mobile apps | David Lee King

smartphone in action I don’t always realize how odd the times we live in are, in terms of technology (yes, the times we live in are generally pretty weird – yay politics!). But in terms of tech – it’s changing pretty darn fast.

For example …

My youngest daughter is in college, and needed to type in pages of text from a book for a project she’s working on. My wife was helping her with this, and had a thought … so she asked me “do you think there’s some sort of app that will let you take a picture of this page and turn it into text, so we don’t have to type so much?”

Good question! That translated in my techie head to “look for an OCR app,” which I did, and which I found (look for the OCR Scanner in Apple’s App store). It worked great, and just like my wife described – take a picture of the text, push the magical “OCR” button … and we had text. Sweet!

It worked remarkably well. The app apparently didn’t like the letter J, but otherwise it did a great job of turning an image of text into actual text.

Which made me realize just how far we have come! I was an academic librarian early in my career, and we talked about doing OCR scanning of rare books. The scanners were (maybe still are) pretty expensive. It wasn’t always very accurate and definitely required some serious clean-up work.

But this? I already have a phone. The app? Free. Sure, the app could have been better – there wart a slightly wonky process of doing the scan, then copying/pasting the text into an email (there didn’t seem to be a “save” feature in the app). I wouldn’t want to repeat that for a whole book of scanning! But that’s just the first free app I found. I’ll guess there are others that might work better.

Just a realization that if you need something:

Yes, there probably is an app for that.
How weird that I can even say that!
What once was time-consuming, pricey, and took multiple people to do … now fits in my pocket.
It might even be free.

I’ve apparently had my passport for 10 years!

I know this because I have an international trip coming up in February, and my passport was going to expire a week or so before that trip. Go figure.

Time to renew!

Ten years ago, getting a passport photo was a bit of a hassle. I didn’t want to take the photo myself – there are lots of nit-picky rules about getting those photos taken.

So I went to a Kinko’s to get it done, because they offered “passport photo services.”

Remember Kinko’s? They are now FedEx Office stores.

Anyway – my eyes are really light sensitive (I usually wear sunglasses outside), and the flash on the weird camera Kinko’s used to take passport photos was … well, it was really bright.

And I blinked a lot.

So what normally would have been a simple photo (i.e., “look here, click … and you’re done”) took a little longer than normal. Those few minutes were filled with the Kinko’s staff person saying things like “no, you blinked again” and “Can you keep your eyes open for the photo?” etc.

I’m sure it probably only took like 5 minutes, but I was embarrassed and it seemed like it took forever.

“Flash” forward 10 years, and I need another passport photo! This time, instead of having a business take the photo for me, I tried something different – I just used an app on my iPhone.

I did a bit of research, and found two passport-photo-taking apps that were recommended by travel bloggers:

I took photos with both apps – not sure which app I ended up using. But they both worked fine. Both apps have semi-transparent outlines that show where your head and shoulders should be in the photo, etc.

The hardest part? Finding a plain, neutral-colored wall in my house. My wife helped – she took the photos. Then I printed those out at a local Walgreens, mailed in my renewal forms … and now I have a new passport. Simple stuff!

In this case, mobile apps made my life a little easier. I’ll have to add Passport Photos to my list of useful things my smartphone has replaced.

Just a post reflecting our changing technology world!