Sad lack of diagram / drawing applcation in iPhone

While there are many great apps for the iPhone, there appears to be a lack of quality drawing apps.

There’s 101 painting apps, but very few vector drawing apps – and as an engineer, that’s something that would e very useful for me. Of those that do exist, they tend to be very basic – not created by experienced programmers – and are at the mercy of the accuracy of your finger.

What would be great would be a vector-based diagram creation program, where you could move and edit shapes, create objects, and drag them around. Snappable grids and zoom for fine editing should also help overcome fat-finger inaccuracies.

And – export to a format where you can continue editing on your PC or Mac – rather than only exporting as a photo (although that’s still useful) would also be great.

But… For the moment, the best on offer is iDrawing. And the author’s own screenshots in the App Store show what a long way this has to go!

Canon MX860 ADF – the last laugh

Not so rosy…

Although the Duplex ADF is great, I’ve just realised that it will turn over each page individually, as it is spit out, for Duplex scanning only. So: if you put in 5 duplex pages in page order 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10;  then it will come out in order 2,1,4,3,6,5,8,7,10,9.

If you want to keep the documents afterwards – not great!

I guess you could put either manually flip them over;  or scan them again to reorder them(!);  but perhaps easiest is just to use MS Office Scanning, which scans in Simplex, but will run through one side, and then the other. So – again – not much smarter than a far simpler printer!

Canon MX860 – getting a normal scan

Canon MX860 Drive Dialogue

Following a bit more troubleshooting, I’ve found that opting to use the full drivers will work.
So:
- In your chosen Imaging app, choose to Open Drivers once scanning starts
- Let the driver open – choose Advanced mode
- Choose Document (ADF Duplex) as the document source.

Now – as for the rest of the settings, the defaults seemed to work OK – even though some, like Auto Tone, were defaulted to ON. It seems that just using the driver overrides the autocorrection options that were causing the problem. Note that selecting the paper source as Document (ADF Duplex), seems to be different to doing the same on the printer itself, where that profile also contains the autocorrection.

So – I’m limited to scanning via USB, as before, and I’m not really getting a lot more for my money than I was with my £10 third-hand HP Officejet V40. In fact, with the V40, the straight scan path meant I could scan stapled documents – something I’m not going to try here.