Do you love the Apple Notes document scanner, but would you like more flexibility in sending the scans to email, messages, files, or other apps? Then Simple Scan is for you. Simple Scan is the quick, easy way to scan paper documents to optimized, searchable PDF documents (or images) and send them almost anywhere – without extra steps, and without cluttering your Notes library or the Files app with scans you don’t need to keep around.
Downloaded and subscribed. Nice concept. I can see SOOO much integration with drafts.
The lack of bells and whistles is very welcome given the bloatware most scanning apps have become.
My wish list for next step features: the careful, slow and thoughtful introduction of naming shortcuts and templates would be great - most of my scans are of things that need to go live someplace permanent and I use Hazel on a Dropbox folder to do that … using templated naming would be a great way to make sure everything works smoothly.
Automatic purchase, I used it to scan two documents today!
I certinly understand the goal of the app to get a scanned file to someone else. For my use case, I would like to see one of the pre-addressed destinations be a folder in iCloud Drive.
Unfortunately it doesn’t work for me. I can launch the app but nothing happens when I press the button!
I can’t even access the settings!
Just says I have 5 scans left.
I’m on the latest version from the App Store; version 1.0.3
Any idea?
Yes, that would allow files to be uploaded to apps like DEVONthink too which would be a game changer for me…
I read a review for Simple Scan on MacStories and as soon as I reached the name of the developer it was downloaded and lifetime subscription purchased.
An automatic lifetime subscription for me once I saw that it was Agile Tortoise.
I am able to do a scan and then save it to a folder in iCloud without any problem. It remembers the last folder used (I set up one called iCloud > Scan).
Unfortunately, I can’t. My scanning use cases are often even simpler: I just need the text to send to another application, which is usually Drafts.
So what I would need is a button that allows me to retrieve, share, save, etc. the OCR’d text and discard the scanned page.
I would also like to be able to choose whether I want the whole page or just a part of it. And if that were possible, additional handles on the sides and not just in the corners of the cropping area would be extremely handy.
But maybe Simple Scan just isn’t meant for me. Which is sad, because I love the general approach of easy scanning and quick sharing to other apps or places.
Just a reminder for anyone predominantly looking to scan text and send to Drafts, there is built-in functionality in Drafts.
Simple Scan I think is more about sharing on the complete scan (image and optionally text). Unlike Drafts, you’re going to want to have a destination in mind when you scan as the scan is purposefully transient.
Thanks, @mikek and of course @sylumer. I know that Draft can scan and OCR, I use this feature quite a lot.
I just thought I might use Simple Scan similar to Drafts—“Where Scan Starts”, i. e. for all sorts of scans and all formats, including the OCRed text. It is not meant to do the latter, that’s okay.
My suggestion of extra handles at the sides of the cropping area came from the same approach: I often do not want “the document” but just a part of it. For the same reason I would have liked an option in the settings to set auto scanning off (this goes for Drafts’ScanDocument too).
That would indeed be great. For a long time in my workflow DEVONthink has been the big beast that keeps all sort of data. And small, fast and versatile apps feed the beast with content—ahead of them all Drafts for texts created by myself as it is the fastest and most versatile.
But as far as I can tell this would only work as a one click general Share to DEVONthink or via a X-Callback-URL to get the scan into a specific place in a DEVONthink database. For the same reason Bookmarks in Drafts don’t work with DEVONthink.
And I am not sure if Introducing X-Callback-URLs to Simple Scan wouldn’t counteract its intended simplicity.
You can save very fast to DEVONthink already. As long as you don’t need the destination File otherwise, that is. Save by Destination File once in DEVONthink and Simple Scan will remember the destination.
