There are some obvious first steps one can take to cut down on the amount of paper used on a day-to-day basis if you’re an iOS user, like switching to electronic bill pay, borrowing eBooks from the library, subscribing to electronic magazines in Newsstand, and using online loyalty programs with iOS Passbook. But choosing up front not to receive or use paper is not the challenge; the question is what do you do when someone hands you paper.
Sometimes you are handed a stack of forms to fill out, receipts to keep track of, business cards to file and other forms of paper that you have to decide what to do with. The following will offer up some options for turning that pile of paper into digital documents as well as some measures you can take to help stop the cycle of passing paper back and forth in your day-to-day digital life.
Document scanners
Scanning apps - The fact that six of the top paid apps in the Business category of the App Store are scanning apps and business card readers says a lot. My personal favorite for quite some time now has been JotNot Pro ($2.99 Universal). I like the way it can manually be adjusted to identify the corners of a document with a magnifying glass and have come to appreciate the fine-tuning capabilities that the app has to offer. Scanner Pro by Readdle ($6.99 Universal) is another document scanning app that I use. It can automatically upload all new scans to a cloud service of your choice. The convenience of automatically saving my scans online may in the end win me over as I have been using Scanner Pro more and more lately.
Traditional scanners - Traditional tabletop scanners still produce better results than scanners that use the built-in camera. Many can also handle multipage documents which can become quite tedious with a camera. One thing that flatbed scanners don’t have to deal with is bending the photo due to the distortion of the image based on the 3D perspective it was taken. Most scanners now come as part of an all-in-one device, which can be a tad ironic, as the device that prints can also be used to make printing obsolete. Epson iPrint, HP All-in-One Printer Remote and the Brother iPrint&Scan apps can all enable your iOS devices to access their products’ network scanners.
Business cards - Tiny index cards with just enough information printed on them to communicate one’s contact information continues to be a very popular custom in business today. The problem is that keeping a stack of business cards around just is not practical. ABBYY’s Business Card Reader ($5.99 iPhone) and InSig’s CamCard HD ($7.99 iPhone) are two apps that specialize in turning images of business cards into contact records in your contacts app. One app that I have used in the past quite often was LinkedIn’s CardMunch. Sadly this service will cease to exist starting July 11, 2014. You will have to transition your information over to an Evernote account.
Forms and annotations
Smile on my Mac - One of the companies that have helped me keep my world paper free are the creators of PDFpen ($4.99 iPhone, $14.99 iPad). With the ability to edit and change original PDF documents as well as create and fill out forms, add text and sign documents with your signature, PDFpen has become an indispensable paperless tool on all of my devices. Their auxiliary app, PDFpen Scan+ with OCR ($6.99 Universal) can be used to turn a photo of a document into text. While the scanner built into PDFpen Scan+ is not quite as good as the scanner in JotNot or Scanner Pro, its OCR capabilities are really good.
GoodReader 4 - Another good app that can be used to annotate your documents is GoodReader 4 ($6.99 Universal). Text boxes, notes, highlights, drawings and some rudimentary shapes are all available. The really great feature of GoodReader 4 however is its ability to access a wide variety of online cloud based document services. While not quite as advanced as PDFpen when it comes to editing PDF files, it does have the ability to sync with individual folders of an online service rather than downloading and syncing the entire account. It is a good app to have around and supports the “Open In” feature for several different file formats. It is the closest thing to a “Finder” you will get to on iOS. It even supports zip files.
Selecting a good stylus - Even before there was paper, using a handheld instrument was a natural part of writing. There are several really good note taking apps (reviewed previously) that benefit from using a stylus. The Jot Touch, ($119), Wacom Intuos Creative Stylus ($99) and the Pogo Connect ($79) are all bluetooth stylus that provide additional levels of pressure to your writing experience. Getting use to a good stylus can help minimize the urge to grab paper and pen when you have an idea to jot down. Finding the right note taking app to go with it makes all the difference in the world. Some apps are better at handwriting, while other are better at drawing. Try a few out before giving up on your stylus all together.
Just avoid printing
Use markdown editors - The most popular document editors are still based on producing documents that are meant to be printed. Microsoft’s Word and Apple’s own Pages are two such examples. There are other document solutions that focus less on how big a piece of paper is, and more on formatting text for online communications. This new class of editors support what is called Markdown, a plain text formatting syntax. Byword ($4.99 Universal) is one such app. Byword also supports TextExpander ($4.99 Universal) and has a series of keyboard shortcuts to quickly format text. It is one of the apps that I definitely feel is leading the way to defining what the new office suite for mobile apps should be.
Printopia without a printer - It use to be that ecamm’s Printopia ($19.95) was a way to turn your older printer into an AirPrint printer. That was before almost every printer started supporting AirPrint. Now it is a great utility to “print” files from your iOS devices to your Mac instead. There are many different configurations that are supported. In addition to your Mac’s hard drive, Printopia can be used to save PDF versions of printable content on your iOS device directly to Dropbox or Evernote. This means that any iOS app that can print, can print to Printopia and save its output digitally rather than on paper.
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