Winter has arrived in Paris, the grizzlies don’t hibernate, but work in their den. We’re happy to release Genius Scan 4.1, our Winter Edition.
The tagging system we released in Genius Scan 4.0 was visually beautiful, but lacked some convenience. Genius Scan Winter Edition addresses this with the following improvements:
If you’re a lucky owner of an iPad Pro, Genius Scan will resize properly on your giant screen.
If you’re not the lucky owner of an iPad Pro (you’re not alone), we’ve added full support for Split View which means that you can use Genius Scan while multitasking:
We also wanted this update to feel more comfy (for the winter…) so we took advantage of several iOS features that make the iOS experience better:
We hope you’ll enjoy this update. We are looking forward to your comments, please do email us!
There are better ways to spend time in life than to do paperwork. We designed the latest update of Genius Scan with this perspective in mind and we are excited to make it available to you today, for both iOS and Android.
About 6 years ago, we launched the first version of Genius Scan which made life easier for millions of you. No need to own a scanner anymore, no need to walk to the copier in the office anymore, no need to go back to the office after a business trip to scan important documents. The scanner is in your pocket.
Today, we take it a step further by making scanning documents twice as fast!
We achieved that by reinventing the scan flow:
Genius Scan 4 will save about 25 years of humanity’s time each year!
Given how many documents are scanned with Genius Scan, these changes will save more than two years of people’s life every month! Obviously, we love scanning but there are better things in life to do!
In every way, Genius Scan 4 is better than ever:
Genius Scan keeps the clean look you love, but the user interface has been refreshed for faster access to most features.
Previously, Genius Scan would only let you modify your scans right after snapping the photo. That’s a thing of the past now: you can change the cropping area and the enhancement applied to your scan at any time.
Adding a tag is much faster and requires less taps. You can now filter your documents with multiple tags (eg. “expenses” and “travel”) in the main search field. No need to open the side menu anymore.
That’s a feature for power user, but you might be one without knowing it. Smart Document Names let you name your documents with flexibility.
You can now create multiple smart document names and you will choose which one to apply when saving. Patterns can be such as [date]-Expenses or [latitude]-[longitude]-measurement.
Smart Document Names can include a prompt when saving the document. Say you scan a document for a customer, you can use a [customer name prompt]-file smart name, and when you save the document you will be able to enter the customer name in the text field.
The Upload History is now directly accessible from the main screen. It lets you access your previous exports even if you hadn’t saved the scans in Genius Scan.
A new build would not be a new build without bug fixes. While Genius Scan 3 was already rock solid, we’ve fixed dozens of small bugs and annoyances.
We are also excited to announce that Genius Scan for iOS and Android are now on par feature-wise though each of the two apps has been carefully crafted for its platform.
All in all, we are tremendously excited about Genius Scan 4, the new opportunities it opens and particularly the time it’s going to save for our users. We are looking forward to your feedback, please do email us!
For more than 3 years now, hundreds of thousands of users have been using Genius Fax to fax documents from iOS and Android devices. Similarly to what we do with any of our apps, we start every day by answering our user’s support emails. What came up from analyzing their feedback is that Genius Fax was used to fax a lot of different documents: documents with pictures or text only, drawings, vector PDF files or handwritten letters. While most of these documents were sent with high quality, our user’s feedback surfaced a couple cases where the quality wasn’t top-notch. Several months ago, we set up to investigate the issue and improve the legibility of the documents.
To understand our investigation, here is a basic summary of the fax process in Genius Fax:
Faxes can only be sent on phone lines in black and white. Before our investigation, we relied on our provider to perform the document conversion to black and white. They have two options available: basic thresholding or halftone. Both have their pros and cons. Basic thresholding is very legible for text but can result in the loss of details in shaded areas. On the other hand, halftone will preserve shaded areas but will be more blurry on details such as small fonts.
Although these two binarization methods are enough for most digital documents, they are sometimes not ideal for scanned documents. Some Genius Fax users don’t use the document enhancement in Genius Scan or even simply send a picture of their document directly from their phone camera, without any cropping or color enhancement. Without a good lighting, such a picture can lack contrast and be incorrectly binarized by the provider’s algorithms.
Here is a typical picture of a document a user could fax:
Original
Monochrome would completely mess up on this document because it’s not contrasted enough:
Monochrome
Halftone is better but has a poor resolution and small font text is not readable:
Halftone
Luckily, we have a goldmine at our disposal: we have been working and improving for years our proprietary image enhancement in Genius Scan. This algorithm is specifically tuned to improve digitized documents and keep them legible. We now apply that same image enhancement algorithm to all faxes sent with Genius Fax. On our example document, it’s night and day:
Genius Scan enhancement
All the documents faxed with Genius Fax are now pre-processed on our servers with the Genius Scan algorithms and we reduced the issues with fax quality to zero.
We are excited to release a major version of Genius Scan for Android today. This update tackles some user requests and adds some critical features that were already available in the iOS version.
The focus is on security and efficiency: it’s now quicker to create multi-page documents, easier to organize them with the smart document names and the tags and they can be protected with PDF encryption and a passcode lock.
We’ve reworked the scan flow to make it really quick to scan a multi-page document. After scanning the first page, the user decides in which document he wants to save it. Then a tap on the blue ‘+’ button in a document automatically adds the next page to that same PDF document.
A long requested feature: a magnifying glass to adjust your scan crop precisely. For most of your scans, it shouldn’t be needed thanks to the automatic document detection. Whenever you need to manually adjust the crop area, though, it’s frustrating to have your finger hide the corner you’re moving. Not anymore with the magnifying glass.
A feature which has received amazing feedback from power users of the iOS version: the Smart Document Names. Until today, if you created a new document in Genius Scan, it would have been named with the current date and time, with the following format: 2016-05-12 15:15. But what if you needed another format, wanted to add a custom text, or the city you’re currently in? Smart Document Names handle all these cases and lets you create templates from date, time, location and other components.
If you create several templates (to name some of your documents “Invoice_05/12/2016” and some others “Receipt - Paris May 12”), you will be able to choose which Smart Name to apply to your document when it’s created.
Organizing your documents becomes also easier with the tags. You can add labels to your documents based on their category (receipt, invoice, ID…), their status (to review, to process, completed…) or to whom they refer (clients, people, company departments…).
Of course we enabled filtering by tag in the document search: this way, you can quickly access documents with a specific tag:
You can now combine multiple PDF documents together. This makes is easy to combine scans done at different times or coming from different sources.
Users have scanned millions of documents with Genius Scan and we want to make sure their documents are as safe as possible.
It’s now possible to encrypt PDF documents produced by Genius Scan with a password. Without that password, exported documents cannot be opened.
The app itself can also be locked with a passcode to prevent anyone from accessing sensitive scans. We still advise you to protect your device with a password or any other security measure (fingerprint, pattern…) because it’s a much stronger protection. The Genius Scan passcode is rather intended to protect your scans from people who borrow your device, not from expert hackers.
Genius Scan for Android was started close to two years after the iOS version. Yet it is a tool used by millions of users. We are extremely happy to bring both platforms to the same level. As usual, we are already at work on the next update!
As for you, you have no more excuses not to scan your paper documents and organize them! Download Genius Scan for free!