If you must know, the full name of the app is “JotNot Scanner Lite for Receipts, Whiteboards, and Documents”. It doesn’t roll off the tongue, but you definitely won’t wonder whether the app will work with whiteboards, documents, or receipts. The answer is right there! 😀
Now that I’m done being a jerk, I’ve gotta say I could really take a liking to this app if I could see some solid results. The idea is pretty fantastic: you can turn your iPhone pictures into “scans” via postprocessing done on the device. The cleaned up images should work really well for a database of receipts or documents – especially in conjunction with other services such as Evernote.
The app can take its own picture or import one from you camera roll. Once that’s done, you just specify the portions of the picture that you’d like the app to process. The actual re-processing of the image takes about 10 seconds or so on my iPhone 3GS, but the results are interesting. Here’s a shot of a tea box that I may or may not want to remember in the future:
The text in the picture is legible, but it’s dark (taken during the day in my kitchen — blame Canada) and you’ve got to squint to read it. I doubted this would be very kind to optical character recognition, like the magical page reading technology in Evernote. Process the image in JotNot Lite, however, and it’s a different story altogether:
The image looks like the camera went batty and decided to throw away the idea of colour and contrast, but the text looks like it could be a lot friendlier to OCR.
For a quick test, I put both images into my Evernote account and waited for the results to come out. To my surprise, both were equally well recognized. I also used a handful of other test images for comparison to lower the chance of flukes, but I think that my untouched images were actually easier to read. I also found that some of the images were actually made blocker or more pixelated due to the post processing. There are a few other tests I can run as I go through my receipt box (adjusting contrast, turning pics to black and white), but so far I haven’t really found the app to make a major difference. It’s very easy to “scan” images with JotNot, I’m just not sure it’s really done anything for me yet.
As for the lite version of the app, it’s pretty functional but for the fact that you can’t actually save your scans. The full version has a save and PDF conversion button, whereas you’re forced to just take a screenshot of your scans (sleep + home button) to save them to the camera roll. This means that you’ll always see that top bar that says “enhanced image” and you’ll always be prompted with this dialogue after you finish using the program. Otherwise, these are the only downsides I can see to using the Lite app instead of the full version (based on the description and a few app reviews).
I’m not quite done with JotNot yet, and I’m hoping to maybe get the full version for review. I still think it’s an interesting idea, but I’m definitely on the fence about how useful it really is for my uses. Ideally, I’d love for the images to be a lot clearer so that I could sync them with Evernote — a feature that’s only included in the full version of the app.
Anybody else tried JotNot? Any tests I didn’t think of?
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You can try out JotNot Lite (here) or check out the full version for $4.99 (here)
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TAGS: images, jotnot, scanner
