Shows a few advanced ScanBizCards features: assigning contacts to address book groups, sorting contacts, searching contact for text.
All videos are also available on iTunes
Tag Archive: reader
Shows ScanBizCards used on the iPad to scan business cards imported from a camera or iPhone, browse through contacts in 2D / 3D views, edit cards – even place a phone call using the ScanBizCards Skype integration.
All videos are also available on iTunes
ScanBizCards is the only iPhone Business Card Reader with the ability to add calendar reminders to follow-up with new contacts. This video shows you how it works as well as how to synchronize your Outlook/iCal/Google calendar with ScanBizCards calendar events.
All videos are also available on iTunes
ScanBizCards is the only iPhone business card reader with the ability to send a LinkedIn invite to a new contact in one click, without ever leaving the app.
All videos are also available on iTunes
ScanBizCards is the only iPhone business card reader with the ability to export cards into an Excel CSV file. A must-have feature for any user of CRM apps like Salesforce.com, ACT or SugarCRM.
All videos are also available on iTunes
ScanBizCards is the only iPhone business card reader with built-in integration with the popular Evernote cloud storage application. Watch how you can import card images from your Evernote account, or save scanned cards to your Evernote account.
All videos are also available on iTunes
Ever got emails with long email signatures with a contact’s info? Now you can turn this info into a new contact without typing anything, using the handy ScanBizCards feature to import text from the clipboard.
All videos are also available on iTunes
Version 2.77 was just approved on the App Store World-wide.
What’s New?
Address Parsing
Long overdue! Until this release we essentially tagged some items as “address” then just lumped all address items into the “Street Address” field of the iPhone address book. No more: we now support breaking addresses down into street address lines + city + state + zip + country. Next time you scan a card with an address on it, touch the group labeled “address” and you’ll get a rather nifty looking special edit view with these items. Touch the country at the bottom and it gets even niftier, displaying all known World countries along with their national flag. Note: this is our very first attempt at parsing addresses so be ready for many cases where we don’t detect all address components perfectly. We are already working to improve that detection but meanwhile we at least made it easy to correct the mapping.
Adjusting Images
By popular demand, we have added a function to permanently trim images to get rid of extraneous background – previously it was only possible to adjust the image thumbnails you see in list view, not the image itself. You will find that function via a “Crop” button in main card view. Note: adjusting images can’t be undone so make sure to exclude only areas you don’t need to scan!
Auto-Start Scan
V2.75 set Auto-Start Scan to ON by default. We did that because it saves time to directly start scanning after taking a new photo and scan results are usually fine. After further analysis we are changing our mind on that: cropping the image before scanning DOES provide significantly higher accuracy. So this update changes that setting back to OFF. Please feel free to change it back if you’d like.
Self Photo Within Quick Intro Email
As part of your own contact information for the Quick Intro feature you can now include a photo of yourself. Just choose to edit your info the next time you send a Quick Intro email then touch the image field in the top left corner to provide a photo.
New Field: Department
This field exists in the iPhone address book yet was not available within the list of fields in the app – now fixed. We also try to map text item on cards as Department when we can (somewhat unreliably).
Ordering Of Text Results
You may have noticed that text results were sometimes alternating one line of the address then a phone number on the other side of the card, then another address line etc. This is because we followed a strict top-down, left-right ordering which is really not the way anyone wants to process the information in the case of a business card … no more: the ordering now follows a more logical block grouping where lines close on the card are show together.
Bug Fix: Excel Export
Exporting cards with accents like é and special characters like ç was failing – now fixed.
Bug Fix: Address Book Groups
With the advent of iOS4, address book groups are now categorized by source. Unfortunately, this caused trouble for users who had more than one source in their address book. This is now fixed – the address book group list in ScanBizCards now contains all of a user’s groups and indicates which source they are from. Please note, however, that it is not possible to save contacts into groups from all types of sources (for example: LDAP or CardDAV servers).
Web Sync: web-based edits
Previously ScanBizCards would only get updates made on the web when the app was started. This is not good enough with iOS4 where apps are long-lasting so the application now checks for web updates every five minutes.
