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 [↩]

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 written about App Store pricing before, and I still fail to understand the “We want free upgrades for life” and “Anything more than $1 is too much” mentality that apparently rules in the App Store customer base.

Tweetie 2 for both Mac and the iPhone have just been announced and the iPhone version will be a separate app from the “old” Tweetie. The fact that you’ll have to pay $3 again for Tweetie 2 made some people go bunkers and some even threw a hissy fit. Guess what… You don’t have to buy it if you don’t want to! There are numerous other twitter clients on the App Store – take your pick!

Tweetie 2 contains a ton of updates and new features and the “upgrade fee” is certainly reasonable. If Atebits was charging for bug fixes that would wrong, but as you can see in any of these blog posts this is clearly not the case!

Apple has an office suite that costs considerably less than the competitors offering, and each year they release a new version with more features that costs exactly the same as the previous version. – Where is the outcry about that?

I don’t get that people are complaining about $3 for all those new features – for all the effort that Loren has put into Tweetie 2. Tweetie 2 costs less than a Grande Cappuccino at Starbucks, do you also complain to Starbucks that you can’t get a free refill the next time you visit them?

Matt Legend Gemmell said it best when he tweeted this yesterday:

Annoyed you’ll have to pay $2.99 for Tweetie 2? If you’re willing to meet me in person, I’ll give you $5 and hit you in the face.

@mattgemmell

Seriously people, wake up! There are more dire and important things wrong in the universe that are worth getting this upset about!

I for one will buy Tweetie 2 when it gets approved on the App Store!

Welcome to The Future and congratulations on finally getting MMS on the iPhone.

I really don’t get what all the fuss is about – I first used MMS way back in 2000¹ or 2001² and haven’t really used it since.

Just to sum it up for those who don’t know what MMS is:

MMS gives you the ability to send an image from one phone to another, just like email except that it is a vastly inferior and limited version of email.

I can access my email from any where, on the web, on my phone even on my television set, so why would I want to send a snapshot to someone in a crappy resolution that is constrained to just one single device? MMS even gives the carriers one more thing they can charge you for, postponing the moment where each carrier³ realizes that they are just “the pipe”.

Enough ranting – Enjoy your new toy, I predict that you will use it once or twice and then forget all about it…

1. This is the year The Future stated, as can be seen in any movie about the future – it’s always in the year 2000-something. [↩]
2. It might have been earlier, but my memory is a bit fuzzy there… [↩]
3. There are some carriers that have realized this, but they are few and far apart [↩]

I have always wanted to get better at drawing, but I have never set aside the time it takes to master this creative skill. As with all creative disciplines the winning formula for getting better is 10% talent and 90% effort¹ and with this little app I always have my drawing tools with me, so I can doodle away anytime² I’m in the mood for it.

SketchBook Mobile is loaded with features, and still manages to have a very non intrusive user interface, it just stays out of your way so you can concentrate on sketching.

SketchBook Mobile makes really good use of Apples Multi-touch technology both for drawing and for zooming and panning around your sketch – Oh, and it has undo too!³

SketchBook Mobile is available in the App Store for just $2.99

1. Anyone who tells you different should go listen to a couple of talks from Merlin Mann: Toward Patterns for Creativity and Doing Creative Work – Seriously, go! now! – And then go make stuff! [↩]
2. This is the effort part, the more you do it the better you get. [↩]
3. A much needed feature that my analog drawing tools is sadly missing. [↩]