PlayScore, with Anthony Wilkes

Anthony Wilkes joins the show to talk about PlayScore 2, a sheet music scanning app. Anthony is the CEO of PlayScore, and in the conversation we talked all about what it can do, the challenges of developing music scanning software, and practical uses for teachers and students.

Patreon supporters receive bonus conversation about machine learning, the future of score scanning software, and automation.

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Show Notes:

• PlayScore 2
• ReadScoreLib
• Dorico 2.2
• An interview with PlayScore creator Anthony Wilkes | Dorico Blog
• Scanner Pro
• PDF Expert
• Documents by Readdle
• Spark Mail
• forScore
• Sheet Music Scanner
• Michael Good, inventor of MusicXML | Scoring Notes podcast interview
• Music XML
• Apple Shortcuts User Guide
• OmniGroup JavaScript Automation
• My Audio Hijack blog post - Audio Hijack 4, Shortcuts, Podcasting Automation
• What's New in Audio Hijack 4

App of the Week:
Robby - Audio Hijack 4
Anthony - Dorico

Music of the Week:
Robby - Listen to This - Audio Guide Anthony - On BBC's first ever live broadcast of Beatrice Harrison, featuring cellist Clare Deniz

Tech Tip of the Week:
Robby - Universal Control
Anthony - iPad multitasking

Where to Find Us:
Robby - Twitter | Blog | Book
Anthony - Twitter | Website

Please don't forget to rate the show and share it with others!

forScore for the Mac: Review

forScore has long been my most essential iPad app, and one of the few apps I consider iPad-first. This is to say that it is an app that takes specific advantage of the iPad’s strengths (form factor, pencil support, paper-like display, direct touch input) and leverages them in a way that makes the iPad feel essential.

For the same reasons it is essential on iPad, it has seemed slightly less essential on the iPhone (small screen size is impractical) and Mac (similarly, the design is not easy for direct manipulation, annotation, portability, or sticking on a music stand).

Still, an app this useful screams to be used cross-platform! The more I moved my sheet music library from PDFs on my hard drive to forScore, the more I found I needed to be able to work with the same library structure on my other devices. An iPhone is small, but there are those moments when it is the only device on you and you want to reference something really quickly. In a moment that my iPad battery once failed, I did conduct a percussion ensemble rehearsal from forScore on the iPhone.

In the same way that the iPhone is sometimes useful for being always the one in your pocket, the Mac is also useful sometimes. For example, file management is way easier on a Mac. No matter how many Mac features the iPad adds (drag and drop, Files app, etc.), it is simply not as easy as the Mac. Yes, the iPad can technically do the same things as the Mac in this regard, but it’s slower and more cumbersome. Furthermore, most users know how to use the Finder on Mac but don’t know how to work with the Files app on iPad, even though it is mostly the same these days.

It is actually possible to open forScore and the Files app side by side on the iPad. From there, you can drag and drop multiple files at once from one app to another.

I’d like to note that a year of teaching (mostly) online has sent me “back to the Mac,” so to speak. The Mac’s efficiency in multitasking, as well as its ability to run streaming apps like OBS and Loopback, has positioned it as my primary work device. Streaming forScore to my iPad’s screen to my Mac using OBS and AirServer is great, but it’s fiddly, indirect, and kills my iPad battery. It has become so much more direct to have forScore running right on the Mac, in the same place my other work is already happening.

In video conferencing apps like Zoom, I can now share music on the screen with my students directly, thanks to forScore running on my Mac.

The wait is over. Actually, it has been over since the fall. With the launch of macOS 11 Big Sur, forScore has released a universal version of their app on the Mac App Store. This means that it will be a free download for those who have purchased the app on iPad.

Note: I wrote most of this review fairly soon after release. Its scope is therefore more like what I would call “First Impressions.” I have been using it all school year long by the time I am actually posting this and think it is now more accurate to call it a review even though I will not be covering every detail comprehensively in the words below.

The goal of this review is to cover what’s unique about the Mac experience. If you want to learn more about forScore’s features, check out this excellent review by David MacDonald

For more on this subject (and speaking of David MacDonald), listen to my podcast review of forScore for Mac, where he was the guest.

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Overall Experience

Having forScore on the Mac is a huge deal for me. I have been using it aggressively since the fall. It is on a shared screen during every band class and private percussion lesson I teach. Using it right on the Mac is just as easy as I expected.

