Scanning and submitting expense receipts

As many of us do, I have to submit expense reports to the company I work for.  We have to submit receipts with each report, and the system is a bit old, so those receipts must be in small (under 2mb) TIFF format (named .tif as well).  This can be a bit of a pain not only scanning receipts (such as parking receipts) but then getting them into the proper format, especially when the Mac prefers PDF.

I have an awesome Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M which works great for bills and such, but it is not so hot on smaller receipts.  It tears them up, or they get caught in the mechanism, etc.  I could always just scan my credit card, but I do not like redacting one hundred line items just to expense five.

I tried a couple of camera solutions, but none worked until I found Scanner Pro for $6.99 on the App Store.  It is a nice little app that takes scans, converts the scans to black and white saves them into a PDF document.  Some of the plusses for my system include:

• Easy management of multiple PDF documents (can rename documents, has a badge for number of pages)
• Automatic uploading of the documents (once saved) to DropBox
• Ability to add new scans to existing documents
• Creates nice, high contrast images

This solved one of my problems – Timely scanning.  I can now scan a parking receipt while in the parking garage elevator and have the receipt in a document (such as August Parking) and uploaded to DropBox by the time I reach my car.  Score!

This did not resolve my issue with the system at work needing .tifs.  This proved to be a royal pain, because exporting as TIFF from Preview makes HUGE images.  Each receipt was around 2-3mb.  The size is not only an issue due to the constraints of our system, but also an image that large takes over a minute to upload.

I turned to my trust old friend from decades past, Graphic Converter.  At $39 on the Mac App Store, it is not cheap, but it sure is useful.  The user interface is fairly terrible, but it works!  The command I used is “Convert & Modify” from the file menu.  Once you use the terrible file browser to select your folder of PDFs from Scanner Pro, and select a destination folder, you do the following:

• Function: Convert
• Format: TIFF
• Options: LZW with Prediction, Single Page File, uncheck all metadata
• Check “WWW Ready”
• Check “Use Batch”
• Add two commands to the Batch Table:
• Scale: proportional 50%
• Resolution 72×72 ppi

Graphic Converter will remember these settings (The Export settings feature failed miserably on 10.8) Once everything is set up, press “Go.”  In about 5 seconds you will have one file for each page in the document named “August Parking1.tif” “August Parking2.tif” etc.  These files for a typical gas station sized receipt will average 100k in filesize.

Upload tiny documents, archive, and repeat next month.

Update: Sam Grover says that he uses automator to do the part I am using Graphic Converter for!

It’s iCloudy and time for an umbrella

The Apple ecosystem is growing faster than anyone could have imagined.  We buy music, apps for our phones, apps for our Macs, videos, and books all via our iTunes accounts.  We can even pay for our Netflix accounts via iTunes now.

This is convenient and nice, but as people come together and form families, things can start to become a mess.  Some music is bought on one spouse’s account, while some apps are bought on another.  Kids are typically set up with an allowance on a parent’s account.  Some families that existed when the Apple ecosystem started have adopted to buy everything under one master account.  Some families have, sadly, broken apart and have to deal with figuring out who gets the main account and who starts over.

In all of these cases, it would be easier to let everyone have their own iTunes account, and then combine them under an iCloud umbrella.  The umbrella would give permission for everyone under the umbrella to use the assets of the other accounts.  The umbrella simply manages the keys needed to access the assets.  If someone is removed from the umbrella, those keys would be revoked.

This system would allow my wife to access the apps that I bought, and vice vera.  We would not have to play the login game to keep our apps up to date.  We could access each other’s music and album art without playing games.

This is Apple after all.  It should “just work.”

Apple, shield us from the rainy iCloud days and give us iTunes account umbrellas.

Steve Jobs

Presenting Lion

I will be giving a class on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion at MacCamp this fall.  We are going to have three classes on Lion, and should be covering iOS 5 and iCloud.

If you are in the Oregon/Washington area and are looking for an excuse to spend a couple of days in the beautiful forest with other Mac users, consider signing up for MacCamp!

Getting Ready for Lion

Mac OS X Lion (10.7) is going to be released soon.  Are you ready?  If not, I suggest you wait for 10.7.1 to be released.  Let others find the bugs and issues.  In the meantime, make a list of your printers and other peripherals, then research their Lion compatibility before upgrading.

Another great resource to help prepare you for Lion is Macworld’s Article on Getting Ready for Lion.  Be sure to check it out before considering upgrading to Lion.

Whatever you do, create a full clone backup of your hard drive before installing Lion.  This will allow you to revert to a known working system should something go awry.

Caution and Warning free for Christmas Day

Caution and Warning gives you a bright, flashing warning sign that you can use while stranded to get attention or make sure people see you in an otherwise dark, dangerous scenario.

Caution and Warning for the iPhone is free today only!  Get your copy now!

All Quiet on the Geeky Front

If you’ve been wondering if I’ve gone away, I have not!  I have been working on an update to BetterHTMLExport as well as some iPhone and iPad applications.  My personal life has moved over to SteveRiggins.net and on twitter.

–Steve

Changes coming to us Mac users

Apple’s announcements about Mac OS X Lion didn’t come as a surprise to some of us.  I’ve been preaching the concept to my friends that Apple will start to merge OS X and iOS.  Apple went a little farther than I expected this soon with the iPad’s application launcher and folder manager, LaunchPad, however I think for novice users this will be a welcome user interface.

I love how they defocus the background to try and make the application icons pop.

