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  • You use whatever works best for you. Microsoft Lens, on Android, is still unmatched for scanning, correcting perspective, and cleaning up whiteboards. No OSS tool comes close - and, believe me, I tried to use others (or, other; I think OpenScan is the only thing that attempts something similar). It would be foolish to not use a tool that you like using and doesn't have any hidden consequences, merely because of on opinion.

    I don't think VSCode is particularly good, myself, but the point remains: it's free, I haven't heard anything about it surreptitiously sending info to MS, and if it works for people, then great.

    • I think the proprietary version MS distributes does send telemetry data to them but I personally just use VSCodium, which is based on the open source VS Code version.

      • Probably. I have no doubt that Lens (the aforementioned tool I used to use) does. In the career I had, I had to give up the telemetry, because I had to use Lens. There is literally no practical alternative. Sometimes, you just have to pay that cost. Heck, I'd have bought a telemetry-free alternative from someone else if it worked as well, and if anyone offered one. Which they don't.

        I'm beating that dead horse because it baffles me everytime I think about it that, in a veritable app ocean of calculator, chat, and everything else, Lens is apparently unique.

        • Is Lens just an app to scan documents using only your phone camera or does it something else that makes it so useful? I sometimes need to scan stuff like that too but haven't find something good that's open source.

          • Lens is, among other things, a camera app that recognizes whiteboards, auto-crops to the whiteboard, and auto-corrects the perspective. It can also clean the image, removing smudges and dry-erase dirt, and do basic color adjustment and B/W conversion. It's designed specifically for whiteboards, but works on documents. And then, when the image is cleaned, it makes sharing via email directly from the app particularly easy - sure, it only removes 2 or 3 clicks, but it does streamline the process.

            It's pretty amazing at what it does. When you're in a tight space and have to take a picture of a whiteboard at some absurdly acute angle, it works miracles. I've never had it not impress a coworker who's never seen it do its thing.

            I don't know who MS acquired to get it, but it's simply a fantastic program with no competition.

            • I don't like using proprietary software but this does sound really useful. In school I take my notes on a laptop but oftentimes I need to take pictures of sheets or the whiteboard to put it in my notes, which always looks really bad. I might check this out for that purpose. I tried to find something open source that could do this but haven't found anything either.

    • I agree with being pragmatic, but the opinion of hating Microsoft isn't unfounded. There are pragmatic reasons to avoid building up and entrenching yourself in tooling that doesn't respect you as a user or is controlled by companies that has interests that don't align with yours.

      • I didn't say iy was wrong to hate Microsoft. I said that it's silly to ignore the best tool on only principle. You might not want it because it costs money, or collects telemetry, or because you want to avoid vendor lock-in; these are all reasons that have a grounded cost, even if the yool is best in class. But just because you don't like the company itself?

        If MS took VS Code away tomorrow, devs would switch to something else. That's a cost I'm not willing to pay, but if they are... eh. If Microsoft took Lens away, well, we're fucked, because the OSS community has not offered any solution that works better than just taking a picture and cleaning it up in GIMP.

456 comments