DocumentSnap

One word: iPad

Brooks — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:38:59 +0000

So, what do you think about the iPad?

Are you going to get one?

(In case you’re curious, I haven’t decided yet).

No related posts.

Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 Review

Brooks — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:01:11 +0000

I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a review copy of a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300, so I thought I’d write up my initial impressions and show some of the new stuff that DocumentSnap readers might find interesting.

As of this writing I have only installed it on Mac OSX, but as I wrote in my initial ScanSnap S1300 announcement post, the S1300 is a “hybrid scanner” which just means it comes with everything you need both for Windows and Mac. Maybe later I’ll do a Windows review too.

Mobile Form Factor

I have to be honest, even though I am a longtime user of the ScanSnap S300M, I have never used it in a mobile situation. I like the mobile ScanSnaps because they take up such a small amount of space, and I personally don’t need the higher speed and capacity of the ScanSnap S1500 and S1500M.

You can see from this side by side shot that the size and shape of the S1300 is basically the same as the S300 series.

All that being said, the S1300 comes with mobile features such as USB power, so you can use it without having to plug into a wall outlet (though if you use it this way you need two USB ports – one for the data connection and one for power).

Installation

Installation was very easy. Just put in the CD, install the software, and then plug in the scanner. Fujitsu does a good job of making it extremely fast from unboxing to scanning.

One really nice surprise was that when I installed the S1300 software, it automatically upgraded all my profiles I had with the S300M. I was not expecting that at all!

Long Document Scanning

The ScanSnap S1300 lets you scan long receipts and documents (finally!), a subject in which I have complained about before. To do long document scanning, just put the document in and hold down the blue power key for 3 seconds. Once it starts blinking, its in long document mode. See the video below for a demo.

Auto Quality

If you have small documents, you can have it automatically detect them and up the quality. This was a feature introduced with the S1500 series and is now on the mobile scanners.

Searchable PDFs

One limitation that the S300M had is that it did not come with OCR software to make searchable PDFs. The S1300 comes with it built in for both Macs and PCs.

You can choose on a profile basis whether you want the document to be searchable, and (similar to the S1500 series), you can have it detect highlighted text on a document and save the PDF with searchable keywords. Pretty cool.

Speed And Capacity

Obviously, the S1300 is not going to be as fast as its cousins the S1500 and S1500M. If speed and capacity are your main criteria, you will want to go for the higher model. However, if 8 pages per minute (double sided don’t forget!) is OK for you, and you don’t need to hold more than 10 pages at the time, the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 is a great scanner in a very small and portable package.

Since I know some people like videos, here is a video where I show the ScanSnap S1300, some of its new features, and some of the software that comes with it.

Have you tried the ScanSnap S1300 yet? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Search Evernote Using Google Chrome Or Firefox

Brooks — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:32:06 +0000

Recently the Evernote blog posted a really cool tip for searching your Evernote notes from inside your browser.

Basically, you tell Chrome or Firefox to use Evernote as a new search engine, which you can then search with in the address bar.

Google Chrome’s address bar doubles as a search bar, which makes it really easy to search various sites without actually going to them first. Now, you can add Evernote as a search engine in Google Chrome and search your notes from anywhere. Here’s how to set it up:

See the blog post for instructions on how to do it in Google Chrome or Firefox, or here is a video.

Great tip!

Organize And Share Your Information With Shelfster (Free Invites)

Brooks — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:04:18 +0000

I was recently contacted by the folks at Shelfster, a service for clipping and sharing information that is in private Beta at the moment. They’re offering 10 free invites to DocumentSnap readers, so I thought I’d check the service out (all you need to do is offer stuff to our readers and I can clearly be bought ).

Shelfster is an interesting concept. In a way, it is like Evernote (take that as a compliment) but transformed into a social network.

Not only is it designed to capture and privately store whatever information you want to keep, but it gives you the ability to make some of it public, tag it, and follow other interesting users or tags that you want to watch. You can also publish it to various services on the web.

Clipping And Tagging

You can create items with Shelfster in two ways: you can create a new item in the web interface, or you can download their Desktop tool, which is (unfortunately) Windows only.

If you are using the web version, you need to copy and paste in the text you want to clip, or if it is an image, upload it or post it to a URL.

If you’re using the desktop clipper, you highlight the text you want to clip and clip that, or crop the image you want to grab.

