Jack Lee's Blog

Art-Copy Still Working Great with new All-In-Ones.

Jack Lee — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 21:03:00 +0000

This article was reprinted from:
http://www.ocdprogrammer.com/post/2009/08/08/Canon-Pixma-MP620B-Blue-Edition.aspx

A few weeks ago my sturdy Dell desktop computer from 2001 decided to finally die. The unfortunate part of this is that it was my only real PC with XP on it, to host my Lexmark X6170 printer on my network. The Lexmark X6170 has been a faithful member of my house for around six years. With no issues until we started upgrading our computers with Vista. The X6170 was only partially upgraded to work on Vista and even then was fairly unusable. Even though I was a key member of developing the drivers that ran the X6170, and many of the first few generations of Lexmark’s All-In-One printers, while at Jetsoft Development… it was time to replace it.
While my family was out one night, we were fairly close to Best Buy and I figured I would stop in and price a few printers. One of the first ones I saw was the Canon Pixma MP620B Blue Edition. It supported ‘wireless printing.’ Which was intriguing to me, as my house is networked by wireless. After reading over the box I saw that it also supported USB and wired printing. It was on sale for just $99.99, a savings of $50. Setting it up was not trivial but the directions that came with it made it pretty clear.
Once I had the printer configured on my wireless network and on my personal computer it was time to install it on my wife’s. Any installs after the first one are pretty trivial and went pretty smooth. Now all the computers in my house are able to talk to this printer without issue.
When I bought this I assumed that only printing was able to be done over the network because scanning is not a simple thing to program for on a local connection, much less a network connection. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that this machine actually does support scanning and printing without having to be directly connected to a computer. I was also surprised to find out that the machine also supports ‘pushing’ documents to computers. So if my wife wants to scan a document to her file system she can do it from the printer and does not have to be around her computer. The printer will scan and save the file on her hard drive.
The next added benefit is the numerous memory card slots on the box. Not only can you access those from the printers 2.5 inch LCD screen but you can access them as a shared drive on any connected computer. This saves battery life on the camera as it doesn’t have to put the power out to copy the files from the memory card to the computer.
My initial ratings on this computer is certainly a 4.75/5.00. The software is a bit clunky, but most software bundled with these devices are. Which leads me to my final point on this machine. When I figured out that it was also a scan over the network printer, I made another assumption that my third party scanning applications would work with it. That they didn’t have valid TWAIN drivers to allow for that. I was wrong again. I opened up my favorite application, again one that I had the pleasure of developing for several years at Jetsoft Development, Art-Copy. Sure enough I get the simplistic interface and advanced features of Art-Copy and the convenience of a network scanner
I certainly recommend this product if you are in the market for an affordable, and flexible all in one device.

Microsoft is Now Writing Software to Annoy People

Jack Lee — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:26:59 +0000

A law office uses auto naming for it document management system

Jack Lee — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 13:33:21 +0000

I recently saw a posting for a law office who was looking for a custom piece of software that would renumber single page tiff files (and maybe text files) from their scanner into a specific numbering system (CTRL00001.tif, CTRL00002.tif, etc.) for their law offices case document management system. When I saw this project posted, I realized that with very small changes to their process, our Art-Copy Scripting software would do this out of the box saving them thousands of dollars they would have to pay for custom software. We specifically designed the numbering system of Art-Copy scripting to handle these types of needs. I contacted them and told them what Art-Copy Scripting would and would not do for them. If they wanted the extra stuff, they could buy our SDK and modify it which would still be less than an entire custom development project.

They tried Art-Copy Scripting and had a few questions about file ordering in windows. It turns out that if you select a group of files in windows by selecting the 1st file and then holding shift and selecting say the 17th file in a standard file open dialog, the will come in the order of 17, 1, 2, 3 because 17 is the last file the mouse selected. If you select then 17th file then hold shift and select 1st file or just do a select all, they will come in the correct order. Our tech support loves these types of customer tests.

Once they figured out this issue, they purchased Art-Copy Scripting out of the box and are able to use it ASIS for their document management numbering system as well as other applications around the office.

Art-Copy scripting is a very powerful and flexible product. It is always nice as a developer to see it doing what it is designed for.

Learning To Code

Jack Lee — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 15:16:33 +0000

With the internet, there has never been a better time to be a programmer. Before, you would have to spend a lot of time in college libraries and buy a lot of expensive books in book stores. Then the internet and Google came along, and now you can search for almost anything and find a code sample and documentation for what you wanted to do.

