I want to take notes on paper, then take a photo of the paper and have my phone notice a symbol and take an action based on that. Say, a checkbox that tells it to send the image as an email attachment, or assign the image to a category/tag.
I’ve done something similar on the desktop before, using zonal or regional OCR to detect something at a certain place on the page, but I haven’t been able to find any way to do this in iOS. It would be something like smart stickers, but where any symbol is drawn by hand or a pre-printed box is checked. Something like that.
Any ideas? I’m all Googled out…
[EDIT: would be similar to Moleskine Smart Notebooks, but with any hand-drawn symbol, pre-printed symbols not required]
This sounds like a really cool idea, so I’m mainly posting to a) see if you would be willing to share your desktop tricks/tips and b) to hang around for the solution to your iOs process.
Have you ever looked at a Rocketbook? I keep a wipable one handy as a notebook for work when on calls where my mechanical keyboard might be too loud and I have to keep my mic on, and as a general scratchpad. The mobile scanning app on iOS picks up on a symbol at the bottom of a page to determine what action to take - but note that it isn’t an infinite choice.
There are varying options under each potential destination.
My desktop work involved scanning a region of each page for a number. When the number changed, that triggered a new file to be created/saved. It automated the process of having all papers from one account placed in a separate document. I can not remember what software had this feature, but it kept me sane. We were taking massive data from a database, printing it (1500 pages or so) then manually scanning it back into PDF files. I talked a programmer into creating a way to skip the whole printing part. Then the boss decided she wanted the print copies any way. headdesk
I ran across Rocketbook while originally Googling this issue. I was hoping to use any paper and pen combo, versus specialized paper and pen. Intriguing, though!
If you use Devonthink, I wonder if a rule would work? If you build in your iOS to upload to Dropbox you could have a series of Hazel rules to get it into Devonthink to set off the rules?
