MacStories Team

3496 posts on MacStories since July 2011

Articles by the MacStories team. Founded by Federico Viticci in April 2009, MacStories attracts millions of readers every month thanks to in-depth, personal, and informed coverage that offers a balanced mix of Apple news, app reviews, and opinion.

Prizmo: Pro Scanner App with OCR, Pencil Annotation, PDF & DOCX Export [Sponsor]

Prizmo is a fully-featured scanner app for iOS and Mac that lets you capture documents and receipts, turning them into professional PDFs that you can share, archive, annotate, fill out as forms, or sign with the Apple Pencil or your finger. The app is perfect for scanning business cards to add people to your contacts too.

The capture workflow on iOS has been streamlined in Prizmo’s latest release as a tap-free multi-page scanning process with the ability to review pages as you scan. Text recognition starts immediately in the background, and the PDF is auto-uploaded into your shared folder immediately without any user action.

Prizmo also offers some of the deepest editing tools available in any scanning app, such as page curvature flattening, edge repair, background cleanup, user-editable OCR layout, and much more. Prizmo edits are non-destructive, meaning you can reverse any operation at any time without the need of rescanning, so even your Apple Pencil annotations from a week ago can be edited at any time.

Among Prizmo’s output formats, PDF gets many customizable options, including image compression level and a JBIG2 encoder for extremely lightweight black and white scans of just 40KB per page, useful for archiving large amounts of data. It also comes with image and text exports and can create fully-formatted DOCX documents that you can edit further in Apple Pages or Microsoft Word.

Prizmo offers not one but three OCR engines to handle the variety of languages and document styles too. And its most advanced one, Cloud OCR, is about to get an important update in the coming weeks with new, breakthrough capabilities.

Prizmo is localized in many languages, and it offers specific accessibility features for blind and vision-impaired users, including VoiceOver support and a dedicated text reader.

Through Sunday, March 6th, Prizmo’s Premium Pack, which is a one-time payment, is 30% off on the App Store, so be sure to download it today for just $/€13.99. Prizmo for Mac is on sale, too, for 33% off ($/€39.99) on the Mac App Store.

Our thanks to Prizmo by Creaceed for sponsoring MacStories this week.





UpNote: A Clean and Powerful Note-Taking App Across Platforms [Sponsor]

UpNote packs extraordinary power into a clean, delightful design that makes it a pleasure to take notes. Crafted to make focused note-taking effortless wherever you are, UpNote combines its beautiful, streamlined interface with powerful tools that use the latest technologies on every platform to deliver a superior experience.

The app works on iOS, Android, the Mac, and Windows, making it an excellent solution for anyone who needs access to their notes across multiple platforms thanks to the app’s fast, reliable sync. Plus, UpNote works however you want and wherever you are with themes, dark mode, a wide font selection, focus and typewriter modes, and the ability to work online and off.

Notes can be organized into notebooks and sub-notebooks too. Hashtags, note pinning, and bookmarking add even more ways to quickly access your notes. It’s a structure that’s supplemented by powerful search and sorting to make navigating even the largest collections of notes simple.

UpNote has all of your note-taking needs covered. Rich text formatting like tables, code blocks, attachments, images, bi-directional links, to-do lists, and more. Of course, the app supports Markdown syntax as well.

To handle your research needs, UpNote has a web clipper extension, so you can quickly save links and content as you browse the web. There’s even a great solution for longer notes: a table of contents feature that makes navigating long notes a breeze. The app can also be locked, which makes it perfect for journaling.

Switching to UpNote is easy, with powerful import functionality that can handle Evernote, Markdown, and other formats. The app handles backups automatically and includes a version history too. And, when you need to use your notes elsewhere, you can export them as Markdown text, HTML, or PDFs.

Now is the perfect time to try UpNote. The app includes subscription and lifetime upgrade options, and for a limited time, MacStories readers can purchase UpNote’s lifetime premium upgrade for 30% off. This is an amazing deal, so be sure to check it out today.

Our thanks to UpNote for sponsoring MacStories this week.