This weeks pick is DocScanner, an iPhone app that allows you to have a flatbed scanner² in your pocket. While DocScanner isn’t the most pretty or well designed iPhone app, it certainly doesn’t lack in the feature department.

Notable features include both really good edge detection, OCR and WiFi sharing. There exists quite a few scanner apps on the App Store but this one is definitely the one to get.

On a recent business trip I used DocScanner to keep track of all the receipts I accumulated during the trip. Back home I exported them all to one huge PDF file and emailed it to our accounting department. No need to fiddle with those old school analogue receipts anymore.

My wish list for future versions³ of DocScanner are: A cleaner⁴ user interface, PDF files with the OCR’ed text included and direct upload to Dropbox.

Update: As of version 3.0.3⁵ DocScanner will embed the ORC’ed text into the pdf files!

1. Please don’t kill me if it isn’t precisely weekly.
2. and a whiteboard scanner and just about any other kind of scanner you can think of.
3. and they release new versions quite frequently – About once a month.
4. and by cleaner, I mean more iPhone-ish
5. Released on January 30th 2010

We decided to go green a few months ago¹, so we bought a trioBike with two bikes and a carrier, and have been using that and public transportation² as our sole means of transportation³ since.

So how did the first week go? – I think it went OK, apart from a few minor snags like loosing the bracket that fastens the carrier to the bike, a flat tire and being stuck at Copenhagen Central Station because some guy got hit by a train⁴.

I would lie if I said I didn’t miss our car⁵, but when I see people looking for places to park, and when I drive past gas stations and see the gas prices – I miss the car less and less.

Using the bike for all of our transportation needs forces us to take it down a notch, relax a little and plan our activities a little more which in turn helps us keep the stress level down – so it’s all good

1. Mostly because my wife wanted to go back to school so she could learn to design beautiful things – and that school is crazy expensive.
2. Which is actually quite good in Denmark, when you compare it with the rest of the world.
3. Except for the one or two times we borrowed a car for transporting stuff too big to fit in the trioBike
4. He god messed up pretty badly, but I think he survived it.
5. This October has been the coldest in years, and our car had climate control and seat heaters.

The first version of Tweetie for the iPhone was cool, and even won an Apple design award. It was easy to use, looked nice and was very polished.²

Tweetie 2 raises the bar for all iPhone applications, not just twitter clients. It has been stuffed with all kinds of new and useful features – but in a way that doesn’t make it feel cramped at all! The user interface is very polished³ and it quickly grows on you.

The feature list is too long to repeat here, so I’ll just mention a couple of my favorites:  Nearby tweets superimposed on a Google map, Pull to refresh⁴, Multiple drafts, offline mode and full persistence i.e the user interface is restored to the same state after a relaunch or a phone call.

Tweetie 2 also takes advantage of some of Twitters new features that haven’t been launched yet – I’m so looking forward to the new Geolocation stuff. @twitter: You may release now!⁵

Oh… and Tweetie 2.0 for Mac will soon be released, and will feature sync with the iPhone version and other goodies!

1. And who isn’t these days?
2. Except for the refresh button that looked like it had been placed with a shovel. It had to be there and this was the only place it would fit, well kinda…
3. Some might say too polished, as in eye candy for the sake of eye candy
4. The ugly button has been hidden, and only comes into view when you need it – nice!
5. Pretty please!

I have been using Pixelmator for a litter over a year now³, and Pixelmator just keeps getting better and better with each new release. The latest release brought the long waited slice tool which is of great use when creating graphics for the web.

Another great thing about Pixelmator is their tutorial section on their website. There the creators of Pixelmator shows you how to use it to create all kinds cool effects.

Pixelmator costs just $59⁴ and is truly “Image editing for the rest of us”.

1. With each new version of Photoshop it seems to move further away from being a true mac app.
2. Unless you are need an image editor for professional reasons, it will get the job done every time!
3. I got it as part of the second MacHeist bundle.
4. Which is approximately 43.19 EUR, and is way less than any version of Photoshop costs.

I have written about App Store pricing before, and I still fail to understand the “We want free upgrades for life” and “Anything more than $1 is too much” mentality that apparently rules in the App Store customer base.

Tweetie 2 for both Mac and the iPhone have just been announced and the iPhone version will be a separate app from the “old” Tweetie. The fact that you’ll have to pay $3 again for Tweetie 2 made some people go bunkers and some even threw a hissy fit. Guess what… You don’t have to buy it if you don’t want to! There are numerous other twitter clients on the App Store – take your pick!

Tweetie 2 contains a ton of updates and new features and the “upgrade fee” is certainly reasonable. If Atebits was charging for bug fixes that would wrong, but as you can see in any of these blog posts this is clearly not the case!

