iPhone App: DocScanner
Were you ever out of the office and desperately need to scan something? Were you ever in the office and either a) not have a scanner, or b) have it stored away and don’t want to drag it out?
DocScanner is a great substitute for a true scanner. Using your iPhone’s camera, it can use a picture of a document to generate a PDF, and automatically push that PDF to Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, or any generic WebDAV-supporting service.
It can automatically scan a PDF using OCR (optical character recognition) to index the content of the document and make it searchable. That is a pretty intensive process and can kneecap your iPhone’s battery if you were to use it a lot on a single charge, but its still a handy feature to have around.
I have been using DocScanner regularly since December (2011) and although it can be a bit finicky at times, it generally outputs reliable scans. In the absence of a true scanner, it is a godsend, allowing me to sign and digitally submit paperwork from anywhere (pending I have paper copies already). It lets me take pictures of receipts when traveling for reimbursement and tax purposes. And it has allowed me to leave my old inkjet all-in-one printer, kept around solely for the occasional use of its scanner, tucked safely away in my office closet.
This isn’t to say its a full replacement for a true scanner; I will still eventually be replacing my black-and-white Brother laser printer with a color all-in-one, hopefully with a sheet-fed scanner for bulk scanning operations. But even then, I will probably still find plenty of uses for DocScanner.
If a giant behemoth of a printer isn’t in your future, and you’re tired of an inkjet taking up space in your house or home office, DocScanner would probably work for you too. They also have a Mac App available in the app store that can use pictures from any digital camera (including your iPhone) to generate PDFs and do OCR on them from there.
Give it a look; I’m not getting paid for this or anything, but I do like to share useful apps when I find them, and this is one market where it seems to be a dime-a-dozen, so it can be hard to pick one over the other.
