It's the Little Things That Matter …

Last week I wrote about a medical record keeping application that has made my life easier. With the surge of interest in all things iOS at Travelers Rest, I thought many of you would be interested in another app I have come to rely upon, TinyScan. It is one of a number of apps that act as handheld scanners, and I have found it indispensable. Over the past few years I have downloaded numerous scanner app, but TinyScan best meets my needs. The app, which I use on my iPhone, also comes in a version for Android.

Scanner apps use the smartphone camera to take a photograph of a document. Before scanning you can select single or batch mode. When batch mode is selected the app will create a multi-page document. TinyScan takes a color photo and approximates the edges of a document. Dots appear in the four corners of the image, and if the entire image wasn't selected, you can move the dots to the proper locations. On the next screen you decide if you want the image in gray-scale or color. If you chose gray-scale you can select the intensity of the black/gray areas of the image. Click on a checkmark and the image is saved to the app. From there you can send the document to a cloud service – Evernote, Dropbox or GoogleDrive – email, print, fax, or open it in another app on your device. The resulting image is saved as a PDF (portable document format) file, which is the only format available in every other scanner app I have tried.

What makes TinyScan stand out is that it also saves document image to the device's builtin camera roll. I need this feature, because I scan all of my business related receipts with TinyScan. Once on the iPhone camera roll, the images become available on my iPad, and I can then import them into the iPad app I use for keeping track of business-related expenses — apps which do not accept imported PDF files.

When scanning documents for use with other iPad apps, or on my computer, I save them as PDF files to the Dropbox app, which, as a cloud based service, gives me access to stored files on other devices and computers. I have written about Dropbox in past columns, and I promise to include an overview again this season.

At this point you might be wondering why bother with smartphone scanning when many of us own scanners, either as stand-alone devices or in combination with a printer. My answer is simplicity. Once you understand the "how to" of using a handheld scanner, it is always at you finger tips. You can scan anywhere, and always find the resulting document in one location – stored on the app. It is simple to scan letter-size documents, receipts of any size, and business cards. I also find myself using TinyScan as a copier – simply scan and print.

When TinyScan accesses my phone's built-in camera, it compensates for camera shake, and I have yet to have a blurry result. The iOS version of TinyScan is universal, running on both the iPhone and iPad, but I find it much easier to take a picture with the iPhone. TinyScan comes in both free and pro versions for both iOS and Android devices. The free version features ads, which are eliminated in the pro version for $4.99.

I want to apologize to anyone who looked for the online version during the past few weeks. It was unavailable due to technical problems, but it is up and running once again. Eddie and I will be visiting family in Hawaii until early February, and OnMouseClick is being filed from the island of Oahu. Aloha.