Now Microsoft has taken learning on the internet to a whole new level. Microsoft has come out with a product called Microsoft Virtual Labs at the website:
http://www.microsoft.com/events/vlabs/default.mspx

With Microsoft Virtual Labs you actually go through a lab-like experience where you are given an Internet Explorer interface to a virtual machine running through the browser. Microsoft gives you a PDF to follow along and 90 minutes to complete the tasks. It can be from configuring IIS to cache web pages and check the statistics to programming C# web forms in .NET framework 3.0. It’s an excellent learning tool for technology.

This means you can not only get documentation but hands on learning without buying anything. It still will not do the work for you but if someone really wants to learn a new skill, they have the ability to do so; it is a great time to be alive and programming.

PDF Page Layout and OPI

Jack Lee — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 13:53:18 +0000

I was working with Postscript in the late 1980’s. You would think with technology this old everything has already been done. However, with the advent of PDF and the internet, everything old is new again.

We have been doing work for a digital printing seller and a seller of products with custom screen printing on them. The two customers have web sites in which customers can go to a web page and use the page to create various cards and other printed material. The problem both printing vendors are facing is that the technology to put all of these elements together on a web site is very different that what the technology it takes to print them on a digital printing press and be able to make money doing it in volume.

With web content to printing press, we have been working on solutions for a number of problems:

1. What you see on a HTML web page is not a printable layout because it flows when the screen changes.
2. When someone works with images on the web they need to work in low resolution so they don’t wait forever when moving around images.
3. Even if a master PDF image is created on the web site, you usually print two or more on one press sheet.
4. For each user to be able to design custom material on the web, whoever prints it needs to be able to do it as automated as possible. If the printing vendor has to open every customer design in Photoshop or Quark, he will lose money.

Because of these problems, we have designed a command line OPI (Open Prepress Interface) program and a command line page layout program. The command line OPI program will take any high resolution images and make a low resolution PDF which can be easily worked with on a web site. When the user selects this image on the web and the server sends it down for printing, the digital printing press will substitute the high resolution image so the final product does not look jagged. The command line page layout program will take a blank press sheet or background image and allow you to paste various pages or images on top of it. When you put a batch file around this command line page layout program, a web site can automate the creation of various jobs press sheets.

For each of these jobs some custom programming was required. At some point, we will probably include a generic version of them in our Collate product either as menu selection or utility programs that come along with it.

For anyone who needs OPI or Automated Page Layout for content from a web site, these programs will be good addition but you may still need some custom programming to really make it all work for you. If you are interested you can contact us by visiting www.JetSoftDev.com or www.ScanHelp.com.

Medical Automation - Which one of our software products does this?

Jack Lee — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 20:59:41 +0000

Sometimes we find out software does so much that we forget all that it does.

We had a customer call up the other day from a medical billing office. She was getting about 20 images each day with different patient numbers inside of the images. She was wondering if our Jetsoft Collate product could read each of these in, recognize the number, and file them in the appropriate directory. Our tech person explained that this is not what Collate did. Collate is a product for splitting, merging, editing PDF and TIFF files. He explained that we could write a custom application to do this but it would be a few thousand dollars. They talk a little further and then said good bye; End of phone call.

But after the call, we started talking about this in the office and realized that while Jetsoft Collate would not do what she wanted, our Art-Copy Scripting Edition would accomplish most of the tasks required. With Art-Copy Scripting Edition, you can specify a file as an input, specify an area for automnaming to ocr, and then use that ocr text as a basis for saving the file. This was well along the line of what the customer wanted to process her patient information for medical billing.

We have since emailed her back from her Collate download record and are waiting on a response.

So this brings up the point, if it is hard for us to figure out which one of our products will do what the customer wants, think how hard it is for the customer.

At www.ScanHelp.com, we work really hard at trying to give lots of details to help the customer decide which product is best for their needs but maybe all of that detail is a little confusing. We are looking into developing some type of overall comparison chart to help our customers. But if you ever have any questions about our software, you can always contact our Sales Department.

P.S. On this same topic, we have already done one automation project for medial records. A customer of ours was looking for a project which would scan the front and back of patient cards and output them to both a digital file and to the printer in one page front and back. He needed this to happen automatically because they process over a 100 cards a day. We did this for under $2000 and it probably will save him about 4 hours of time a day to pay someone to accumulate all these medical card copies manually.

