An app to keep your receipts

We all have receipts to file and many of us do a very poor job of it. Unless you have been diligently saving all your receipts, it is always a chore trying to locate a receipt that you need for a warranty claim or for filing a tax return.

Fret no more. With a simple scanner app in your smartphone, you can save each and every important receipt the moment you have it. How about that: a filing system on the go! I use an app called "ClearScanner". Apart from being able to crop the image, rotate, and change the colour temperature, etc, I can also scan multiple pages into one pdf file. Plus, I can save it directly to a pre-assigned folder in my Google Drive. Of course, I can also share it in multiple ways, such as email, Whatsapp, etc.

The following images are screenshots from my phone:

The first one is the app. The second one shows two files I have scanned (one single page and one two-page document, as indicated).

An app for passport photo

There are many similar apps in the Google Play Store. I just happened to try out the one that is called "Passport Photo Editor", developed by Dak Bhavan (in case you are interested to give it a try).

The app allows you to pick the dimensions as required for any number of countries. The huge list provided probably covers any country you want. Using it is a breeze. All you need is to find a background that meets the background colour required of the passport photo.

The example below was a selfie that I took against a plain coloured wall, in ordinary ambient light. It took less than a minute to create the 6-photo jpeg image; at no less than my very first try.

I took it to Harvey Norman this afternoon. I transferred the image from my smartphone to the kiosk, paid 20 cents for the print, and voila! The size of the passport photo came out exactly 35mm x 45mm, and the size of the face exactly meets the requirements for an Australian passport photo.  By the way, it costs AUD$16.95 to have this done at a post office, so it is definitely worth trying out.


 

Screen sizes and how it matters

Apple Computer must be running out of ideas if they think that the a 6.5" screen size is what people want, based on the rumoured iPhone XL. It certainly has not learned any lesson from the lacklustre sales of the Apple Watch.

Here is how screen size plays out its role. Basically the world of communication devices can be divided into 3 "screen sizes", which I simply call large, small, and tiny.

We use large screen sizes where we need to display a lot of information on one screen. Typically this is when we deal with spreadsheets and visual presentations, and sometimes even text documents. Many of these documents have to do with business and education. That is why we have desktop and laptops. Even if we can shrink the computers into a palm-sized gadget, we still need to have a larger screen size. So desktops and laptops are not going to be replaced by smartphone size gadgets anytime soon; or rather, the screen size that I call "large".

A small screen size like what we have on a smart phone is used where we only need to show limited information on one screen to do what we want to do (ever tried to work with a spreadsheet on a smartphone?). There is a compromise between portability and ease of viewing, and most people settle for a screen size between 5" to 5.5". Apple XL with a giant 6.5" screen will not be able to convince the world to shift to this size unless we all grow larger hands and big pockets become a fashion trend.

Finally, the tiny screen. Obviously Apple Computer has not learned that the reason Apple Watch failed to replace many of the things we do on a smartphone is because we simply need the larger real estate for the things a smartphone is designed for. A tiny screen is useful only for apps with very, very limited information to display. We cannot use it for email, and for social media. We cannot use it where we need a keyboard to enter text.

If you are buying a smartphone today, just choose the screen size you are comfortable with. Definitely a 6.5" screen size is going to be awkward and would probably only appeal to you if you are choosing between having to use reading glasses or splurging on a bigger display.