A camera that knows it is looking at a card
Scanning used to hand you over to your phone's own camera app: no guide, no idea whether the card was framed, and a twelve-megapixel picture of a countertop with a card somewhere in it. The scanner now has a camera of its own, with the card's outline drawn on the screen, the shot taken when the card is in place, and everything outside the outline cropped away before anything reads it.
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Why there was never a guide before
Tapping the shutter opened your phone’s camera app. That is the fastest thing to open and it works on every handset, which is why it was the right first answer, but it is your phone’s screen, not ours. There was nowhere to draw an outline on it, no way to see what the lens was seeing, and no way to take the photograph ourselves at the moment the card was in place.
So the scanner now brings its own.
Three things that follow from having our own camera
The card has somewhere to go
An outline in the real proportions of a business card, with everything outside it dimmed. You can see whether the card is square, whether it is sharp, and whether the whole thing is inside, before you take it, rather than at review.
It takes the photograph itself
It watches inside the outline several times a second, looking for enough detail to actually be a card and then a moment of stillness that means it is being held rather than moved. Hold the phone over a card and it goes. The shutter button is still there and always will be, with a switch for anyone who would rather press it. An automatic camera you cannot overrule is worse than no automatic camera.
The table is cropped away
This matters more than it sounds. Cards get photographed on whatever is to hand, and the reader was spending its effort on the surface instead of the card: one photograph taken on a brown cloth produced pages of nonsense read out of the weave. Only the outline is kept now, so the background is gone before anything looks at it.
And the photographs are a sensible size at last
A phone hands over twelve megapixels (four and a half megabytes) for a piece of card the size of a credit card. Nothing was making it smaller, so that is what sat in your phone, what went over the exhibition wifi, and what the reader tried to work through.
At a stall that is the difference between the cards going up and the cards waiting. Forty cards used to be a hundred and eighty megabytes to push over wifi shared with four hundred other people. It is now around ten.
Photographs taken any other way (chosen from your gallery, or through your phone’s camera where ours cannot run) are reduced on the way in too.
When a field lands in the wrong box
The reader gets the words right far more often than it gets the field right. It will read a street address perfectly and then file it as the company name. Until now the only way out of that was to select the text in one box, cut it, find the right box and paste, on a phone, with somebody waiting at your stall.
Every field now carries a dropdown of the lines the reader actually saw on that card. If the name has ended up in the job title, open the dropdown against Name and pick it. One tap. It is the same idea as matching up columns when you import a spreadsheet: the lines off the card are the columns, the fields are where they belong.
Where a field has a shape, the list is narrowed to match: only lines containing an @ are offered for the email address, only web-shaped lines for the website. A list of everything against a field that can only be one thing is just more to read.
Website and address are on the review screen for the first time. Both were being read off the card and stored, and there was nowhere to see or correct either of them.
Does this affect anything you already have?
No card already scanned was changed, re-read or re-cropped. All of this applies to cards photographed from now on.
The app will ask for camera permission the first time, which it never needed before, because your phone’s camera app was asking on its own behalf. Refuse it and the scanner quietly goes back to using your phone’s camera. It will not keep asking.
Install version 1.3.18. All of this is in the screens the app carries inside it, so it does not reach a phone until the app is updated. Settings → App update.
One honest note: the automatic shutter has been built and tested, but not yet at a real event with a real queue. If it fires while you are still moving, or makes you wait too long, tell us how it feels. That is the kind of thing only a stall can teach.
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