adrianmott.com

I mess around with a lot of iPhone apps, from searching to hearing about interesting new apps from friends and acquaintances.  Many of these are games (perhaps the most viral of mobile app categories), but every once in a while, I’ll find a productivity app that’s excellent enough to use all of the time and I’ve found one in Jotnot’s scanner app.

The premise of the app is really simple – start the app and either take a picture or upload one you’ve already taken.  The application then let’s you drag selection targets (think iPhone cut and paste) to the corners of the business card, whiteboard, letter, receipt or whatever you’re trying to scan.  Once you have the document selected, hit the process button and the app will enhance your scanned document (fix any lighting issues) and allow you to save the scan as an image.  Check out the results below:

Suffice to say, that I’m pretty impressed with the resolution and clarity of the images produces from Jotbot’s scanning. Never again will I take bad pictures of whiteboards, often times sections at a time and try to interpret what’s written days later.  The app works really well with receipts and whiteboards, though I haven’t gotten as good results scanning business cards (especially cards with white backgrounds and small font sizes).

As TechCrunch pointed out in this post, Jotnot does have some competition in the space, from companies like Scanr and Qipit, but these services transfer the scanned image files through their servers and therefore don’t adhere to many corporate policies of transferring potentially sensitive corporate information to third parties.  There is also a competing iPhone app out there called Whiteboard Capture that’s a dollar cheaper.

Their premium iPhone app costs $3.99, though they do offer a free version as well.  There is also apparently an Android app out there that’s currently in Beta, but is downloadable.  No word on if they’re planning on developing a version for the Pre or other mobile platforms.  Here are some more screen shots: