Minor update released

Released v1.2009.6.5 this morning. No new functionality, just fixed a couple of bugs relating to importing images from your hard drive. If you use Home Document Manager to scan you proably wouldn’t have noticed them.

Ne’er the TWAIN shall meet

Like Wellington facing his old foe at Waterloo, this weekend I did laborious battle with the TWAIN specification and the scanner manufacturers determined to pervert it.

TWAIN is a standard that allows software programs to talk to image acquisition devices (scanners to you and me) in a common way. Although capitalized, TWAIN isn’t actually an acronym, and comes from Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West” – “…and never the twain shall meet…”, and reflected the difficulties at the time of connecting scanners and computers. Although a later attempt to create an expansion of “TWAIN” failed, “Technology Without An Interesting Name” is still well remembered.

One of the challenges of developing software that makes use of scanners is that scanner manufacturers, for whatever reason, seem to be very bad at actually following the standard. In my office for example, I have a  Brother MFC-7820N. It’s not bad, it has served me well over the last few years, but – the driver, as released by Brother, tells lies. I ask it what image formats it supports, and it lies. So I find myself continually relying on TWAIN less and less, and doing more and more in the application.

Today’s update (version 1.2009.6.4) is essentially a big step forward in scanner compatibility. Any problems you encounter, be sure to let me know. As usual, no action is required on your part, Home Document Manager will update itself whenever an Internet connection is present.

As an aside – if you’re on Twitter, I’d love to hear from you – http://twitter.com/documentmanager

Related articles by Zemanta

• Scanner Review: Fujitsu fi-6140 (blogs.adobe.com)
• Review of the DocuPen RC800 Handheld Scanner (technically-speaking-radio.blogspot.com)
• The secret behind Google’s book scanning project (guardian.co.uk)
• Scanning Negatives and Slides (oreilly.com)

Bug fix update released

I’ve just uploaded version 1.2009.6.0 (catchy eh?). This isn’t going to set the world alight with new features, but it does have a couple of bug fixes that should make for happier use.

• With some older drivers, Home Document Manager was struggling to select the system’s default scanner. This is fixed now.
• Another driver issue – not all scanners and drivers support multi-page TIFF as an image format. I’ve put some fixes in to allow for multi page document capture even if your scanner doesn’t support it.

As usual, no action is required on your part. Home Document Manager will update itself when an Internet connection is present.