All of the buttons, knobs, bells, whistles and user interface elements are exactly where you would expect them to be because it looks and feels like the iPad app. I will get into the implications of that in a moment.

Adding music to my library is now a breeze. Until this point, I have been storing all of my scores in a folder in iCloud Drive and then creating duplicate copies in the iPad version of my forScore library. This means that to share music on my Mac’s screen (without doing the AirPlay method above), I have to open the files in PDF Expert. They don’t have any of my indexes, metadata, or attached recordings. I cannot annotate them as I can in forScore, or use music stamps, and I cannot see them in the context of my organized setlist. It is in some ways like maintaining two separate libraries of the same stuff.

To make matters worse, iCloud Drive periodically decides to put some of my scores back in the cloud when I am low on space. When this happens, and I try to open a score from the Spotlight, even a score I used the day before, I will have to wait an extra-long time for my Mac to download the file before actually opening it.

I am happy to report that forScore on the Mac resolves these frustrations. Not only is it lightning-fast for me to get all of the scores that were not in my forScore database inside of it, but scores can also now sync across devices over iCloud. Using keyboard shortcuts like Command+Clicking, Command+Tabbing, and the precision of the keyboard and mouse, allowed me to easily drag and drop most of my remaining digital sheet music library straight into forScore from the Finder. I never pushed forScore too hard in this regard, but at one point, I dragged about 40 scores into forScore from the Finder at once and it handled them with a breeze. This is something the iPad would occasionally crash while trying to do.

The file import process I showed on the iPad above is far faster and more precise on macOS.

Because of this ease, finding duplicated, and deleting them was also easy. So was adding metadata. The Mac is now my preferred tool for doing this kind of logistic work in bulk.

Catalyst

forScore uses Apple’s Catalyst technology which means that Mac apps can share code with iPad apps. Apple introduced this at WWDC in 2019 and in the year that followed, relatively few apps made this transition. A notably good app using this technology is GoodNotes 5. They ditched their native Mac app in version 5 and decided to bring the iPad version over. GoodNotes is a good comparison to forScore, because its strength is, similarly, that it is a touch-first app that feels best when conceptualized as a digital “piece of paper.”

Catalyst apps can be automatically provided to the Mac by the developer with one press of a button, but they won’t be good experiences. Developers can do more work to have the app feel more like it belongs on the Mac, using things like the Touch Bar, custom Tool Bar elements, keyboard shortcuts, etc. The results have been lackluster. Still, having a Mac version of GoodNotes is better than not having one. And because it is an app I usually use on iPad, the need for the Mac version was more for reference.

GoodNotes 5 on the Mac. It looks good. But I am constantly forgetting whether to double or single tap on things because it behaves like an iPad app, but I have the conventions of a Mac hardwired into my brain when I am sitting in front of one.

This is an even weirder example of an iPad toolbar on Mac, but it brings GoodNotes to my Mac, and for that I am grateful.

At WWDC in 2020, Apple announced that more developer tools would be coming to Catalyst, so that it is easier to bring even more of the things that make Mac apps feel like Mac apps to your iPad version. They also announced that new Macs would be coming out (they shipped on November 17th) with new processors built by Apple. These new machines would be able to run native iOS apps without developers doing anything at all.

Steven Troughton Smith highlights these three methods on Twitter.

I imagine forScore went with the last of those three options for the Mac. Even though it feels like a mostly native experience, some things get weird.

With everything in macOS 11, it’s getting harder to define what Catalyst is. There are 3 forms:

• Unmodified iOS apps (Apple Silicon-only)
• Traditional Catalyst apps (more Mac like, but blurry scaling)
• Optimized for Mac/Mac Idiom Catalyst apps (pixel perfect, Mac controls)

— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) November 12, 2020

Details and Weirdnesses

There are things about forScore on Mac that “look” like the iPad and things that “behave” like the iPad. The things that look like iPad are more forgivable.

For example, the toolbar of an iPad app looks distinct from that of the Mac. Apple is attempting to blur this distinction by redesigning their stock apps to have buttons that are made of thin-lined graphics, rather than appearing as press-able buttons.

The old macOS toolbar used to look like this.

By contrast, iOS apps that are brought to the Mac with Catalyst have a toolbar that looks like this.

