iPhone App Reviews

Touch-Fill-Go

Dan R. | Feb 18, 2010 Business

User rating: (6 votes, average: 2.50 out of 5)

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Tired of co-workers asking you: “Is that a portable scanner in your pocket or are you just happy to see me”? Well if you are, Earthlink has the solution for you. Their Touch-Fill-Go iPhone Scanning App allows you to take care of any of your on-the-go emergency scanning needs thus freeing your pockets of that long, cylindrical portable scanner you’ve been lugging about.

Touch Fill Go works like other scanning apps. Basically, you snap a picture of a document, edit the brightness/contrast as needed, and the app does the rest, converting your image into a PDF. Now here comes the cool part: you can actually add text to your PDF. Using a technology that can best be described as ‘magic’ to us lay people, or OCR for the technologically inclined, the app scans the document for places where text can be entered (ie: textbox or checkboxes). If it finds any, it will allow you to tap on that box and ‘type in text’, thus turning your PDF maker into a limited PDF editor as well. You can also ‘sign’ your name with your finger or draw a picture..don’t ask me why anyone would need to draw a picture, but the function is there.

One of the cool features of this app is it will remember all the text you enter. So once you’ve entered your address on one form, it’s stored and ready to be entered again on any other form, a handy feature for jobseekers who use Touch Fill Go to fill out their hiring forms.

With the app, you can also email your PDF or share it with another Touch Fill Go user if you’re both using the same WiFi.

Overall the app works as stated. I did find that using the editing function takes a little getting used to and sometimes ‘dragging’ things around requires fairly good ‘finger aim’ – fat fingered people, you’re better off just asking a skinny handed friend for help. Also, to email a doc, you need to go through three steps: (a) processing the picture (b) converting it to a PDF (c) waiting for it to email. The whole process can seem a bit time consuming, especially if you’re an anal retentive organized control freak, which let’s face it – if you need a portable scanner, you probably are.

Scan quality – I took pictures of the docs while sitting down at a table. There was a very light shadow at the bottom caused by own big dumb silhouette, a problem I probably could have solved by standing up (did I mention I’m a bit lazy at times?). I adjusted the brightness and contrast higher for each picture and that seemed to improve the ‘sharpness’ of the image. I’m no scan expert but the PDFs looked good to me. I had written in red ink on one of the docs and my notes showed up clearly (in black and white of course – it’s not a color scanner).

I also ran into 2 bugs. Bug 1 – I took a close up picture of a doc (instead of capturing the whole document). The program acted like it had processed the image, but when I tried to email it, the email arrived with no PDF attachment. I tried to email it several times, ignoring Einstein’s advice about insanity = doing the same thing and expecting different results. Of course, I got the same blank email each time. Finally I took another picture of the full doc and it converted and emailed correctly.

Which brings me to Bug 2 – Not sure if it’s really a bug of the app but, one time while emailing, it took about 5 minutes to send. During that time I couldn’t check or use my mail program for anything else. I looked for a “Cancel Send” button on the app, but there is none. It eventually did send, so it wasn’t a major catastrophe. But being the aforementioned anal retentive organized control freak that I am, I spent that entire 5 minutes thinking “what if I had to email something this instant and this program was preventing me from doing so?” In all fairness, it’s probably more of problem with the Mail App than Touch Fill Go, but I feel better having gotten that off my chest.

Overall, I’m satisfied with my $4.99 purchase. This app would be perfect for business travelers who need to keep track of and turn in copies of signed receipts. I think as far as scanners go, $4.99 puts this on the low end of the pricing scale. I’d say that’s a fair price to pay for the power to scan and edit. Not to mention you’ll avoid all those embarrassing misunderstandings that the Planon Handheld you’ve been carrying in your pocket has been causing.

(As always, be sure to read the description of the app provided before purchasing to make sure you know what it does and doesn’t do. Also, not for iPod Touch users because you need to have a camera. Unless you just want to store PDFs that someone shares with you.)

iTunes Link: Touch-Fill-Go
Version 1.0
Reviewed on an iPod Touch 2nd Gen