Adobe Capture is being discontinued(?)

Jack Lee — Thu, 31 May 2007 20:36:58 +0000

I found out recently Adobe was canceling Adobe Acrobat Capture.

Adobe Acrobat Capture was really the first scan to PDF program that scanned an image in front and put OCR copy in the background giving a searchable file with all the graphic elements of the original. Capture also had a limitation for the number of pages you could under its license. If you went over the license, you have to buy another copy. Adobe Acrobat Capture also had many scanning specific features. Many corporations used Adobe Acrobat Capture to put their documents in the company document management/intranet systems.

Recently Adobe has decided to cancel Capture and roll the scanning into the Standard version of Adobe Acrobat. Many of the Scanning automation features are not making the cut and while you can buy the older version of Capture it does not work well with many of the newer scanners.

Because of these limitation and that a lot of people don’t want to pay the full price of Adobe Acrobat, many customer have been looking at Art-Copy Enterprise and Scripting to do their document capture. While Art-Copy does not have every feature that Adobe Acrobat Capture had, it does have most of them and we are working hard to add any feature we don’t have to be able offer a viable alternative.

This brings me to the question of why is Adobe canceling Capture? My first thought is money; they can make everyone buy a full version of Adobe Acrobat Standard for each scanner. The other is that I know from experience, it is easier to develop and support one product instead of two. The last is that while scanning is probably not a growing market, document management is so they are focusing more on their growing products.

Let me know what your thoughts and experiences are with Adobe Acrobat.

Vista - The Bleeding Edge?

Jack Lee — Fri, 11 May 2007 15:20:00 +0000

We are getting ready to release our first Vista tested software next week - Art-Copy Scripting 4.0. Vista really messed up our development cycle. Vista broke our activation system so we had to wait for the vendor who provides our activation system to come out with their Vista version so we could come out with Vista software.

Also on Vista compatibility, we have been working with a printer company who is developing a new CD printer. Their first release will not support Vista. Many of our users who upgraded to Vista have found their scanners no longer work and big companies like HP have no plans to update their scanner drivers.

Which brings me to my point, if you are getting a new computer with all new hardware, only using MS Office software and buying from one vendor like Dell. You might be OK but if you have an existing computer don’t upgrade unless you want to buy lots of new third party software and hardware. Vista may be released but it is six years away from being good for the average person and by then Microsoft will have released their next operating system and we will do this all over again.

P.S. Dell has recently said it would be offering XP again as an OS option on its web site because so many customers were requesting it but as of the 15th of May, when I tried to buy a Dell XP computer for my father in-law, Vista was all that was available. It must be nice to be able to force software down our throats.

Developing Software

Jack Lee — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 19:47:02 +0000

Have you ever been waiting for the next release of a software package?

Have you ever wondered why it takes so long?

It has been real apparent to the me the last few months. We have been in the process of upgrading our Art-Copy Scripting Edition and Art-Copy SDK. We have added some really good features such as OCR, Scan to Existing databases, Image naming.

We have had the core of coding done now for about three months. Unfortunately, since we release only quality software, we have to test for as long as it took us to code. This means over the last few months we have been fixing little bugs. Just about the time you think you have a final release, you find a minor bug or a bug that results from strange combination of settings happens and you start all over again.

Even after the final, we still have to do manual and web site updates

Stay tuned.. It a great release. Hopefully this month or next.

I just hope I can wait that long.

Ease of Use

Jack Lee — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 03:27:38 +0000

Sometimes you forget what a product does well. We spend a lot of planning new features for products but the basic uses are sometimes the best.

I receive a call from a legal software developer who was use Art-Copy Enterprise with an expensive Ricoh scanner to scan to a tiff file. He wanted to use that tif file in his docket management software. He told me that all the white space was missing around the image. I explained to him that he needed to turn auto crop off on the front panel. He turned it off and it worked perfectly for him. I spent a few more minutes telling him how to deskew the image so it would come out straight without having to straighten the originals in his scanner.

He spend the next 10 minutes telling me how much he loved Art-Copy Enterprise. How much easier it was to use than the software that came with his $10,000 scanner and how easy it was to scan and how many of his users will be able to benefit from this software.

It good to get a call like that to remind you how much people love your software.

P.S. I had almost the same call about a month ago with a expensive Fujitsu scanner user that Fujitsu tech support had recomended our software to him.