announcementsEnhance - a Scanner
12 March, 2012One of the earlier ideas we had, from Scott Hanselman, on our Uservoice was a scanner utility that had a metro look and feel.
We've put it off a few weeks as we looked at projects that would help us out with administrating Code52 like MarkPad and Pretzel whose sites have had a facelift lately, and have had large changes and improvements since being created.
But we've always had it in the backs of our minds as a fun project, some of us have gone out and gotten some hardware to participate, and now we're set to go!
Goals
What we really want, is to start simple - a scanning tool that builds on top of the Windows built in systems, but restyles the dialogs and pages into a metro look and feel, and simplifies the act.
Then we want to look at extending it - offering some basic image processing functions like straightening the image, or basic color correction.
And finally we want to extend it further with parts to handle some document management/OCR (to index what you've scanned for future reference), and so you can do things like upload what you've scanned to dropbox/rackspace/skydrive and similar.
Some helpful starters
Pete Brown's WIA Example and image rotation and a Silverlight one for kicks.
@aeoth's WIA and OCR post.
Scanning from an Auto Document Feeder in C#
An ADF library on Codeplex also cloned on Github here
A Twain library on Codeplex and an example on how to use it.
AForge library on Nuget for image manipulation - and a feature list
Craig's Libraries which can be found on Nuget
A nuget package for Rackspace and the Rackspace API
And a Skydrive client.
The Skydrive SDK and a recent blog post that could help
How can I get involved?
As usual the project is going up on GitHub tomorrow. The Trello Board has some thoughts outlined on where we think we'll be headed with it, but as usual we're always open to other ideas being added. You can ping one of us on JabbR to be added to the board to volunteer to do one of the features, or come in just to discuss the project, or chat in general.
We're looking forward to seeing what we can come up with, and hope that lives up to the great WPF apps we've managed to put out over the past couple of months :)
If you want to check some of those out you can do so on this blog, or the code is up on GitHub!