The new macOS toolbar seeks to blur this distinction by bringing its own toolbar design closer to that of iPad apps.

iOS apps also have different pop-over style elements that feature a Cancel button in the upper left and a Done button in the upper right. These don’t feel Mac-like but they get the job done. You can, for example, still press Escape to dismiss them like you can on a Mac, though the difference in user interface might suggest otherwise.

Alerts and settings screens trip me up with Catalyst apps because they really make me feel like I am using an iPad.

By contrast, here is the user interface of the OmniFocus settings screen, which follows native Mac app conventions.

Here are some other details and quirks that highlight the varying degrees of success that forScore has at being Mac-like…

Window resizing

Windows can be resized on Mac. This is implemented pretty well in forScore. When the window is dragged to certain dimensions, the score will automatically decide if it is better to fit one or two pages of the score on the screen. As with an iPad, you can click the book-looking button to the left of the file’s title to force it to keep two pages on screen, regardless of window size. Tools in the toolbar also automatically disappear at smaller window sizes and reappear at larger ones.

forScore can do things on Mac it can’t do on iPad, like window resizing!

Menu bar

The Mac has the menu bar which exposes (in well-made software) all of the available actions in the app. This helps with discoverability and customization. Users can always find what they want from the menu bar and can set menu bar items as keyboard shortcuts in the System Preferences app. It is nice to see many of forScore’s options in the menu bar, but I am not certain that all of them are there. Fortunately, forScore for Mac has an area in settings that allows you to customize keyboard shortcuts for many of the app’s features.

You can set up custom keyboard shortcuts in forScore.

Page navigation

It’s really weird. Simply put, page navigation conventions that work on iPad do not always translate to the Mac. For example, touching and dragging the screen to turn pages is natural when you use your hand to turn the pages, but less so with a keyboard and mouse. Common Mac conventions like two-finger scrolling to swipe pages are implemented in forScore. But other things are weird. Two-finger scrolling feels more natural in other document-based apps like, for example, Preview. In forScore, you can pinch to zoom, but pages that are zoomed in larger than the window size take extra page-turning gestures to navigate. This if because forScore’s default behavior when you swipe is to show you whatever of the page is not on the display. This makes sense because in a performance you might want to zoom in closer to the music. When doing this, it makes sense that a one-touch gesture reveals the next part of the music (regardless of what page it is on), but in practice, this is not Mac-like. Any other app that deals with PDFs would show me the next page when I do the page turn gesture. This quirk is particularly weird if your score is just a few pixels taller than the window size you have set. Turning the page takes two swipes instead of one. The first swipe awkwardly jolts the screen down just enough to see the few missing pixels at the bottom of the screen, and the next swipe actually turns the page.

When my window is just too short, I have to turn the page twice, to turn it once. These kinds of quirks aren’t terrible, but when you encounter them, it’s easy to perceive the app as broken or untrustworthy.

Zooming in and out

The above-mentioned quirk is even weirder when you have zoomed in a lot. I do this often to focus my students on a particular excerpt of music. When scrolled in, there is (to my knowledge) no way to keep scrolling from the trackpad. You have to zoom out, turn the page, and then zoom in again. Contrast this with Preview, a native Mac app, which will just let me scroll freely through the document, no matter how far I have zoomed in.

Spotlight!

I am pleased to say that searching for score files in Spotlight (Command+Spacebar) results in all my scores showing up, even chapter titles in an index of a larger score.

Sidebar

Mac apps tend to have sidebars that reveal list views and top-levels of organization hierarchy in an app. These can often be toggled on and off though I usually leave them on so I can get to things more quickly. forScore on the Mac supports the option to keep the sidebar permanently visible, so you can always see your library alongside whatever score is selected. Cool.

I like that the Mac version of forScore supports a permanently-visible left sidebar. I wouldn’t mind this feature on my 12.9 inch iPad Pro.

Conclusion

There are of course more Mac-like things to celebrate and more iPad-like things to question, but the bottom line is this: forScore is an app loved by musicians all over, and it is completely stellar that the developers dedicated time to bringing this application over. It is unknown if it would ever have happened without Apple’s Catalyst technology, but because of it, we get to have a pretty ok Mac app, where we otherwise would not. And having a pretty ok Mac version of an indispensable iPad app is… actually great! So thank you forScore team!

There are certainly more Mac apps that I would love to see on iOS than there are iOS apps I would like to see on the Mac, but the list is getting smaller.

