SnapMeasure (together with BetterHandles) is being redeveloped as part of VectorScribe Designer by Astute Graphics, who acquired Nineblock last year. So far so good: there are some enhancements and at least one removed feature (scaling), but it does look as though Astute are committed to future development.

http://www.astutegraphics.com/products/vectorscribe/designer.html

I love Synk Pro 7: it is intelligently engineered, it is relatively simple to set up, and once this is done it is as effortless as Time Machine with much more flexibility and finesse. Like others here I still use SuperDuper! for regular bootable backups, because I do like that to happen on a schedule (at night). I also use QRecall for some things, partly because I am a software junky and I like the interface, but also because it does have specific capabilities that Synk doesn’t.

But if I was forced to choose, I’d go for Synk. I remember the days when despite the fact that it was expensive and awkward to use, the herd all stuck with Retrospect because it had been around for a long time and they were used to it. In those days the smarter choice was Synchronize! Pro, which was (and is) much more flexible and user-friendly, but times have moved again: S!P is still good, but it is no longer cutting edge, and it is stuck with an outdated licensing model. Synk, to my mind is the new gold standard.

I just really hope that the change in dev will not compromise things. Indications are that it won’t and I wish the team every success.

Before someone says “no demo, no sale” (and no, I’m not a fan of the App Store either) I’d like to say that this is actually a very nice app, and something of a bargain compared to most serious OCR apps.

It has a very specific remit: to turn scanned images into searchable PDFs with hidden text. The workflow from scan to output is very quick and simple, and it does not require specialist document scanners.

It does however offer limited control over the scan, with no previews, so while it works fine with predictable originals in standard sizes, I generally prefer to pair it with VueScan or throw prescanned images at it. (They don’t have to be PDFs; most formats seem to work fine.)

The OCR is no more perfect than any other OCR, but it is good, and easily good enough for the intended purpose. Acrobat probably does a marginally more accurate job, but at a much higher price and in a klunkier way. OCR-ed text may be copied and pasted from the main window without saving the file, so it can be used as a quick route to text, but don’t expect clean formatting.

You have to watch file sizes: PDFScanner can downsample images, and provides a useful estimate of file size in the Save DB, but in some cases these can unaccountably balloon. The dev, who is very responsive, is working on this and other things. I don’t think this is going to be one of those apps that is cobbled together for the App Store and then forgotten.

Great to see an update to this wonderful little one-trick pony. I used to use it all the time before I had Lightroom, and I miss the speed and simplicity of DateTree's photo imports i. If you like to store your photos in date order, this is well worth looking at as an efficient first step in the process of going from camera to Mac.