Apple has an office suite that costs considerably less than the competitors offering, and each year they release a new version with more features that costs exactly the same as the previous version. – Where is the outcry about that?

I don’t get that people are complaining about $3 for all those new features – for all the effort that Loren has put into Tweetie 2. Tweetie 2 costs less than a Grande Cappuccino at Starbucks, do you also complain to Starbucks that you can’t get a free refill the next time you visit them?

Matt Legend Gemmell said it best when he tweeted this yesterday:

Annoyed you’ll have to pay $2.99 for Tweetie 2? If you’re willing to meet me in person, I’ll give you $5 and hit you in the face.

@mattgemmell

Seriously people, wake up! There are more dire and important things wrong in the universe that are worth getting this upset about!

I for one will buy Tweetie 2 when it gets approved on the App Store!

I really don’t get what all the fuss is about – I first used MMS way back in 2000¹ or 2001² and haven’t really used it since.

Just to sum it up for those who don’t know what MMS is:

MMS gives you the ability to send an image from one phone to another, just like email except that it is a vastly inferior and limited version of email.

I can access my email from any where, on the web, on my phone even on my television set, so why would I want to send a snapshot to someone in a crappy resolution that is constrained to just one single device? MMS even gives the carriers one more thing they can charge you for, postponing the moment where each carrier³ realizes that they are just “the pipe”.

Enough ranting – Enjoy your new toy, I predict that you will use it once or twice and then forget all about it…

1. This is the year The Future stated, as can be seen in any movie about the future – it’s always in the year 2000-something.
2. It might have been earlier, but my memory is a bit fuzzy there…
3. There are some carriers that have realized this, but they are few and far apart

I have always wanted to get better at drawing, but I have never set aside the time it takes to master this creative skill. As with all creative disciplines the winning formula for getting better is 10% talent and 90% effort¹ and with this little app I always have my drawing tools with me, so I can doodle away anytime² I’m in the mood for it.

SketchBook Mobile is loaded with features, and still manages to have a very non intrusive user interface, it just stays out of your way so you can concentrate on sketching.

SketchBook Mobile makes really good use of Apples Multi-touch technology both for drawing and for zooming and panning around your sketch – Oh, and it has undo too!³

SketchBook Mobile is available in the App Store for just $2.99

1. Anyone who tells you different should go listen to a couple of talks from Merlin Mann: Toward Patterns for Creativity and Doing Creative Work – Seriously, go! now! – And then go make stuff!
2. This is the effort part, the more you do it the better you get.
3. A much needed feature that my analog drawing tools is sadly missing.

I once wrote an IRC notifier for Irssi that will message you via XMPP whenever someone highlights you or sends you a private message while you are disconnected from Irssi³.

It worked ok, but what I really wanted was a way where Irssi could connect directly to Growl and notify me whenever something interesting happens.

With Prowl all I need to send a push notification to my iPhone, is a small piece of code that looks something like this:

So based on my old notifier program, I quickly whipped up an Irssi Prowl Notifier program So now I get notified with a push message whenever something interesting happens on IRC. There is even a Wordpress plugin that will notify you whenever someone posts a comment on your blog.

Anything you can think of, Prowl can notify you about.

1. Don’t get me wrong I love Growl and use it extensively.
2. Well at least I won’t – I feel the Growl desktop notifications belong on the desktop.
3. I run Irssi inside Screen so it will persist even when I logout of my account.

While on vacation in northern Jylland my MacBook Pro died . So for the past 2 weeks my iPhone has been my primary “computer” for Instant Messaging, twitter, Email, Web browsing and all that stuff that I usually do when I am online. I have previously written about using the iPhone as a laptop replacement when going to conferences, but this is different – this is everyday and for everything.

The iPhone actually did quite well when you think of its relative small size and small keyboard¹. For most tasks I can say “There is an app for that”, I even upgraded this website using nothing but my iPhone. The only task I really missed my MacBook Pro was for programming, so my secret project is a bit behind schedule. Oh, and I did miss out² on the online launch sale for the iPhone 3GS, but I think this was mostly due to the fact that 3.dk didn’t scale under the pressure of the danish iPhone fans desperate to get a proper carrier with a 3G network that actually works.

One thing you have to remember though, is to always bring your charger and your USB cable as there will be some days where you’ll drain the battery and that little extra juice³ you can get from a quick charge here and there is a lifesaver.

My precious…

1. I find that the keyboard on the iPhone is no better or worse than any physical keyboard of the same size. You just need to get used to it. – Actually I find it a little better
2. I have ordered a 32 GiB iPhone 3GS – Now I’m just waiting…
3. A couple of months ago I ordered a Juice Pack Air from juicepack.co.uk but I have still haven’t received anything from them – quite frustrating…