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Want more forScore? The second most popular post on this website for a long time was my tutorial for adding an index to large scores in forScore for iPad. Watch the video above.

MusGlyphs is a useful font for typing music symbols into a word procesor

Check out the update to MusGlyphs, a font for typing music symbols into a word processor. Scoring Notes has the details. Click to read their writeup below.

MusGlyphs updated to 2.1; text version added - Scoring Notes:

MusGlyphs has been updated to version 2.1. MusGlyphs is the font by Dan Kreider that makes it easier to type a wide variety of musical symbols directly into a word processor, combined with text fonts, without needing to adjust baselines or point sizes.

Among the notable improvements in this version is the addition of MusGlyphs Text, a version of MusGlyphs with regular and bold variants that allows the user to type ordinary text and musical symbols without needing to switch between two different fonts.

This isn’t something I have used a ton but I am excited to check this version out in more detail. It could be really useful for making music worksheets in a word processor like Pages or Word. Unfortunately, Google Docs (to my knowledge) still has terrible support for third party fonts.

forScore is coming to the Mac

In the hustle of our school semester starting, I forgot to post about possibly the most exciting app news I have heard this summer.

After writing about it and talking about it on the podcast for well over a year, I am pleased to say that forScore has announced they are making a native Mac app. It will be coming this fall, alongside their version 12 update. Read all about version 12 here...

forScore | forScore 12:

forScore comes to the Mac in a big way with a brand new, fully native experience built for some of the most advanced and powerful devices out there. forScore runs on macOS Big Sur, both on Intel and Apple Silicon-powered Macs, and it’s included with forScore for iOS and iPadOS as a universal purchase. That’s right—it’s absolutely free for everyone who has ever bought forScore.

From the looks of it, forScore is using Apple's Catalyst technology, which allows iPad apps to be ported to the Mac.

While I have not seen the Mac version of forScore, I have been testing the iOS version of forScore 12. It's great! My favorite small (but significant) feature is that you can now annotate while viewing two pages at a time without the app jolting into annotation mode. You just write directly on the screen with the Apple Pencil and your markings appear immediately.

I store my score backups on my hard drive's file system, which is how I access them on the Mac. But I store my most frequently read scores in forScore on the iPad. I am glad the experience of interacting with my sheet music will now be consistent across both devices.

Something I have felt would need to happen for this to be useful is iCloud syncing. forScore says that is coming too...

Bringing forScore to the Mac is just the beginning—a whole new platform means a whole new set of opportunities. From subtle refinements to major new features already in development like iCloud Syncing, we’re building the future one step at a time.

We’re just getting started. Again.

Using a Mac version of the app with the need to maintain two separate score libraries would have been a nonstarter for me. As an added side benefit, I can see this getting me to use forScore on the iPhone. Its not the best screen size for sheet music, but every now and then, I'd like to be able to take it out of my pocket and reference a score real quick. The problem is that it is never real quick because none of my scores are there!

I could not be more excited about this announcement!

🔗 Chris Russell on sheet music scanning apps

Last week Chris Russell reviewed a new score scanning app, ScanScore. I kind of like that he turned this review into a comparison of the different options available, with example photos. Here is a link to the post with a quote:

ScanScore – Technology in Music Education

So, how did it work? Again, I’m not in the scanning mode right now, so I’m creating an artificial comparison (something that really isn’t crucial to me on a need-to-get-it-done-as-quickly-as-possible basis). I decided to take a a version of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata from IMSLP, and to see how the programs did with it.

While one example is not enough to effectively compare this kind of software, it's still interesting to see where they stack up in the example he provided. I personally find that these scanner apps require more touch up than is worth the effort. In many cases it is still easier to manually recreate the score in a notation app. 

Of the apps Chris mentions in the post, Sheet Music Scanner is my favorite, even though it doesn't do triplets yet.

My Online Teaching Setup (High-Tech Edition)

My studio computer and associated hardware.

When school let out in March, I wrote My Very Straightforward and Very Successful Setup for Teaching Virtual Private Lessons. The impetus for this post, and its snarky title, was an overwhelming number of teachers I saw on Facebook fussing about what apps and hardware they should use to teach online when all you really need is a smartphone, FaceTime, and maybe a tripod.

I stand by that post. But there are also reasons to go high-tech. I have had a lot of time this summer to reflect on the coming fall teaching semester. I have been experimenting with software and hardware solutions that are going to make my classes way more engaging.

