BYO: JotNot Scanner Pro app

Will this app help you to embrace the paperless future?

Lets face it, paper isn’t going to disappear any time soon, and as long as there are important documents and receipts to be maintained, there will be people who manage to lose their sole hard copy.

One way to prevent the loss of important information is to scan and digitise paper documents. The entire process has been made much simpler as people now carry around portable scanners in their pockets in the form of smartphones.

JotNot Scanner Pro ($2.59 on the iOS App Store) is an iPhone app which takes advantage of the phone’s high resolution camera to scan documents of different shapes and sizes.

Users can scan and manage the documents through the app, and save them as images or PDFs.



I scanned two A4 documents, and one GST receipt — all three were saved clearly, but I could adjust contrast and edges to make the text clearer if I wanted.

JotNot’s makers say the image processing is handled on the phone, so you save money on data and keep any sensitive information from hitting the web.

If you do want to share your document, or store it in the cloud for safe keeping, you can upload it through JotNot to Google Docs, Evernote, or Dropbox. Using a combination of JotNot and Google’s optical character recognition software you could potentially transcribe physical documents into editable digital documents.

The app works best on the latest iPhone, as it has a better camera than previous generations, but it also supports the iPhone 4 and 3gs.

Admittedly you could save yourself $2.59 by just using the default camera and gallery on the iPhone itself, but it’s the extra features which make JotNot worth the money.

Android users looking for similar functionalities should consider CamScan2ner, which is $6.99 in the Android Market.
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* BYO is a new section in Computerworld that looks at devices and applications that are of interest to business IT users.