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Comment by chazeon | Hacker News Reader

You can actually directly scan in the Files app from the triple dots menu in the upper right corner, this will allow you to directly scan as a PDF file.

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I love Apple, but this is so Apple: hidden powerful functionality you'll only know about through word of mouth or intentional exploration in the UI.

It’s also documented in the iPhone User Guide.

You can get it through Books or on the web:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iphf2746307f/18...

No one reads the manuals these days.

Apart from me apparently.

I work mainly with undocumented stuff. That taught me to appreciate when there is manuals and documentation for anything and I read them. I don't watch YouTube videos, I read the manual. Of course until I can't figure it out and then still look into YouTube anyway.

...or the manual.

Exploring the UI is a perfectly valid method of discovering functionality. What’s the alternative? The phone interrupting you every 2 steps saying hey by the way, you can also do this and this from here?

Now, I’ll probably ask Siri. “How can I scan a document with native iOS functionality?” Hopefully I get the right answer back from the LLM!

(Admittedly, I have never read the manual for any iPhone I’ve owned; mea culpa)

It also shows up as a shortcut in spotlight if you search for “Scan Document”

Valid, yes. But this should never be the sole method of discovery.

Good UX provides clues to discovering additional functionality without intruding on the user.

What’s the alternative? That’s a question for a UX team - something Apple can certainly afford.

Clicking on a kebab and getting a clearly-labeled “scan document” option seems like an eminently followable clue. It’s not like it’s a minuscule inscrutable icon three levels down.

> Good UX provides clues to discovering additional functionality without intruding on the user.

This does that. It's behind a button that means "click this for a bunch of stuff you can do here"

Same with number-range call blocking. Gotta pay $4 but it saves you from scammers and other serial callers

And you can scan to any cloud provider that integrates with Files that way. Dropbox etc

Mind blown. Thanks for telling me about this gem.

And you can use the Shortcuts app to create a home screen shortcut for it.

You can long-press the Files icon and access it from the iOS context menu too!

With an iPad, just open Camera. If it sees a piece of paper, you’ll get a yellow Scan Document button without doing anything.

Also worth noting is that if you have a Mac, you can do the same from its Finder and a right click menu.

Came here to say the same. I wonder how this app compares. One perk this app provides is you have a button to press from your home screen. With the native feature, you could set up an Apple shortcut to start scanning a document and create a button on your home screen.

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