Version 2.78 was released to the App Store world-wide last night. We have two exciting announcements to make: a brand new Web Sync 2.0 card management is ready, and we teamed up with Vistaprint to provide a one year free Web Sync subscription (or a free premium upgrade to Lite users) to anyone who makes a purchase via www.vistaprint.com/scanbizcards – details below.
What’s New
Web Sync 2.0
The Web Sync site has been enhanced with such a long list of features that it’s now very clearly a (web-based) desktop application on its own right, and includes many functions not possible on the iPhone. Here are the highlights:
- Completely revamped card display and edit screens: elegant, easy to use, auto-saving changes, one-click zooming on images while editing
- Contact-style information: contact properties are presented in a consistent order regardless of where the info was on the card
- List View: in addition to the Web Sync 1.0 Thumbnail View and Map View, we added List View – a tabular text list showing more information about cards, easier to sort visually by various properties
- 3D Card Flow View: similar to the 3D view within the app. This one is definitely a Beta version (you’ll see)!
- New export abilities:
- Export a card to VCard: gives you full control to add the cards you want, when you want, to your desktop contact app such as Outlook or the Mac Address Book, freeing you from the intricacies of syncing via iTunes
- Export multiple cards to Excel: just like the iPhone function
- Bulk upload: you can now upload multiple card photos directly from your desktop into your Web Sync account
- Sharing: you can now define groups of cards you wish to share with colleagues. You tag the cards you want, give the collection a name and you get a URL everyone can access from any browser.
- Speed: the Web Sync UI now loads very, very fast. We have upgraded our servers for increased availability and speed.
If you already have cards backed up to Web Sync and have not accessed them lately, they miss you! Pay them a visit at www.scanbizcards.com/websync – if you forgot your pwd, there is a link on that page to reset it. And if you never tried Web Sync, watch the cards of our demo account at www.scanbizcards.com/webdemo, the instructions for the demo are “click everywhere” and see what happens!
Auto-crop Images
Until this update cropping an image before scanning only affected the scan and the image thumbnail in list view but not the image itself you see when opening it again later and you would have needed to crop the image to adjust it. Now cropping before scanning also crops the image itself, saving an extra step. Note: this is permanent so don’t crop away parts of the image you wish you didn’t! If you’d rather keep the old behavior, there is (yet another) setting for that (“Crop Image On Scan”).
Displaying Preprocessed Image
As you know, images are processed before performing text recognition. It’s an important part of the process and for problem cards text recognition failures often originate at the image processing stage. We thought it could be useful to show the processed image to help you identify problem areas in the photo so this image is now displayed during scanning. You can turn that off by disabling the “Show Processed Image” setting. Note: we are working on improving our image processing so problems you’ll spot now may be solved in a future update but do report issues as you encounter them.
Calendar Times Bug Fix
A nasty iOS4 bug was setting times that were off by a few hours for calendar reminders, now fixed. Heads up: in an update soon we are going to do away with the need to subscribe on the iPhone to synchronize ScanBizCards events with the iPhone calendar (subscribing will still be available to sync with Outlook, iCal or Google calendar).
Search Box on Start Screen
We thought it could be convenient to be able to search for cards right from the start screen so we added a search box there. Love it? Too crowded? Please tell us what you think.
New Shortcut
Some of you pointed out that it takes many touches after scanning an image to get back to the start screen to snap the next photo. We added two options to the screen after adding a card to the address book: do more with the current image (any of the post-scan features we have) or directly snap the next photo.
Vistaprint: FREE Premium upgrade or one year Web Sync
You get business cards all the time so you probably hand them out – we are excited to announce that if you buy your next set of business cards at Vistaprint through our joint URL at www.vistaprint.com/scanbizcards, you get all this:
1. 250 free business cards
2. 25% OFF site-wide
3. A ScanBizCards credit to upgrade the Lite app to premium at no charge, get a one year web sync subscription or gift the Premium app to a friend.
What’s not to like 
? Vistaprint is the leading provider of business cards and other print and digital marketing product and services. They ship World-wide, I have printed my cards with Vistaprint since the 1990’s and have found no reason to look elsewhere.
So how does it work? Just start your purchase at www.vistaprint.com/scanbizcards and after you complete a purchase, touch the Vistaprint “Redeem Promo” button on the start screen of ScanBizCards on your iPhone and choose your freebie.
Press
A very kind review of ScanBizCards in the leading iPhone blog in Canada, iPhoneInCanada. Note: there is a URL at the end of the review providing an upgrade of Lite installation to premium until October 21 so if there are any Lite users reading this go ahead and click that link!
The Washington Post wrote an editorial on the outlook for business cards. Note: it’s a bit strange that I was quoted as merely “not the enemy of business cards” considering I scanned more than 4,000 cards this year, 1,700 of which are still on my phone!
Rating
Only one user review for V2.78 so far (thank you “slick”!). Want to add your view or re-affirm a previous review? These shortcuts take you directly to the appropriate App Store page:
- Premium users: click www.scanbizcards.com/rate.
- Lite or Lite Upgraded users: click www.scanbizcards.com/ratelite.
