App of the Week: CamScanner
October 16, 2011, By Craig J. Heimbuch 0 comments
I've never been a terribly linear thinker. Ask me to make an outline or create a presentation and I'm wrought by the same kind of anxiety I had the night before my driver's test—sweaty palms, dyspepsia, a general sense of unease. I was always better at just driving, feeling the road, taking it all in and making instinctive decisions.
I also spend a lot of time coming up with new ideas. It's part of my job. A big part. Most of it, in fact. And over the years, I have come to rely on a giant white board in a downstairs conference room as my go-to tool for planning and ideation. I write random thoughts, phrases, words and draw a complex schematic of lines connecting them. It makes total sense to me, but capturing these ramblings to share or for future use has been a bit tiresome.
I used to do the picture thing. I'd snap a photo on my iPhone and import it through iPhoto. It was okay. Passable. I still had to edit and straighten and, if multiple pictures were needed, create albums to share or e-mail multiple .jpgs.
Then I discovered CamScanner+ and the whole process got easier. Download it to your iPhone and when the time comes to capture your ideas, simply pull up the app and take a picture. The program will straighten and crop photos with a single click. And when it comes to sharing, CamScanner allows you to create multiple-page .PDFs to share by e-mail directly from the program.
It's made things a whole lot easier around the office. Now, if I'm on a roll, I just shoot a picture, wipe the board clean and keep going. When I'm done, there's no transcribing, no trying to recreate my circular logic in a Word Doc or e-mail body. I just send my work out and go from there.
There are three versions in the App store. One is pretty basic but also free. The second gives you more capabilities but will run you $4.99. There's also a Pro version, but I didn't play around with that one yet. If you're a circular thinker like me, then trust you me, it will be one of the best $5 you've ever spent.
