JotNot Scanner

by MobiTech 3000

Category: Business
Price: $4.99

Sorry, I didn't see you behind that gargantuan wall of loose documents! Good lord, do you want me to call an ambulance? Oh, those paper cuts will heal on their own? Whatever you say, but it looks like you brought a legal pad to a knife fight, my friend. I do apologize for interrupting your bloodletting back there, but wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to keep these bank statements, utility bills, and pizza delivery receipts stacked around anymore? No, I'm not talking about a filing cabinet, although I noticed you've got one of those already. Oh, that's your liquor closet? I see.

No, what I'm proposing is a scanning solution. Wait! Put that manila envelope down before you scalp somebody! I'm not here to sell you some overpriced Canon or Epson machine, complete with Windows-only drivers coded by the programming equivalent of a one-eyed plastic surgeon in a Bangalorean basement. I know all too well how those scanners can take five minutes to spit out an upside-down JPEG. The age of the flatbed scanner is coming to a close, with the iPhone ready to take its place, and never the TWAIN interfaces shall meet!

You see, it's always been possible to take photos of a sheet of a paper in lieu of a proper scan, but those results always prove fairly unusable. For one, you can't print them out again or put them through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, because they're just photos of a sheet of paper, often shot from below or to the side to avoid shadows. In order to turn those photos into head-on shots with good contrast between text and paper, one requires a thousand-dollar Photoshop license and the services of an arrogant, know-it-all designer type who will preface all assistance with complaints about your computer's lack of proper fonts, and roll his eyes at your choice of desktop wallpaper.

Since the iPhone is adept at transforming itself into all manner of useful appliances with the help of apps, the folks at MobiTech 3000 have created JotNot – the world's first program designed to render obsolete both Wacom-wielding snobs and flatbed scanners alike. In a simple two-step process, it automatically performs a series of graphical operations far beyond the abilities of a paper-hoarding luddite such as yourself, outputting a cleaned-up PDF at the end. Simply take a photo of a page lying flat on a table top, from any angle you find comfortable, and JotNot corrects the skewed perspective while brightening and sharpening the hell out of that young boy. It also works with documents.

From there, the free services Evernote and Google Docs are your new virtual filing cabinets. Upload everything from directly within the app, and find anything again later with Evernote's intelligent OCR search, or transcribe them to plain text with Google Docs. Worthy competitors are few and far between: the closest, Scanner Pro by Readdle, is both more expensive and harder to navigate. JotNot is the only one to offer Google Docs integration, which anyone who understands the technical term "unlimited storage 4evaaaaa" will appreciate.

So you see, my scored and seeping student, with this system your business can run online, clutter free, and even the most challenged of employees can share a single iPhone instead of a bulky copier/scanner. But I recommend wrapping yours in a Ziploc bag – we found this out the hard way at my office when mine came back smelling like ass.

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Positives: Intuitive UI makes this app the easiest of its kind. Supports local export via Wi-Fi as well as various online services including Google Docs. Multi-page PDF creation.
Unpositives: No support for landscape scans or Dropbox exports, which closest rival Scanner Pro has. Occasional "low memory" warnings even on 3GS.
Rating: 4 / 5

Buy JotNot Scanner in the iTunes App Store.
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