It’s January, but I’m declaring the winner now. Go download Evernote Scannable and enjoy it all year. If’s for iOS only, so go buy an iPhone if you don’t have one. Ok that’s too extreme, but if you’ve been thinking of getting one or switching to an iPhone Scannable may sway the decision. It’s a GREAT app. Not only that, it’s 100% free.
So what does Scannable do?
Scannable uses your iPhone camera to digitize paper. Essentially, it takes a picture of a piece of paper and turns it into a .pdf or .jpg file. There’s tons of smartphone apps that exist for this purpose, but Scannable is the first I’ve used that has the simplicity and elegance to become part of my regular workflow. Upon launching Scannable you’re immediately given a camera view to capture paper. The app detects any paper it finds automatically. On your iPhone screen the recognized paper momentarily turns blue to indicate Scannable has detected it, then it instantly crops the picture of the document, removing the background, straightens the image, gets rid of most all document artifacts like crease lines, and converts it intelligently into a digital sharable file that can then be emailed, texted, or saved. All this can be accomplished in less than 5 taps.
What’s it good for?
Anything you might otherwise want to use a paper scanner for. For example, need to email a receipt to your bookkeeper?
- Tap the Scannable App
- Point your phone at the receipt
- Tap the preview of the receipt
- Press the blue share button
- Tap Mail
You’ve now got an email with the attached receipt ready to be sent. Input your bookkeepers email address and hit send. Done.
Using the same blue share button you could also save it to Dropbox, Google Docs, iCloud Drive, your iPhone camera roll, or Evernote. Another use for this app could be for contracts or work orders.
Give your client a signed copy of a contract or workflow right onsite. You could do it immediately. Get the signature, use Scannable, send via email.
When Scannable scans business cards it automatically detects them and can transform the business card into an iphone contact. If the contact has a public LinkedIn profile it will include their photo and other LinkedIn details allowing you to save it all to your iphone contacts app.
The Scannable app also integrates with Evernote branded desktop scanners via WiFi to streamline desktop scanning. It allows documents to be scanned directly into the Scannable app from the Evernote scanner bypassing the PC.
I'm not getting any compensation to write this. I just enjoy the ubiquitous efficiency this app allows. It makes my life easier, so hopefully it can do the same for you. It's free. What are you waiting for?