Most office scanning software wastes a lot of time. They all want you to pick a stack of options and they want you to do it every time!
\nI hated that. It went against my belief that computers should make things easier; not harder. What annoyed me most was having to do the settings again for the next scan. And the next ….<\/p>\n
It was out of all that, that CmdTwain was born – software that would just scan the page.<\/p>\n
CmdTwain was recently updated to use new libraries and a new compiler. It is a long story which I’ve covered before. The update was version 1.02. The program moved from Borland C to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. However, the move also resulted in a large black window appearing when the program ran. It was not a nice look.
\nYou could avoid having to pick a lot of options or you could avoid a dreadful interface. It was not a nice choice.<\/p>\n
(The underlying cause was I’d made the program into a “Console-mode” application in the move. It doesn’t display a window of its own so Console-mode seemed reasonable. It wasn’t. The black window that appears is a “DOS box”. Console mode apps have them. This is the case even if the program doesn’t do anything with it. What was once quite familiar to us all, now just looks terrible.
\nThe solution sounds pretty straight forward: swap it over to use Win32 GUI mode. As usual this was easier said than done. Visual Studio was not keen to have a new program with the same name as an earlier one. But we finally saw eye to eye ….)<\/p>\n