Zoom

I have been hesitant about Zoom. I still have reservations about their software. Yet, it is hard to resist how customizable their desktop version is. I will be using Google Meet for my public school classes in September, but for my private lessons, I have been taking advantage of Zoom’s detailed features and settings.

For example, it’s easier to manage audio ins and outs. Right from the chat window, I can change if my voice input is going through my Mac's internal microphone or my studio microphone, or if video is coming from my laptop webcam or my external Logitech webcam. This will also be useful for routing audio from apps into the call (we will get to that in a moment).

Zoom allows you to choose the audio/video input from right within the call.

Zoom also allows you to AirPlay the screen of an iOS device to the student as a screen sharing option. This is the main reason I have been experimenting with Zoom. Providing musical feedback is challenging over an internet-connected video call. Speaking slowly helps to convey thoughts accurately, but it helps a lot more when I say “start at measure 32” and the student sees me circle the spot I want them to start in the music, right on their phone.

You can get really detailed by zooming in and out of scores and annotating as little as a single note. If you are wondering, I am doing all of this on a 12.9 inch iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, using the forScore app. A tight feedback loop of “student performance—>teacher feedback—>student adjustment” is so important to good teaching, and a lot of it is lost during online lessons. It helps to get some of it back through the clarity and engagement of annotated sheet music.

Selecting AirPlay as a screen sharing option.

AirPlaying annotated sheet music to the Zoom call using the iPad Pro and forScore app.

As much as I love this, I still think Zoom is pretty student hostile, particularly with the audio settings. Computers already try to normalize audio by taking extreme louds and compressing them. Given that my private lessons are on percussion instruments, this is very bad. Zoom is the worst at it of all the video apps I have used. To make it better, you have to turn on an option in the audio settings called “Use Original Audio” so that the host hears the student’s raw sound, not Zoom’s attempt to even it out. Some of my students report that they have to re-choose this option in the “Meeting Settings” of each new Zoom call.

If this experiment turns out to be worth it for the sheet music streaming, I will deal with it. But this is one of the reasons why I have been using simple apps like FaceTime up until this point.

My Zoom audio settings.

My Zoom advanced audio settings.

Sending App Audio Directly to the Call

I have been experimenting with a few apps by Rogue Amoeba that give me more control over how audio is flowing throughout my hardware and software.

Last Spring, I would often play my public school students YouTube videos, concert band recordings from Apple Music, and warm-up play-alongs that were embedded in Keynote slides. I was achieving this by having the sound of these sources come out of my computer speakers and right back into the microphone of my laptop. It actually works. But not for everyone. And not well.

Loopback is an app by Rogue Amoeba that allows you to combine the audio input and output of your various microphones, speakers, and apps, into new single audio devices that can be recognized by the system. I wrote about it here. My current set up includes a new audio device I created with Loopback which combines my audio interface and a bunch of frequently used audio apps into one. The resulting device is called Interface+Apps. If I select it as the input in my computer’s sound settings, then my students hear those apps and any microphone plugged into my audio interface directly. The audio quality of my apps is therefore more pure and direct, and there is no risk of getting an echo or feedback effect from my microphone picking up my computer speaker’s sound.

A Loopback device I created which combines the audio output of many apps with my audio interface into a new, compound device called “Interface+Apps.”

I can select this compound device from my Mac’s Sound settings.

Now I can do the following with a much higher level of quality...

• Run a play-along band track and have a private student drum along
• Play examples of professional bands for my band class on YouTube
• Run Keynote slides that contain beats, tuning drones, and other play-along/reference tracks
• and...

Logic Pro X

Logic Pro X is one of my apps routing through to the call via Loopback. I have a MIDI keyboard plugged into my audio interface and a Roland Octopad electronic drum pad that is plugged in as an audio source (though it can be used as a MIDI source too).

The sounds on the Roland Octopad are pretty authentic. I have hi-hat and bass drum foot pedal triggers so I can play it naturally. So in Logic, I start with an audio track that is monitoring the Octopad, and a software instrument track that is set to a piano (or marimba or xylophone, whatever is relevant). This way, I can model drum set or mallet parts for students quickly without leaving my desk. The audio I produce in Logic is routed through Loopback directly into the call. My students say the drum set, in particular, sounds way better in some instances than the quality of real instruments over internet-connected calls. Isn’t that something...

