Bournemouth — Nov 16th 2010

With three of our regulars elsewhere engaged the meeting was best described as compact. So was the presentation by Michael Corgan who gave an overview of five applications for Optical Character Recognition. Of the five it was only possible to show the three cheapest at work, namely in descending order of price and accuracy: Abbyy Fine Reader 10, Prizmo and Vuescan. The last adds OCR to it's scanner driver capabilities (which are huge and well recommended). Prizmo also has another area of application in its' ability to straighten images taken at an angle (e.g. a newspaper lying on a table and photographed from one corner) or which have curved surfaces, such as a double page spread in a magazine. Samples of the results from these three were passed around - one comment, looking at the Vuescan output was that it would have been quicker to type from the original rather than spend time correcting the scan!
Another application designed to take away the burden of keyboard entry was demonstrated to and by the people present - Dragon Dictation for the iPhone - a free download and one which works very well and improves very quickly after a little training with an individual voice. However it is not designed for dictating long documents.

To round off the evening Mark Ford gave a demonstration of geotagging photographs, placing them on Google Earth with amazing accuracy, using HoudahGeo. Very easy to do!

The Q & A session was considerably enhanced by the answers given by Gordon Clyne, which, in view of his great experience both working for Apple at Cupertino as well as many years with other IT companies, such as Palm, is not surprising. A welcome addition to our membership!

Details of the applications reviewed can be had from Michael, and next month, in addition to a mince pie or two and quiz on matters Apple, we will have a presentation by John Cadd on Lightroom from his viewpoint as a professional photographer.

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