One improvement I think Shelfster needs to make is that a lot of the time you want to clip something that is both text and images; not either/or. The most obvious use case is a part of a web page.

Also, a small nitpick, but when you are creating items, it would be nice if the UI told you whether tags are supposed to be comma separated or space separated.

Sharing

Once you have an item in Shelfster, you have a number of options to share it. You can share it with another Shelfster member, with up to 5 email addresses, or you can send it to various social networking sites.

One thing that is slightly odd is that I don’t see an option there to share it with Twitter. Maybe I am missing it though. Surely that’ll be added before it goes out of private beta.

Following

One cool feature of Shelfster is you can follow people who share interesting stuff, or if there are tags you are particularly interested in, you can follow those as well. To set that, you need to go into your account settings and type in the people and the tags you want to follow.

Once you do that, you can go to a “Follow Items” interface and keep track of the things you are following. Here I am following the tag “Seth Godin”.

This is a nice feature but it would be improved a bit if they made it so that when you are viewing a tag, you could just click a “Follow this tag” button. It’s too hard to go into your account settings and type in the tag name itself.

All in all, I think Shelfster is an interesting product and it will be fun to see where they take it after they leave private beta. If you are interested in checking it out, I have 10 invites so the first 10 commenters will get an invite to the beta.

Pixily Changes Names – Is Now OfficeDrop

Brooks — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:01:53 +0000

We’ve written a few times here on DocumentSnap about Pixily, a document management and scanning service that will let you physically send your paper documents and upload them to their service, and then securely manage the scanned files online.

We’ve just gotten word that they have changed their name to OfficeDrop. Why did they change it?

We decided to change our name because we found that customers were having problems spelling and remembering the Pixily name. Additionally, we wanted to find a label that helps potential customers understand what we do. We are obviously very attached to the Pixily brand, so this name change is not something that we took lightly. If you are curious, we will be posting articles on our blog talking about how we came up with OfficeDrop and the process we went through to find a new name.

As of now, not much else is changing other than the name. All web addresses should redirect, but if you run into any problems, email them at support@officedrop.com or phone them at 1-888-674-6493.

What do you think of the new name? Is OfficeDrop better/worse/indifferent than Pixily?

Updated: Acrobat Applescript for ScanSnap OCR

Brooks — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:02:53 +0000

As many of you know, in 2008 I posted an Applescript that will use Adobe Acrobat to make PDFs searchable using Acrobat’s OCR capabilities.

In the comments to that post, user nodis pointed out that adding 2 words to one of the lines can make the PDFs quite a bit smaller.

In my testing, I ran a 1.3 MB PDF through the script. Before nodis’ change, the resulting PDF was 1.7 MB. After the change, it was 424K!

Here is the updated script:

OCRIt-Acrobat – Droplet to batch OCR PDFs in Adobe Acrobat

To use it:

Download and uncompress the file and save it to your Desktop, Dock or wherever
Drag one or more PDFs onto the icon
Enjoy

Let me know how it works out for you and if you see similar reductions in file size.

Fujitsu Releases Cross-Platform ScanSnap S1300 .. Yeah!

Brooks — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:51:49 +0000

Well, it’s official – the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 has been announced and much like Eddie Murphy, it is coming to America.

You might remember a while ago I saw it on Amazon Japan and posted about it. Well, now no need to wait for it to come to the US. It’s announced. I don’t see it on online stores yet, but I will update when I see it.

I will have a full review coming very soon, but lets get the important stuff out of the way:

Yes, it is a replacement for the S300 and S300M. The 300 series is dead. Long live the 1300!
Notice there is no 1300M. This is intentional – for the first time, Fujitsu is releasing what they call a “hybrid” – a device that includes everything for both Mac and PC.

Form Factor of S300 With Features Of S1500

The S1300 takes some of the features of the ScanSnap S1500 like:

Long Documents: This is huge and you might recall me complaining about it before with the S300M. It will now scan receipts etc. up to 34 inches long
Searchable Keywords: You can now mark with a highlighter and embed searchable keywords in a document
Auto Quality: You can choose Auto for Image Quality and if you scan a small document, it will adjust automatically
More Profiles: You can now set up 20 profiles instead of the previous limit of 12
Searchable PDFs On The Mac: Yes!!!!!!!!!! This was the biggest limitation of the S300M. The ScanSnap S1300 will now make PDFs searchable out of the box.

