The
Ultimate
Business Machine

Technology, business
and innovation.

And, not least, about
the Mac.

Weblog Archive Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo








Creative Commons License

Copyright © 2003-2012
Bernard Teo
Some Rights Reserved.

The Ultimate Business Machine - Archives

List of Categories : Database * Technology * Commentary * Singapore * Travel *

Tue 21 Oct 2014

Free iOS Apps

Category : Technology/iOSApps.txt

If you’ve been to our home page, you might see that I’ve featured two free iOS apps you can download:

iOSApps.png

WordScanner is the OCR scannning app I’ve always wanted to have on my iPhone. I read a lot of books and I often want to share what I’ve found on my Facebook page. So, what I wanted was to have an app on my iPhone where I can simply take a shot of the page I’m reading and then hope to lift the text right out of it so I can paste it onto Facebook or the Notes app or an email message.

And I wanted it all to be so drop-dead easy — I wanted it to work even if I can’t position the page precisely on the iPhone camera viewer, or if the lighting is not particularly good. And I need to be able to crop out my fingers holding the edges of the page. And I wanted it to work so fast that I can get the text onto Facebook before I lose inspiration for whatever I wanted to write about that I was reading.

I want it to never crash because OCR is particularly finicky and memory intensive. So I decided to write the app myself, using the open-source Tesseract OCR engine and some image editing code I found on the web. The result is WordScanner. I’ve had this app for a couple of months and I’ve used it to share a lot of stuff I’ve read on Facebook. And it hasn’t yet crashed, so that’s what I’m very happy about. When I first did this, it would crash every short while.

I really love this app, maybe because I had built it myself, but I’m happy to share it. It’s available for free.

BookNapper is another app for a book lover, but in this case it would only be really useful if you’re in Singapore. We’ve got this lovely, first-class public library that I always think of as our national treasure. It’s very current, so if you’re in a nice book shop and you see a nice book, chances are that our library would have it.

So what I do is, I scan the book’s ISBN number into BookNapper, which will then keep a list of books I want to read. BookNapper tells me if this book is available in our library’s collection , and if so, in which particular branches of the library system. (It also gives me the Amazon and Goodreads reviews). Then when I step into any branch of the library, Booknapper tells me which of the books I want to read is available in that library for borrowing, right then. And leads me precisely to the right shelves.

So it’s like a precision heat-seeking missile for taking out good books! And it’s available also for free.

WordScanner and BookNapper are both available on the iOS App Store now.

Posted at 10:26AM UTC | permalink

Mac@Work
Put your Mac to Work

Sivasothi.com? Now how would you do something like that?

Weblogs. Download and start a weblog of your own.

A Mac Business Toolbox
A survey of the possibilities

A Business Scenario
How we could use Macs in businesses

VPN Enabler for Mavericks

MailServe for Mavericks

DNS Enabler for Mavericks

DNS Agent for Mavericks

WebMon for Mavericks

Luca for Mavericks

Liya for Mountain Lion & Mavericks

Postfix Enabler for Tiger and Panther

Sendmail Enabler for Jaguar

Services running on this server, a Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks:

  • Apache 2 Web Server
  • Postfix Mail Server
  • Dovecot IMAP Server
  • Fetchmail
  • SpamBayes Spam Filter
  • Procmail
  • BIND DNS Server
  • DNS Agent
  • WebDAV Server
  • VPN Server
  • PHP-based weblog
  • MySQL database
  • PostgreSQL database

all set up using MailServe, WebMon, DNS Enabler, DNS Agent, VPN Enabler, Liya and our SQL installers, all on Mavericks.