Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

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Tal G in Jerusalem
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Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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Tuesday, June 25, 2002
00:05 - A Voice in the Wilderness http://www.lasersoft-imaging.com	(top)
My days of scanner purgatory are over. Anybody who's stuck with me for some time will probably remember my scanner woes-- my Quixotic battles with the beast known as VueScan, my futile attempts to find an A3-sized scanner for less than $3000 or with anything but a SCSI interface-- it seemed my life was doomed to ignominious failure; the Gods of Scanners mocked my every scrabbling. A few days ago, Think Secret published some screen-shots of native, OS-level scanner support in Jaguar, and my spirits were lifted-- perhaps, who knows, Image Capture will know about my Microtek 6400XL! Maybe, just mayhap, it will lift scanning from the dismal Pit of Despair that is VueScan-- in which your prescan and your full scan passes would have about as much bearing on each other's exposure levels as the Designated Hitter Rule has on wind patterns on Mars-- and give me the ability to transfer things from paper to pixels without physical pain again. Maybe... ...But that's in the future. Jaguar isn't out until "this summer", which we translate to mean "late September". So I'm again returned to my seat of peering at my screen and wishing it to convert itself into a Stargate that I could throw my sketchbook into and have its whole contents converted to JPEGs by the happy little Apple Elves. Until Saturday, that is. Saturday, my whole life changed. I got an e-mail, out of the blue, from someone I'd only run into in passing in a forum somewhere, months and months ago. He said, "Hey-- I don't know if you're still having trouble with your 6400XL. But if so, I found this great piece of scanner software-- it's called SilverFast, and it supports your scanner natively." No way, I thought. But I went to the website anyway. And there it was. A very slick, well-polished, full-featured scanner program, with both a Photoshop plug-in version and a standalone version, for Windows (all flavors) and Mac OS 9 and OS X. It supports all kinds of scanners-- three columns' worth of manufacturers. Drill down into "Microtek" and you find pictures of each and every scanner Microtek has made in the last five years. They're all supported, including my 6400XL. There's a $300 full version (with a demo) and a $50 "SE" version for the low-end. I download the demo and install it. I cross my fingers. I swear under my breath. No way can this be everything I'm looking for. I fire up the plug-in and do a prescan run. And instantly, the prescan appears, scrolling real-time as the data flows in from the scanner. It's non-blocking. I can keep doing things as it scans. And the pre-scan run is fast! Fifteen seconds and it's there, perfectly balanced! It's then that I notice how perfectly polished everything in the interface is. This isn't just some bad port. This is a gorgeous, carefully laid-out OS X app. The buttons are all spaced right. The labels all update correctly and fit right. When I select a post-processing option of "Unsharp Mask", it gives me a pop-up palette with a "before" and "after" window, and asks me to select a piece of the prescan region; I do, and it snaps off a salute. "Yes, SIR!" And it hurriedly zips to the spot where I clicked, scans that little square, puts the results in the "before" window, does an unsharp mask, and puts the results in "after". Then it stands poised, ready for me to do a real scan and apply that filter inline. I do a full scan, the tears streaming down my face. A progress bar pops up. It only takes up about 2/3 of the dialog box-- because the rest is taken up by a progressive icon of the scanned image... it updates pixel-by-pixel as the scanner travels down the length of the bed. And it's not just updating once per pixel height... it does one row of pixels then an antialiased row-- then it resamples that row (now that it's finished) and completes it, then goes on to do the next row antialiased. It's a smooth, feathered boundary-- an OS X-native effect, and completely unnecessary-- but the kind of thing that you do if you're a programmer who loves his work. Fifty bucks has never so violently flown out of my pockets and into the Stargate of my screen. The SE version is missing a few features from the full version, but not so you'd notice; it still has the contrast-o-meter, some of the post-processing, and all the positioning controls. The only thing it seems not to have is the weird calibration stuff that top-end graphics professionals would demand. But for my purposes, all my deepest desires have been fulfilled. I have since Saturday been drifting in blissful slack detachment, with the same kind of feeling in my limbs of a man who has just been released from a neck brace. My life begins anew. SilverFast. I sing thee an ode. And thank you to Chris Pople, the Voice in the Wilderness, to whom I owe my current euphoria. It would still be nice if OS X could support discovery of SCSI devices that aren't necessarily turned on at boot time, but no! No no no. That's not a complaint that needs to be aired right this minute. That can wait. Like until after Jaguar, if it's not in by then.