Software Included

Fujitsu has included most of the software you’d expect with some extras for Mac users over the S300M. It doesn’t come with Acrobat like it’s big cousins the S1500 and S1500M.

PC and Mac:

ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap: Does OCR and makes PDFs searchable
ScanSnap Manager: The main software for the scanner which controls the 1 button operation and enables all the profiles.

PC only:

ScanSnap Organizer 4.1: Document manager
CardMinder 4.1: Business card scanning/extraction
Scan To Functions: Allows you to scan to a folder, email, printer, SharePoint, etc.

Mac only:

Scan To Functions: Can scan to the usual stuff but also to iPhoto or iDisk
CardIris 3.6: Business card scanning/extraction

Additional Specs

From a tech perspective, the S1300 is pretty similar to the 300 series.

It scans 8 pages per minute and will hold up to 10 pages, it has auto deskew/orientation, blank page detection, and can (of course) be powered by USB.

It is very very slightly bigger than the 300 series (11.18 x 3.9 x 3.03 in. for the S1300 vs. 11.18 x 3.74 x 3.03 in. for the S300) and is the same weight (3.08 lb.)

As I said, I will be posting my review very soon, but on paper anyways the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 looks like a great upgrade to the 300 series, especially for Mac users (adding searchable PDF is killer!).

What do you think? Anything you are particularly excited about or wish was there? Sound off in the comments.

Cool Paperless Setup Video

Brooks — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:03:31 +0000

As much of a paperless geek that I am, I normally wouldn’t sit and watch a video of someone scanning and shredding paper.

However, I just wanted to point you to this YouTube video by user allenday. He’s got a really cool setup of a ScanSnap S300M, Adobe Acrobat, a Mac Mini, a wall-mounted Sharp Aquos, the Royal PX1000MX to shred, and uploads everything to Evernote.

To do the OCRing, he uses the Acrobat OCR Applescript Droplet that I hacked/posted about earlier.

Very cool setup, thanks for sharing allenday! Do any of you have a cool paperless setup? Feel free to share pics or videos in the comments.

How To Create Searchable PDFs With The ScanSnap S300M

Brooks — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:02:57 +0000

So you read all this great stuff about how the Fujitsu ScanSnap is awesome and creates searchable PDFs, and you’re on a Mac and want a portable scanner, so you drop the cash on a ScanSnap S300M.

Then you get it home and find out – wait a minute – the S300M doesn’t come with OCR software! If you’ve been there (and I have), hopefully this post will help you out, as I get a lot of questions about this.

Mail-In Rebate

Your local Fujitsu website may provide a mail-in rebate for OCR software if you purchase the S300M. At the time of this writing, the US Fujitsu websites has a mail-in rebate for a free copy of ReadIris OCR software

The rebate is at http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/peripherals/scanners/rebates.html . Check if your country has something similar.

Acrobat

While the S300M doesn’t come with Adobe Acrobat, if you have a copy of it laying around, or have access to it, you can use the ScanSnap with it. Here is an example of how I use the S300M with Acrobat 8.

Evernote

Evernote Premium allows users to upload PDFs and they will be automatically OCR’ed and made searchable.

DevonThink

If you use a program like Devonthink Pro Office to manage your documents, they will be made searchable.

NeatWorks

NeatWorks is a software that is bundled with the NeatDesk scanner, but it can be purchased on its own. See this post for how to use NeatWorks with the Fujitsu ScanSnap.

These are some ideas for how to make searchable PDFs with the ScanSnap S300M. Do you have any others? Leave a message in the comments.

Carbonite Introduces iPhone App

Brooks — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:02:56 +0000

If you’re a Carbonite online backup customer, they’ve released yet another way to get at your files when away from your computer. The company has released a Carbonite iPhone App (it works on iPod Touches as well).

From the CEO of Carbonite:

The Carbonite app gives me access to the backed up files from each of my computers, even if the computers are turned off. And I don’t have to be logged into a Wi-Fi connection or lug my laptop with me. It displays my photos, documents, and other important files and allows me to share any of my backed up files with someone else via email, right from the app. It’s fast and super-simple. I’m really proud of this Carbonite app and I hope you all will find it as useful as I do.

Any Carbonite customers want to comment? Have you tried it out? Do you see the trend towards getting to your files on a mobile device a useful one? Let us know in the comments.