NeatWorks vs Paperport#

I bought a cheap version of NeatWorks and downloaded a demo of Paperport from Nuance in an attempt to find a good option for digitizing all my mail.

My experience with NeatWorks isn't great.  It mostly works, but some problems have cropped up from time to time that make me have some concern.  For example, when I first installed the application it automatically searched for updates: it found one, and I installed the newer version of the app (newer that what was on the CD).

Well, it turned out over the next few days that much of the text that it would OCR would not make it into the search index.  So when you went to search for some keywords nothing would be found.

I contacted support and after walking me through a bunch of stuff, it turned out that there was a much newer version of the app available (but somehow their auto update didn't find it).  This new version seemed to fix this problem, but I basically had to rescan all my documents.  At that point, it was only a few, but what if I run into another problem after I have a few hundred scanned documents?

Speaking of a few hundred documents, right now I have 50 pages scanned and my database is 300MB.  This is insane!!  Even if you backup your data and compress it it ends up being like 500KB / page.  WAAAAAAY to large.  I guess it really isn't THAT big of a deal.  I mean if I end up with 5000 pages (100x what I have now) and my database is 30GB, it will really be stupid, but it won't really be a problem I guess. 

Another concern of mine with NeatWorks is lock-in.  What if I want to move to some other software product in the future?  How can I get my documents out of NeatWorks?  Well, it turns out not very easily.  You can export each document to a PDF, but you have to do it 1 at a time.  If you select multiple documents, it puts them into 1 giant PDF.  This is completely useless.  If you have 5000 pages and you want to start using some other PDF indexing product, it will take you forever to export all those files.  Also, you can only use the software with their scanners.

Also, last night I noticed that some receipt that I had scanned never showed up in my "inbox" (it goes from the Quick Scan to the Inbox).  This has me concerned.  I got no error message or any indication that something didn't work right.  It just never showed up.

Paperport has some nice pluses on its side.  It uses any scanner (not just 1 like w/ NeatWorks).  It stores all images as PDFs in a folder on your file system so you can manage them as you would any other file.

Reviews for PaperPort were not good, but others claimed the newer service pack fixed a lot of problems.  I did have it lock up on me once, but otherwise it seemed to work. 

The main problem with Paperport is it is trying to do to many things.  NeatWorks is for exactly what I am doing, Paperport is trying to be a fully featured Scanner software product, helping you to manage photos and stuff like that.  The UI is pretty poor also.

Basically though, the only reason I can't see myself using Paperport is that there is no way to attach and search by a date field.  I don't care about the date I scan a document (the file created date), I care about the date of the document.  So when I search for Mastercard statements, I can filter out what I want by date.  I didn't see any way to do this with Paperport.

Then when I went to submit a question to their support team asking about this, I was totally convinced to not buy their product (click for full size):

As many users have commented, it really does look like Paperport WAS a good product which has just morphed into a big, bloated, difficult to use product.

UPDATE: Now Nuance has changed me for the full product.  I'm guessing part of their trial is that they will automatically bill you for the software if you don't cancel your trial.  Wonderful, I am really glad I didn't pick Paperport: time to call and demand a refund.... again (they charged me 8 bucks for some BS extended download service on my free trial... these guys suck).

Categories: Computer Stuff | Hardware | Misc
Tuesday, March 03, 2009 11:32:04 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00) #    Comments [4]  | 

 

Amazon Mechanical Turk#

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a way to "automate" things that computers are not quite able to do.

There really isn't enough info out there on it yet.  It seems like it could have some pretty interesting applications, but I don't think you can do anything realtime.

http://requester.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=15879911

Categories: Computer Stuff | Interesting
Friday, January 12, 2007 10:54:36 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00) #    Comments [0]  | 

 

MusicBrainz#

This website www.MusicBrainz.org has a great piece of software called "Tagger" and a not so great, but supposedly getting great program called "Picard."

I am still trying to figure out Picard, to see if it can download album covers for me, but I am not having much luck as of yet.

But Tagger is awesome.  You basically point it to your MP3 collection, and it will attempt to match up your MP3s with their database based on a "music fingerprint" and then it will automatically set all the tag info as well as rename the file.

So this means if you have an MP3 of Pink Floyd's Breath from Dark Side of the Moon but the MP3 has no ID3 info and is named PinkF.-Breath.mp3, it will most likely look at the audio and match up the mp3 with their database and put it into \Pink Floyd\Dark Side Of The Moon\01 - Breath.mp3 or however you tell it to rename files.

Pretty sweet!

I just need to find a similar program to get album covers too.

Categories: Computer Stuff | Cool | Music
Friday, July 07, 2006 1:48:56 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00) #    Comments [0]  | 

 

iDont.com#

Almost all of my friends have IPods, but I have held off. 

There are a number of reasons why:

1) ITunes:  It sucks.  I hate it.  My current MP3 player simply allows you to drag and drop the files you want onto your MP3 player.  No syncing, no problems.

2) User interface.  I know a lot of people think the wheel is really cool, but I think it overly involves the user.  Tell me what is wrong with up/down buttons before you redesign the interface to use a wheel.

3) Batteries.  As noted at http://www.ipodsdirtysecret.com/.  The battery in an IPod can not be removed, and some say they start to fail after 18 months.

Well I came across a site called http://www.idont.com/, which went live today (before today it had some anti-ipod message up there). 

Turns out it is a site for the new SanDisk MP3 player.

The e200 (really catchy name... not) looks pretty cool, and might be worth me looking into more: http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives/2006/03/sandisk-sansa-e200-series-review.php

 

Categories: Computer Stuff | Cool | Hardware | Gadgets | Music
Monday, May 22, 2006 1:19:38 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00) #    Comments [0]  | 

 

Building a Home Network#
This article from Toms Hardware, goes over some of the issues surrounding Building You Own Network.
Categories: Computer Stuff | Networking
Thursday, July 03, 2003 12:26:31 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00) #    Comments [0]  | 

 

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