May 1st, 2011 Meeting

Pre-Meeting Notes:

A big thanks goes out to the Patty Bolands staff for the cool new tables they got us for our monthly meetings, as well as to Fujitsu Canada for generously lending us one of their Fujitsu SnapScan 1500M.

Also, Tom’s talk on how to give good bug and request reports has been moved to next month to allow for more time demonstrating the Fujitsu SnapScan S1500M.

Tom Talks About iStat Menus.

iStat Menu is a comprehensive system monitoring utility that allows you to keep a very close eye on practically every aspect of your system’s performance.  Whether it’s the CPU, the hard drives, memory, processors, tasks, etc., you will know what’s happening with your system.

Tom demonstrated various aspects of the utility, showing us its window and menu systems.

Question Asked: Can it tell you the ideal temperatures for the various devices and parts?
Answer: No, but it would be a great feature request.

Version 3.16 of IStat Menu is available for MacOS 10.5 or newer, and iOS devices.

Price: $16 US for the desktop edition; 0.99 CDN for the iPhone app which does work on an iPad.

Tom also quickly mentioned several other system monitoring utilities, including iStat Server, and an iStat Pro widget.  There are many others, but the were the only ones covered at the meeting.

Honourable App Mention

Mobile Mouse is an iOS app which turns your device into a wireless remote for your desktop, acting as a remote trackpad and mouse, allowing you to “… surf the web, browse your photo library, or control your music player, …”

There is a Pro edition which gives you many extra features, but will cost you $1.99 for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and $2.99 for the iPad. Check them out in the iOS App Store.

Podcaster for iPhone (works on iPod Touches and iPads as well) is an app that allows you to manage the way you work with podcasts. Comes as a free app, as well as a $1.99 app.

The Mac Bundles: A new Mac software bundle.

For the low price of $39.95 US, The Mac Bundles bring you ten pieces of software, as well as a possibility of building your own bundle.  Check the site out for more details. Deal ends around the 22nd of May, 2011.

The Fujitsu SnapScan S1500M is a Snap for Scanning

The Fujitsu SnapScan S1500M is an ADF (Automatic Document Feeder) duplex scanner.  This means that you can not only place up to 50 pages of 14 – 34 lb paper in the automatic feeder, but it will scan both sides of each and every page, one at a time, discarding blank pages from its final product on your computer.

It should be noted that before going further into the demonstration of the SnapScan S1500M, that there are a lot of scanners out there which have plenty of bells and whistles, but when you go about putting them to use, you find yourself disappointed with the price you pay for these bonuses.  Sometimes it’s a reduction in speed.  Other times it’s a reduction in the quality of the end-product.

It should also be noted that while Tom did a wonderful job demonstrating the product, the end-results of this demonstration should not be considered a full review.  A more thorough review would be needed, as did Macworld Magazine.

Its scan speed and resolution are 20 ppm (pages per minute) in five modes (Automatic, Normal, Better, Best, and Excellent) which will give you between 150 – 600 dpi for colour and greyscale, and 300 – 1,200 dpi for monochrome.

Test #1: Three black and white photos were scanned.  Three seconds later, the software was attempting to OCR the text which was located on the backsides.

Test #2: Three letter-sized pages of text were scanned in.  It took a total of thirteen (13) seconds to scan and OCR all three pages.  This includes identifying for duplex.

There was a notice that with the black and white photos, there looked to be tiny amount of artifacts, but we could not at the time deduce whether it was because the photos were old, or because the scanner has issues.  The Macworld article does point out as a con, that artifacts were found in their scans.  But they also mention that the OCR documents require editing.  It should be noted that there is no OCR software out there at this date that is 100% perfect.  [Editor’s Note: Whether you’re using OmniPage, ReadIris, or even FineReader, out-of-the-box, no OCR software is perfect.  I have used all three of these over the course of my 16 year tenure with the Federal Government, and we settled with FineReader for one reason: it was simply a lot better, albeit not perfect either.  So if you’re looking for a good piece of OCR software, and you are looking for perfection, you’d be better off just typing it up yourself.]

Here’s what we discovered about the SnapScan S1500M:

  • Has an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF).
  • Does simplex and duplex scanning.
  • Scanning speed was 13 seconds for three pages with OCR test (specifications indicate 20 ppm (pages per minute) one- and two-sided).
  • Quality test showed a minuscule amount of artifacts which may or may not have been caused by the old photos.
  • Scanning resolution: 600 x 600 dpi optical; 150 – 600 dpi for colour and grayscale; 300 – 600 dpi for monochrome.
  • Handles photos and letter-sized paper easily (specifications also include A4, A5, A6, B5, B6, Business Cards, Legal, and Custom Sizes).
  • Interface is USB 2.0 (specifications state it’s also USB 1.1 compatible).
  • It will scan to Evernote, Word, Google Docs, Word, Excel and PDF by default.
  • Saves to JPG, PDF, and PDF Searchable.
  • Can identify if a page being scanned is folded, and will warn you.
  • Software automatically adds “_” for spaces in your default file names.
  • Scanning software provided: CardIris and Adobe Acrobat 8 (both for Mac only).
  • OCR software provided: ABBYY FineReader 4.0 (for Mac only).

For more information please go to Fujitsu’s ScanSnap S1500M product page.

Price: Roughly $500 CDN.

[Editor’s Note: Mariner Software produces a piece of software called Paperless which fully supports the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M.

Your Monthly Shortcuts

  • Cmd + Shift + 3 to save a snapshot of your desktop to a file.
  • Cmd + Ctrl + Shift + 3 to save a snapshot to your clipboard.
  • Cmd + Shift + 4 + click & drag to save a selection to a file.
  • Cmd + Shift + 4 then hold Control to save screen selection to the clipboard.
  • Cmd + Shift + 4 then Space to save selection to desktop.

And that’s it for May’s meeting.  Stay tuned shortly for June’s meeting schedule.