Deleting Contacts
Previously the only way to delete a contact added by ScanBizCards was through the iPhone contacts application. You can now do it from within ScanBizCards through the “Groups & Merge” button on top of the contact view.
New Web Site!
We are very proud of our new web site courtesy of our “Web Sync” man Jonathan Moldofsky! We hope you like the new look and even though you know all about the product already, check out the series of screenshots for the major features at www.scanbizcards.com or the full list at www.scanbizcards.com/features.
You can also get access to your Web Sync cards from the site via the Web-Sync tab (as opposed to remembering and bookmarking http://my.scanbizcards.com).
Press
Apple recommended us to the 500,000 Facebook fans following their App Store Facebook page as “Not just a business card reader” on Sunday, September 5! Read the brief introduction here.
ReadWriteWeb wrote about us in the past and now chose us in their September recommendations.
Rating
In an effort to make rating or reaffirming and editing a previous review of the app easier, we created a shortcut directly to the appropriate App Store page (the things we do for our users!):
- Premium users: click www.scanbizcards.com/rate.
- Lite or Lite Upgraded users: click www.scanbizcards.com/ratelite.
Version 2.75 was approved on the App Store world-wide 5 hours ago (Note: the Lite version is actually labeled V2.76 although identical to the paid V2.75 – don’t ask why – next version for both will be V2.77).
What’s New?
V2.74 Bug Fix: the previous update introduced a regression causing a crash when turning Auto-Start Scan ON. This setting can now be used again.
Web Sync: we fixed a number of small bugs and added an option to change your Web Sync email or password.
Double-sided cards: long awaited and request by several of you – ScanBizCards now enables to capture both sides of a business card! Use cases include:
- Cards with scannable text on both sides. Note: pay attention to possible duplicate information, for example a same name on both sides (please swipe delete one).
- Cards with a back side in a language we don’t recognize yet (such as Chinese) but that you recognize. Note: in such a case, please scan just one side.
- Cards with anything on the back side you wish to retain visually: attractive design or just written comments you scribbled.
Double-side cards show in list view (e.g. Recent Cards) with side 1 alternating with side 2 every 2 seconds. We “upgraded” the 2nd card (my card) in the “Sample Cards” folder within the app to be double-sided, take a look (touch “My Cards”, then “Sample Cards”). You can also see how double-sided cards are handled on the web interface at http://my.scanbizcards.com/demo.
A debate is raging within the team between folks who think this feature is super cool and others who think it’s only very cool. What do you think? Here is one idea to help you make the right decision: say you scan a card with no back side but where the person who gave you the card is still standing in front of you. Snap a picture of HIM (or her) as the back side of that card (just don’t scan it, you won’t find any text on people’s faces – usually)!!!
Email signature import: ever received emails from people with an email signature at the bottom? Now you can also capture this information as a new contact:
- Select these lines within the email, copy (to clipboard)
- Start ScanBizCards, touch “Import from Clipboard”
- You get the usual list of items, tagged according to type: review/edit then touch “Add To Address Book” – that’s it!
A tip: most signatures don’t include the person’s email itself. To add it, return to that email, tough the “From” email, select merge with existing contact and add it to the new contact you just created from the signature.
Usability changes:
- Auto-Scan: we turned Auto-Scan ON by default. This should not affect any of you since it only sets the default for new installations. We set this default because it saves users one touch & time. It skips the cropping stage so users who want to crop should set Auto-Scan back to OFF.
- Merge: we added a new “Merge” button right next to “Add To Address Book”. When merging a card info into an existing contact, that button saves one step.
- Adding to the address book: the “Add To Address Book” button now saves to the address book directly without needing the user to confirm with “Done”, again saving one step and avoiding confusion with users who didn’t realize nothing got saved until pressing “Done”. To edit, touch “Edit” on that screen or just the Back button to edit the ScanBizCards items and again save to the address book.
Test your ScanBizCards knowledge!
If you have time to kill, skim through http://www.scanbizcards.com/features and write down how many of the 27 features you knew about. If you scored a perfect 27/27 you are probably a ScanBizCards team member (get back to fixing bugs)!
