Some of you might remember I shared Anyline Keyboard a few months ago; a scanner app that also lets you edit characters (if you're a bit confused, don't fret. More on this later). There are several of these apps already, but all have one common factor: OCR (here's a quick educational tech-letter for you)

Short for Optical Character Recognition, OCR is a technology that recognises text from images. For those who still can't quite understand what that means, let me use Anyline Keyboard as an example:

When you use an ordinary scanner app, all that happens is... your physical document is now digitalised. Can you edit that digital document? No. When I scan my passport, all I have now is a digital copy of my passport. That's it-- I can't edit the text on the scanned copy of my passport. 

Some of you might have seen routers where the Wi-Fi passwords are printed on the back (they tend to be quite long and complex). If you use an app like Anyline Keyboard, you can scan that complicated string of characters. However... unlike a normal scanner where all you could do is view the Wi-Fi password you just scanned, OCR lets you treat this scan as ordinary text-- this means that you can actually edit whatever you just scanned.

Today's tech-letter elevates that concept from smartphones to smartcomputers.

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For starters, please note that today's email features an application that's exclusive to Apple MacBooks, but like always, I'll add decent Windows alternatives at the end of this tech-letter. 

Now that you have a rough idea of what OCR is, here's OwlOCR-- my all-time favourite MacBook scanner (mostly because the free version covers everything I need, plus it's so so easy). With this, there are several different "scans" you can take. 

For starters, anything on your screen (P.S. I'm adding a carousel here. Click on either of the thumbnails to switch between images).

In the first image, you see what my screen looks like while writing today's tech-letter. See how that chunk of text is greyed out-- that's me using OwlOCR (in real time) to select that portion of my screen. It's like taking a screenshot on your MacBook.

On the second image, you'll see OwlOCR's window. This app took my screenshot and converted it to editable text. 

Just in case you don't quite grasp how impressive this is, I'm going to write it one more time. 

OwlOCR took a screenshot of text, and made it text you can edit. After this process happens, the app automatically copies that portion of text for you (just in case) for you to paste it anywhere.

Please note that even though I used OwlOCR to take a screenshot of text, you can even use it to take screenshots of buttons and images; after all, to OwlOCR they are simply images with text.

Do you have PDF documents or images you want to extract text from? Simply drag and drop, and OwlOCR will convert it to text for you. But it gets slightly better than that.

Remember the Anyline Keyboard example from above? Complicated Wi-Fi password but you don't want to go through the process of typing out something annoying like "fnG53faynSfm4"? You can take a photo of it using your iOS device (iPhone/iPad) and sync it with OwlOCR.

Some of the things I use this app with (as it's always more convincing to me when I read use-cases) is:

• When someone sends me a screenshot of a to-do list, I can use this app to extract the text so I can follow along too.
• When someone sends me a picture of their credit card for me to make a purchase, I can use this app to extract the numbers, name, and dates instead of manually typing them.
• Wi-Fi passwords (my fav example), etc.

This app supports English, French, Italian, German, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese, and you can get the core version for free. For Windows users, there are way too many to choose from, but these seems like a decent shout.