Dok-Dok
A new Kickstarter project has appeared
recently which aims to solve the on-the-go need for a document
scanner in a fairly imaginative way. Most business users, whether you
travel for your company or for yourself, have regular needs to scan
paper documents, whether they be contracts or even just your hotel
receipt. There are quite a few hardware devices available out there,
typically handheld scanners that take some time to run over your
documents and require a laptop to use. Dok-Dok is a new hardware
device which, if funded, will create an iPad scanner which doubles as
a case.
The whole device is a large aluminum
case meant to carry around your iPad and some paper documents. When
unfolded, it turns into a holder for the tablet and those documents
so you can then use the iPad’s camera to take pictures. Dok-Dok is
made so that the documents are held vertically, just at the right
distance to be seen by the camera. It supports both single and
multi-page documents, and the iPad app will take pictures, turning
them into PDF files which can then be shared to iCloud, Dropbox, etc.
Of course, this is hardly the first
type of scanning system for the iPad. There are already a lot of
software apps that you can download which will take a picture and
convert the result into a PDF. They don’t include a hardware device,
but many of them are smart enough to take any angle into account and
still detect the sheet of paper. So if you don’t need the huge case,
it would make a lot more sense to stick to a simple app. Of course,
if you do happen to need the case, then perhaps this is something
worthwhile for you. Also, the advantage of having such a contraption
means your scanning process is much faster than if you need to hold
the iPad in your hands, or have the app always try to focus on the
documents. Right now, the Kickstarter project is trying to raise
£7,000 with 22 days to go.
