What a fun (and so very Apple-like) story. Espen Haagensen didn’t even know Apple had bought a license for his photo until he saw it in use in the promotional material for the iPhones 6.

Scan and OCR directly from your iPhone or iPad camera using PDFpen Scan+ from Smile.

Swiftly scan batches of pages and do post-process image editing.

Crop quickly and precisely.

Easily copy post-OCR text content for use in other apps.

Automatically upload scans to Dropbox and iCloud.

Share your scanned PDF, complete with OCR text, by email or via your favorite cloud service.

PDFpen Scan+ 1.5 improves the camera layout and adds support for image stabilization and iCloud Drive.

PDFpen Scan+ is available on the App Store.

* * *

My thanks to Smile for once again sponsoring the site this week. Scanning and saving documents from my iPhone is something I do often. I use my iPhone to capture and save almost all of my business receipts. PDFpen Scan+ is one of the best scanning and OCR-ing apps out there. It’s super fast, easy to use, powerful, etc. Once you’ve “scanned” a document (by taking a photo of it) then what’s great about having the scanning and OCR all happen in-app is you can upload to Dropbox (or Evernote, or iCloud Drive, or Google Drive, or your own WebDAV or FTP server). It’s then easy to sort, search-for, and find those documents later if and when you need to.

On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly I’m joined by my former podcasting partner in crime, Ben Brooks. We talk about (a) what sort of camera you should buy if you want to upgrade from your iPhone, and (b) how to increase your chances of snapping a few awesome photos of friends and family during the holidays (and pretty much any other time).

Sponsored by:

• Mandrill: Scalable, reliable, and secure email infrastructure service from the folks at MailChimp.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

Whoa.

This photograph was taken this morning by American Airlines mechanic, Mike Alvstad, on a flight into DFW. (Via Derek Nelson)

Speaking of Tad Carpenter and interviews, Tad was featured on TGD a couple years ago:

The fact that I grew up in the hallways of Hallmark Cards really shaped my voice as a designer. A lot of us think of Hallmark Cards as a place where fluffy bunnies and sentimental flower cards are created—there’s some truth to that. But outside of Pixar maybe, there’s nowhere that has this much creativity in one location.

Made in the Middle is a fantastic new website built by Tad and Jessica Carpenter. It just launched yesterday, and it’s all about the creative community here in Kansas City. The site features interviews with local creative professionals — designers, photographers, chefs, architects — every Monday.

You don’t have to be a KC local to appreciate the site — the interviews are well designed, and conducted with some extremely talented and thoughtful folks.

When I quit my job as a marketing and creative director to begin writing for a living, the creative community here in Kansas City was smaller and far less vibrant than it is now. In the last 3-4 years, it has exploded. (No doubt it has something to do with the fact we’ve got some the best coffee shops in the world and along with some of the fastest internet.)

Fantastic, as usual, essay by Paul Graham:

And yet while there are clearly a lot of mean people out there, there are next to none among the most successful people I know. What’s going on here? Are meanness and success inversely correlated?

Steven Levy on the iPhone 6 Plus:

The smartphone as we know it (i.e. the iPhone and its followers) is only seven years old — and already it has seen dramatic changes in form. There’s nothing that indicates that we’ve frozen the form factor. Companies like Apple, Google, Samsung and others yet to be founded are going to try all sorts of sizes and shapes. The functions of our phones and tablets will probably be portioned out in wearables, in spectacles, and maybe even tie tacks.

The Normal earbuds are a pretty wild product. Using their iPhone app, you take a few pictures of your ears. Then, they 3D print the earbuds to be a custom fit. If they don’t quite fit, you take a few more pictures with the earbuds in place, they’ll make adjustments and ship you new ones.

Tyler Hays wrote a review of the whole process and the earbuds themselves for Tools & Toys.

Over on The Sweet Setup, Dropbox is smack in the middle of Mac apps we think you should be using.

And our senior editor, Jeff Abbott, wrote an excellent guide to using Dropbox. The guide covers the basics of how to get up and running, and it outlines how to get additional storage space for free. But it also covers expert-level tips such as syncing your application support files, setting up symlinks, integrating with 3rd-party services like IFTTT and Wufoo, and so much more.

There are also organization tips for how to best keep your synced files and folders free from chaos and clutter. Plus there are three bonus documents that cover photo sharing and how families can get the most out of Dropbox.

The guide is brand new, and this week it’s on sale for 25% off. Not to mention we’re bundling it with another great ebook by Bradley Chambers: Learning to Love Photo Management

You can read more about the guide here, or go ahead and buy your discounted copy right now.

Mandrill is an email infrastructure service that started as an idea in 2010. That idea became reality in 2012, when Mandrill cannibalized a crew of MailChimp’s best engineers. Isolated from the rest of the team, they turned the idea from a skunkworks project into a product that outperforms competitor services. Growing fast and innovating faster, Mandrill is now the largest Email as a Service platform on the market, with more than 250,000 active customers.

Use Mandrill to send automated one-to-one email like password resets and welcome messages, as well as marketing emails and customized newsletters. Mandrill is quick to set up, easy to use, and ridiculously stable. We made it for developers, who love documentation, integrations, high delivery rates, webhooks, and analytics. If you’re not comfortable with code and APIs, we recommend finding someone who is before getting started.

Mandrill comes with a beautiful interface, flexible template options, custom tagging, and advanced tracking and reports. Mandrill is the only email infrastructure service with a mobile app that lets you monitor delivery and troubleshoot from wherever you are. It’s also powerful, scalable, and affordable. But you don’t have to take our word for it.

* * *

My thanks to Mandrill for sponsoring the site this week. Sponsorship via Syndicate Ads.