Special Mention
Thomas Milo, president of www.decotype.com and a pioneer in multi-lingual computing has scanned a record 613 cards, thus – in his own words – “porting 20 years of accumulated business cards into a well-structured, searchable environment in less than two weeks”. He also sent us in excess of 90 problem reports which I hope to finish addressing by the year 2013. We are very grateful to Thomas for his relentless feedback and additional help understanding specific recent Unicode issues!
Press
Evernote unveiled their “trunk” initiative with a number of apps integrating with them. Our app was picked up by a number of Evernote reviewers such as this one:
http://www.intomobile.com/2010/07/15/evernote-unveils-the-trunk-to-showcase-various-evernote-integrations/
S. Henry, salesman and part-time blogger: http://svghenry.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/iphone-app-review-scanbizcards/
And here is a honorable mention in (close) 2nd place:
http://portfoliosc.blogspot.com/2010/07/business-card-scanners-for-iphone-which.html
Rating
We forgive the above reviewer for misguidedly placing us only in 2nd position but you can help repair this obviously grave injustice by rating the app! You can do so by touching “Rate This Version” from the app’s help pages. Note that even if you already rated the app, doing so again after an update helps a lot by reaffirming it for the current version.
Version 2.74 – both Lite and Premium – was approved around 3pm EST today. We’ve been eager to see this update go live because it fixes two significant iOS4 bugs affecting both iPhone 4 users as well as previous models upgrading to the new OS4. There is also some exciting stuff: Evernote integration (scan biz cards images in your Evernote account) + Skype integration (dial/SMS contact on iPad/iPod Touch). And finally the Web Sync subscriptions are in order and the free 2-week trial can now be properly extended.
Update: we introduced one problem in V2.74 – the Auto-Start Scan option doesn’t work, please turn it back OFF (the default setting) if you were using that setting. This will be fixed in V2.75.
Features List: before going into the new features of this update: we reached a point where it may be hard to keep track of all the features, so we created a page with the complete list, and plan to keep it up-to-date. We counted 25 features so far, having a list will also enable us to refer to features with incredibly catchy names like “Feature #23” etc. You can find that list here.
New Features
- iOS4 bug fixes: the new iPhone OS caused two bugs in the app – new card images came up shifted right into the app and scanned incorrectly unless the user knew to shift the image back to the left per the warning we posted on our FAQ page. Some of the features involving sending an email crashed the app after sending the email. Both issues have been resolved in this update. iPhone 4 users: please yell if you find any issues!
- Evernote Integration: ScanBizCards is now fully integrated with Evernote! Considering the very large installed base of Evernote users, we hope this is exciting news for a lot of people (and certainly for us). This is how it works:
- Touch “My Cards” and Look for a large Evernote button at the end of the list of folders. Touching that button will enable you to provide your Evernote credentials. You only need to provide these credentials once, we then save them within the app.
- That same Evernote button is also the conduit through which you then search for photos of business cards in your Evernote account using various search criteria. Import the image you want from the search results, scan it then optionally store the recognized contact info back into the Evernote record.
- But that’s not all: you can also export any scanned card into Evernote as a new record (i.e. not just those imported from Evernote).
- Web Sync Updates: the previous update introduced the Web Sync service with a free two weeks trial but the option to extend the service through in-app purchases had yet to be approved by Apple. It is now done, we hope you continue to enjoy the service. Reminders:
- Registering for Web Sync is through the “Web Sync Settings” button on the main page
- If you were within the free trial and it expired, use the “Extend Subscription” button
- You can access your saved cards online from any browser at http://my.scanbizcards.com
- More details are provided in the Help pages within the app or for a quick demo of the web-based access, try the web side of our demo account at http://www.scanbizcards.com/webdemo
We have continued to update the web interface: we now have a much nicer card edit view and we added a “Map This Card” button to the card view to show the address on that card on a Google map.
Recent Reviews
- Derek Walter, AppCraver
- Kevin Whipps, Apple Gazette
- hitech dads
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