Multiple Camera Angles

Obviously, there is a reason I have previously recommended a set up as simple as a smartphone and a tripod stand. Smartphones are very portable and convenient. And simple smartphone apps like FaceTime and Google Duo make a lot of good default choices about how to handle audio without the fiddly settings some of the more established “voice conference” platforms are known for.

Furthermore, I can’t pick up my desk and move it to my timpani or marimba if I need to model something. So I have begun experimenting with multiple camera angles. I bought a webcam back in March (it finally just shipped). I can use this as a secondary camera to my laptop’s camera (Command+Shift+N in Zoom to change cameras).

Alternatively, I can share my iPhone screen via AirPlay and turn on the camera app. Now I can get up from my desk and go wherever I need to. The student sees me wherever I go. This option is sometimes laggy.

Alternatively, I can log in to the call separately on the iPhone and Mac. This way, there are two instances of me, and if I need to, I can mute the studio desk microphone, and use the phone microphone so that students can hear me wherever I go. I like this option the best because it has the added benefit of showing me what meeting participants see in Zoom.

Logging in to the Zoom call on the Mac and iPhone gives me two different camera angles.

SoundSource

This process works well once it is set up. But it does take some fiddling around with audio ins and outs to get it right. SoundSource is another app by Rogue Amoeba that takes some of the fiddly-ness out of the equation. It replaces the sound options in your Mac’s menubar, offering your more control and more ease at the same time.

This app is seriously great.

This app saved me from digging into the audio settings of my computer numerous times. In addition to putting audio device selection at a more surface level, it also lets you control the individual volume level of each app, apply audio effects to your apps, and more. One thing I do with it regularly is turn down the volume of just the Zoom app when my students play xylophone.

Rogue Amoeba's apps will cost you, but they are worth it for those who want more audio control on the Mac. Make sure you take advantage of their educator discount.

EDIT: My teaching set up now includes the use of OBS and an Elago Stream Deck. Read more here.

Conclusion

I went a little overboard here. If this is overwhelming to you, don't get the idea that you need to do it all. Anyone of these tweaks will advance your setup and teaching.

This post is not specific about the hardware I use. If you care about the brands and models of my gear, check out My Favorite Technology to read more about the specific audio equipment in my setup.

App of the Week: Scanbot (and Scanner Pro)

This week’s App of the Week is Scanbot! 

As years pass, I solidify my mainstay productivity apps. I might try 100 todo or scanner apps, but many of the ones I depend on have been on my home screen for years. For a very long time, Readdle’s Scanner Pro was my scanner app of choice for getting documents and sheet music from the real world into my digital database. Scanbot has recently come to challenge it. 

Rather than explain all of the features, I have simply embedded a quick screencast below that shows it off. Both Scanner Pro and Scanbot allow the user to very quickly get paper into their phone, make the text searchable, neaten up the edges, and prepare the document for sharing. Both apps make it easy to customize ways to send finished documents to specific locations in your file system. Scanner Pro does this through custom workflows and Scanbot does it by remembering my most commonly saved locations in my iCloud and Google Drive (you can see this on the last screen of the screencast). But Scanbot has a few nice touches that ultimately push me over the edge, especially considering how tedious scanning documents with a phone can be...

Getting the final scan into a particular location is smoother for me in Scanbot because it always has my most recently saved locations one tap away. I also really like the way that when selecting the edges of the paper, Scanbot has handles that drag an entire edge, whereas Scanner Pro only has handles in the four corners. Notice in the video how Scanbot even detects the edge when I get close and automatically snaps to the edge of the page. Note that both of these apps have an automatic mode that detects the edges for you and bypasses this step. I just wanted to demo the neat snapping feature in the video.

Both apps also create a folder in iCloud Drive that will automatically save all snapped documents so that you can instantly run over to another device like your Mac and get to your new files.

Scanner Pro does have a few unique features. First, its custom workflows are very powerful and can do multiple things with your finished PDF (for example: save a document to Evernote with specific tags, add it to a specific folder in Dropbox, and email it to a coworker all in one tap). Second, it can scan your camera roll for things that look like documents (maybe a business card or a page you shot on your camera in a hurry) and transform them into PDFs on the spot. Third, it integrates with Readdle's other great productivity apps, like PDF Expert. 

Check out these awesome scanning apps and level up your digital organization!