I tried out the Snapter demo recently. Snapter is an intriguing piece of software that aims to ease the digitization of books, magazines, whiteboard photos, etc. You photograph your page with a digital camera, feed it into Snapter, and boom, you are presented with a beautiful PDF… or that is the idea. In practice, things don’t seem to work so well.

I photographed a magazine (about 50 pages). Then ran them through Snapter. The interface and workflow are still a little rough, but the more fundamental problem is the page detection. The program is suppose to detect the edges of the page. Using this information, it can than warp the image to deal with things like page curl, or crooked photos. On most pages, it wasn’t even close, comically so. The page detection algorithm appears to just look for high contrast and forgets that a the edge of a page is almost always a straight line, or close to a straight line. To add insult to injury, the interface gives you the opportunity to correct the page detection by dragging the handles to the true edge, however, when dragging the handles, it would refuse to move where I dragged the cursor.

The above photo is an example of Snapter doing a decent job of page detection thanks to the very simple layout of the pages, with high contrast between the page and the background. It has correctly found the center of the magazine (yellow vertical line). The red line has a minor blip on the lower left, and also didn’t quite find the left side. I imagine, it would do a decent job on a book with no color and no photos or illustrations.

On this set of pages, Snapter fails miserably. These pages are trickier than above, but there are still distinct page edges. Snapter has made comical wavy lines desperately trying to find the edge. Attempts to drag the handles to the true page edges is mostly ignored and just ends in frustration.

On top of these issues, Snapter is overpriced (for a consumer application) at $50 and only available for Windows. Here’s hoping for Snapter 3 soon.

My father still uses dial-up. I signed him up for an AllVantage dial-up account because it was only $5 a month. Recently AllVantage got bought by PeoplePC. There were two problems. PeoplePC charges $11 a month, and they require you to use their Windows only software for connecting. It seemed like a no go, so I called to cancel. The woman offered to only charge $4.47 for six months, I said no thanks, so when the woman said, $4.47 a month indefinitely, I figured it was worth figuring out a way around the requirement for the Windows software.

I first emailed their tech support address. I asked if I could just use PPP on a Mac. This is the response I got:

“Regarding your concern, we suggest you to reload PeoplePal Toolbar.”

I wrote back saying I just wanted to know about PPP and Mac support. I got this back:

Regarding your concern, we would suggest you to first connect to PeoplePC Online service using the PeoplePC dialer and then try accessing Internet explorer and Outlook Express.

That route was clearly a dead-end. I decided to just try it. First, I tracked down a local access number. You get a list here. (I had erroneously been looking for them in the support documentation.)

The rest turns out to be remarkably simple. Your username is simply your PeoplePC email address (username@peoplepc.com) and your account password.

With these three items in hand, PPP dial-up works flawlessly.

Testing out iMovie ‘08 using my entertaining visit to Gray’s Auction in Fairlee, VT.

YouTube video. Photo Gallery.