What’s new: Scanner App

[DBXCommunity]

There’s nothing worse than forgetting an idea, or losing an important piece of paper. The one thing we never lose, and usually don’t forget is our phone - so now with the Dropbox Scanner App, you can save, organize, and share important documents right from your phone. Dropbox Scan is a standalone app that lets you quickly transform all your physical documents into high-quality PDFs. It’s everything you love about doc scanner in the Dropbox app—but even faster and easier to use. The app is available to iOS users in English-speaking markets, and you can sign into Dropbox with your corp email or a Basic, Plus, or Professional account. Whatever the situation, whether it’s a piece of paper, a receipt or even a whiteboard of notes, you can conveniently save high quality scans to Dropbox.

• Receipts - Take the pain out of your next expense report, and save receipts as you go. 
• Whiteboard drawings - Never feel rushed in a meeting or presentation again. Just use the doc scanner, and an image of the whiteboard will be uploaded as a PDF or PNG to Dropbox.
• Contracts, bills, and invoices - Now your filing cabinet can be digital, and take up a lot less space. And of course, you can share it with others who need access. 
• Photos - We’ve all taken a photo of a photo, but now you can scan them and keep them safe, with the same phone - just better results. 
• Business cards - Never lose an important connection! Easily upload business cards from meetings, conferences and trade shows—right from your mobile device.
• Magazine clippings - Instead of ripping out a piece of a magazine or newspaper scrap you will inevitably lose, just scan the page or excerpt into Dropbox using the document scanner.
• Personal cards and notes - Scan those thoughtful personal notes into Dropbox for keepsakes without the clutter.
• Handouts - Scan in materials from classes or seminars for easy reference— they’re a lot less likely to get crumpled or torn in a digital setting! 
• Napkin sketches - Never lose your next big idea again.

There’s a Smart crop feature, Smart folder suggestions based on where you've saved recent scans, and you can even edit the scan for clarity! 

You can probably tell we’re a little excited about this one! Which of these uses are you excited about? 

[Gregg T.]

Android camera-based app’s are far more expensive to develop than iOS apps since there are 100’s of combinations of camera hardware and brands to test in the Android world. iOS has 3, and targeting only 2 of them gets your app running on 80% of the deployed hardware.

Plus, Dropbox is interested in secure environments, and indeed is required to ONLY use secured platforms for some of their contracts (but not for their consumer versions); Android, OTOH, is virus-ridden. iOS DOES have a few viruses but Apple has far more robust mitigation efforts than Google & the Android companies have.

[Henry Pearce]

Why would you even considder pandering to IOS when it only has a 27% of the market and Android has 71%?  The only reasion I can thik of is some affilliation to this minority opperating system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_operating_systems

[Gregg T.]

Because rather than having a single set of standards to adhere to, such as in iOS, developers must understand and try to make their applications compatible with a wide variety of hardware and software configurations.

So it’s not actually 72%, but 100’s of smaller markets, each of which must be individually tested for compatibility against a Dropbox app. If a developer finds a problem on the 100th device, she needs to test that fix against all of the 99 other devices. Not only is this tedious and expensive, but it is a really good way to burn out your developers.

See?

[Badjer]

The ones I would be excited about would be photos, sketches, whiteboard, handouts, etc if it means that you can search thru it via search/ OCR/ whatever term you want to use.

To say that you want to digitalize things, to never lose a big idea, never be rushed about losing your meeting notes only works so far with scanned notes. If all it does is convert it to png/ pdf/ etc then it only helps to a certain point. Basically becomes a dumping ground since the more info you have the harder it is to find if you are limited to folders only without tags or the ability to add text notes

Searching within the images makes this very useful. Many times I use notes in class etc but once again it is only helpful to a given point if the OCR cannot search the handwritten text

It would also be helpful if there was an ability to convert images already in DB to searchable images vs finding the paper doc again (if you still have it) & scanning it. 

[Gregg T.]

i have not tried the OCR features, but if it turns it to work for your situation, you can snap pictures of your image-based document (already in dropbox) by displaying it on a second screen. so open the document on a computer/tablet, zoom to the largest size, and use your phone to snap the picture into your app. you’d have to page thru the document (what a pain for a long document!), and images might lose crispness, but if it saves time overall, it might be worthwhile.

finding the right document, especially if you have lots of them in a small number of folders, is a challenging issue for me. i try to pack essential “keywords” into the filename, but usually that’s not enough. you could consider using the dropbox searchable comments/tags to store more keywords. the issue for me is remembering the keywords a year later when it’s time to search. google had a feature to index files — i don’t know if they do support that — by installing the google search engine in your computer so you’re not exposing your private files to the world. dropbox should replace their search engine with google’s engine, i think.

[Badjer]

I have not been able to make comments come up in the search results. It was one of my thoughts as well to create a hack tag system of sorts. Would be greatbidea if it could work

[Gregg T.]

I’ve read that searching tags only works in the desktop app, but not thru the website. I wonder if the original author who started this was using windows comments and not dropbox tags. in any case, if the feature is not implemented everywhere, it’s somewhat useless for my usage patterns.

[Badjer]

When I talked to support team they told me that search bar still beta phase & search in comments & spaces not supported yet. Tried playing around but can't get it to work on any device or platform but didn't dive further after team info

I will love these ideas once search improves for sure. I am in same boat that if can't use everywhere would create friction

[Andrek70]

The most phones & PC'S out there not ios why start with that?

[Gregg T.]

I’ve developed software for all platforms but MacOSX, and I can tell you that Windows app’s are horrible to write since the platform is so fractured. Not only are there multiple versions of Windows (7, 8, 10), but there are 7 flavors of Win 10, and a developer never knows which .NET version is supported on each flavor. Some users can’t upgrade .NET, or it can require multiple reboots to install it. Sometimes installing a .NET version will cause other app’s to fail, and some .NET installs can not be uninstalled, so you’ve just bricked an app, angering users.

The resources required to develop Windows app’s used to be simple such that a single developer could handle it; now it requires a team to write and test an app that works for 90% of deployments, and that’s never going to cover hardware you don’t have, or drivers you can’t get.