Ground Control to Major Tom

Along with the LaunchPad, Apple has begun a hard core push for full screen applications.  It appears that OS X Lion has better mechanism for going full screen which are supported by Apple’s new “Mission Control,” which is a new application and window manager that utilizes Exposé, Spaces, Dashboard and these new full screen applications.  I really like this actually as the typical Macintosh user did not have a clue as to how to utilize Spaces.  It appears that each fullscreen application gets its own space, as well as the Desktop and Dashboard.  This allows the LaunchPad to swipe right to show the dashboard from the Desktop and then swipe left to get right back to the Desktop.

In the image above, you can see full screen applications across the top, your windowed applications in the middle with their windows stacked in piles and the dock across the bottom.

Mac App Store

Apple also announced the Mac App Store, something I had written to Steve Jobs about quite awhile ago and Apple delivered on every feature.  Applications will be checked by Apple for crashes, viruses and trojan horses.  You will be able to run a purchased application on any of your personal Macs.  You will be able to update your software in one click.

There are some downsides to the Mac App Store, albeit small ones.  First off, if you update a application and the new version has a unforeseen bug, you are kinda stuck.  Unless Apple gives developers to push out signed, licensed versions, you will have to wait for Apple to approve the update before you can get it.  Ken Case of Omnigroup makes the point that developers can still deliver betas the old fashion way, however I think that many customers won’t know what the old fashion way is before too long.

Finally, not all software will be available via the Mac App Store.  Software that need to install kernel extensions or plugins will have to wait.  My hope is that Apple makes these types of software easier to install by having the operating system find the software, instead of the software needing to be installed in a specific location.  I would like to see a signed application announce it has kernel extensions, iPhoto plugins, etc and the operating system just handles it, with permission of course.  If you download VMWare from the Mac App Store, the OS should install and activate VMWare’s extensions to the OS.  This would require Apple to make it possible to install and uninstall this type of software without a reboot, which is technically possible today, if not a tad dicey to do.  When you were done with VMWare, you could simply delete the application via the LaunchPad and VMWare along with its remnants would disappear forever, never again to silently confuse the next OS update.  A geek can dream, can’t he?

Cost of Software

I would not count on getting super cheap Mac applications.  Macintosh software is far more complex to develop than iOS software.  There is a broader range of devices to test on as well as several major OS releases to support, if a developer chooses to do so.  Users of Macintosh software are much more abusive of the software, so the software has to be hardened even more.  On a Mac, it is much easier to get that 96 megabyte image onto the clipboard to try and paste into an application.

Summary

I’m interested to see how far Apple goes with this.  As I have posited at PMUG in the past, the Mac as we know it could cease to exist within five to seven years.  The computer may become a more powerful, capable iPad.  Apple lent further evidence of this with the introduction of the new MacBook Air, asking “what would happen if an iPad and MacBook hooked up?”  Macs will always be more capable devices, but the days of running DiskWarrior might be over soon, as Apple will lock down the system so users can make fewer and fewer decisions about how their computer operates.

Can Adobe get worse? Yes! Photoshop Elements Downloader hell

I head to Adobe.com to check out Photoshop Elements 8. They have a trial version so I give it a shot.

First, a browser window pops up asking you to log in to adobe.com. I complete that. Then it says it will download an Akamai Downloader.

The Akamai Downloader downloads and mounts the disk image. It asks me where to save, defaulting to my home directory of all places.

I choose Downloads. This is a Macintosh after all.

I run the Akamai Downloader, and it puts up a minimal window with just a title and a progress bar beneath it. Yes, this “Window” is 20 pixels tall.

Then the window flashes several times and it quits. Now I am sitting at the Finder, with no UI. No Adobe nor Akami apps are running.

I look in Activity Monitor and see this new process, “rsmac_3276″ running. That is a very descriptive process name.

Next i bring Safari forward and now, in the same window I originally downloaded this Akamai Downloader from, is a progress bar with the download.

So apparently, this Akamai Downloader is a Safari Plugin.

The download finishes and it asks me if I want to open the disk image. I select yes, but the disk image is corrupted, so it won’t mount.

Awesome.

Meanwhile, I close the installer window in Safari and I notice this rsmac_4276 process is still running, still using cycles. About 0.3% cpu.

I force quit the process and it immediately launches again.

So awesome, now they have some daemon that won’t go away and is using cpu cycles for no reason. Maybe it is tracking my use of the trial and dialing home, I have not checked yet.

What an awful, awful experience. Should I have expected better?

Update:

I had to delete com.akamai.client.plist from ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ and reboot in order to get rid of this software.

Update 2:

I found a bunch of other daemons installed, like bresink’s for an older hardware monitor I had used two machines ago, a textwrangler agent when I tested that for someone, and three, yes three Google daemons for updating software and such.

I wrote about this before but really, Apple needs to fix this mess of a software model.

Using meta folders for time machine exclusion

Time Machine, Apple’s awesome automatic backup software is very aggressive about backing up your data because, well, that is it’s job.

I’m beta testing a game with a large number of files that change constantly. The folder for the game is around 16GB of data, so I don’t want any of this backed up. I used Time Machine’s exclusion list (found by clicking the Options button in the Time Machine System Preference Pane) to add the game’s beta folder. This worked fantastic, until….

Recently they asked us to delete the game and install from scratch. Not a problem. However, while the new installer did it’s job, it put all of the new content in “Game Beta-Temp”, instead of “Game Beta” Time Machine saw this and starting backing up the now constantly changing temp folder which at the time contained over 10gb of data.

Hmm, what to do. Well, I could add the temp folder to the exclusion list, but what if they change the name of the temp folder in the next build? My solution was simple, I created a folder that would hold the game, and added that folder to Time Machine’s exclusion list.

Now, I have /Application/Game Beta Time Machine Exclusion Folder/

When the game asks where to install, I select the exclusion folder and install inside of that. I have added the Exclusion Folder to Time Machine’s Exclusion list such that anything created by the game or it’s installers in the future will never be backed up.

Perfect.