It only takes a few minutes….
Deep wisdom from LifeHacker about the oh-so-corporate task of digitizing whiteboards….
This is a trick I picked up when I was working as a consultant. This process quickly and efficiently sends out notes from a working session to all the collaborators. The steps are:
1. Capture whiteboard notes with your cameraphone.
2. Send your images to your laptop/PC via Bluetooth (or email).
3. Use CutePDF to “print” them to a PDF file.
4. Email PDF to all collaborators.This sounds like a lot of steps, but Dan says it only takes about 5 minutes, depending on how many images you’re distributing.
Not that I capture a lot of whiteboards, but I like my way better.
- Step 1, buy a MacBook or a MacBook Pro
- Step 2, Open lid of MacBook and press power button
- Step 3, Point the MacBook’s built-in camera towards the whiteboard as you snap a picture with PhotoBooth
I know it’s a lot of steps, but you only have to do the first two once every year, and the third one only takes about 4 seconds, depending on how many images you’re distributing.
Now that Scanr thing they are talking about that converts your whiteboard pictures into PDF and then emails them back to you … that’s pretty neat.
Link to “The MacBook Family”
Link to Scanr
Filed under: apps, lifehacking, neat · 2 Comments
Actually, the mobile copy technology and concept you’re describing was first pioneered and showcased in 2005 by an innovative European company called Realeyes3D. They have launched a service in the US called qipit (www.qipit.com) during DEMOFall 2006 last september. With qipit you can use your camera phone or digital camera to turn pictures into documents in seconds. You can then easily share the black and white or color clear crisp digital copies with anybody from or store them online in your private, secure document center.
I did try the service and can tell you it works in almost any lighting conditions and delivers very good quality copies, provided you have a decent camera phone (1.3 + Mpixel w/ autofocus)
And it rocks just great on my AluBook (sorry, no MacBook upgrade yet, will switch to Mac Book Pro some day)…