, $work and life in general have kept me very busy lately, but I’ll try to get back to my weekly¹ schedule again.

This weeks pick is DocScanner, an iPhone app that allows you to have a flatbed scanner² in your pocket. While DocScanner isn’t the most pretty or well designed iPhone app, it certainly doesn’t lack in the feature department.

Notable features include both really good edge detection, OCR and WiFi sharing. There exists quite a few scanner apps on the App Store but this one is definitely the one to get.

On a recent business trip I used DocScanner to keep track of all the receipts I accumulated during the trip. Back home I exported them all to one huge PDF file and emailed it to our accounting department. No need to fiddle with those old school analogue receipts anymore.

My wish list for future versions³ of DocScanner are: A cleaner⁴ user interface, PDF files with the OCR’ed text included and direct upload to Dropbox.

Update: As of version 3.0.3⁵ DocScanner will embed the ORC’ed text into the pdf files!

1. Please don’t kill me if it isn’t precisely weekly. [↩]
2. and a whiteboard scanner and just about any other kind of scanner you can think of. [↩]
3. and they release new versions quite frequently – About once a month. [↩]
4. and by cleaner, I mean more iPhone-ish [↩]
5. Released on January 30th 2010 [↩]

Today marks the day where we have officially been without a car for a full week! While there are many who have survived without a car their whole life, and don’t see this as something special – it is a a big deal to us because we have grown used to the comfort and ease that a car brings you.

We decided to go green a few months ago¹, so we bought a trioBike with two bikes and a carrier, and have been using that and public transportation² as our sole means of transportation³ since.

So how did the first week go? – I think it went OK, apart from a few minor snags like loosing the bracket that fastens the carrier to the bike, a flat tire and being stuck at Copenhagen Central Station because some guy got hit by a train⁴.

I would lie if I said I didn’t miss our car⁵, but when I see people looking for places to park, and when I drive past gas stations and see the gas prices – I miss the car less and less.

Using the bike for all of our transportation needs forces us to take it down a notch, relax a little and plan our activities a little more which in turn helps us keep the stress level down – so it’s all good

1. Mostly because my wife wanted to go back to school so she could learn to design beautiful things – and that school is crazy expensive. [↩]
2. Which is actually quite good in Denmark, when you compare it with the rest of the world. [↩]
3. Except for the one or two times we borrowed a car for transporting stuff too big to fit in the trioBike [↩]
4. He god messed up pretty badly, but I think he survived it. [↩]
5. This October has been the coldest in years, and our car had climate control and seat heaters. [↩]

Nice response to the Droid teaser from Motorola. Should I care? I have yet to see Motorola create any kind of usable phone, but I welcome the competition.

I have blogged about this weeks pick before but I never made it a pick of the week before. The recent update to Tweetie rocks, so if you are into twitter¹ I suggest you head over to the App Store and pick up a copy.

The first version of Tweetie for the iPhone was cool, and even won an Apple design award. It was easy to use, looked nice and was very polished.²

Tweetie 2 raises the bar for all iPhone applications, not just twitter clients. It has been stuffed with all kinds of new and useful features – but in a way that doesn’t make it feel cramped at all! The user interface is very polished³ and it quickly grows on you.

The feature list is too long to repeat here, so I’ll just mention a couple of my favorites:  Nearby tweets superimposed on a Google map, Pull to refresh⁴, Multiple drafts, offline mode and full persistence i.e the user interface is restored to the same state after a relaunch or a phone call.

Tweetie 2 also takes advantage of some of Twitters new features that haven’t been launched yet – I’m so looking forward to the new Geolocation stuff. @twitter: You may release now!⁵

Oh… and Tweetie 2.0 for Mac will soon be released, and will feature sync with the iPhone version and other goodies!

1. And who isn’t these days? [↩]
2. Except for the refresh button that looked like it had been placed with a shovel. It had to be there and this was the only place it would fit, well kinda… [↩]
3. Some might say too polished, as in eye candy for the sake of eye candy [↩]
4. The ugly button has been hidden, and only comes into view when you need it – nice! [↩]
5. Pretty please! [↩]

This weeks pick is a mac app called Pixelmator. Pixelmator is a lightning fast image editor for the mac – kinda like a Photoshop lite but unlike Photoshop¹, Pixelmator really feels like it was build for the mac. Pixelmators feature set is some what smaller than its big brother but most² of the time it will get the job done.

I have been using Pixelmator for a litter over a year now³, and Pixelmator just keeps getting better and better with each new release. The latest release brought the long waited slice tool which is of great use when creating graphics for the web.

Another great thing about Pixelmator is their tutorial section on their website. There the creators of Pixelmator shows you how to use it to create all kinds cool effects.

Pixelmator costs just $59⁴ and is truly “Image editing for the rest of us”.

1. With each new version of Photoshop it seems to move further away from being a true mac app. [↩]
2. Unless you are need an image editor for professional reasons, it will get the job done every time! [↩]
3. I got it as part of the second MacHeist bundle. [↩]
4. Which is approximately 43.19 EUR, and is way less than any version of Photoshop costs. [↩]