App Writer US
App Writer US is a new app from a programming studio in Denmark. It is a text editor for the iPad with word prediction, text-to-speech, OCR, and a special font for people who are Dyslexic. The developers have put together a short video to introduce the product.
Requirements: Compatible with iOS 5.0 or later.
Posted in Literacy and Reading and Text to Speech and Writing. 5 comments
Previous Post: PaperPort Notes Next Post: Abilipad
Two comments about this app were made on the QIAT listserv on March 26, 2012.
Nettie Fisher said: “I purchased the App and tried about eight times, it does not work at all and am planning on contacting the vendor. At this time I would say don’t spend your money.”
Margaret Poore said: “I also tried it today. I couldn’t hold the iPad steady enough to get the text aligned so the OCR never worked. I was able to copy text into it and it does work for text to speech. Word prediction when typing seems good but you have to touch the screen to select the word.
I think it’s a good start but needs work.”
I, too, paid $ 19.95 for this app.
The features sound great — but it does not work at all.
Do not waste your money on this app.
I paid $19.95 as well, for this app. I was forwarded the information from my District Special Ed. Supervisor.
I’m very disappointed with it so far. Doesn’t work. Not user friendly. No instructions. Right now I am spending time trying to figure out why it so expensive for such low quality.
More discussion of this app on the QIAT listserv. This is from Ashley Smith, written on 3/29/12:
“I have spoken with one of the company’s employees and they said:
“People are very excited about the OCR feature. However, I would like to stress that it’s very difficult to capture a decent image using the built-in camera on the iPad. It works better with screen captures. But the main reason why we included OCR is because we are working on a pdf-reader, which we will integrate directly in AppWriter. So the actual use case will be to import pdf-file – and then select either a portion of the text or select the entire text and perform OCR on it.”
Jeanne Tuthill shared this comment on the QIAT listserv on 3/29/12:
“I bought it and tried it out last night. I could not get the OCR function to work at all which was disappointing. I also found that it would randomly crash on me. When using word prediction,
the prediction worked reasonably well but I was a bit annoyed that if you selected a word from the prediction box it would not automatically put a space after the word.
I emailed the developer (and got to use some of my rusty Danish language skills!) and he was very responsive. He explained that they are having such difficulty getting the OCR to work with
the camera that they are going to remove it in an update for now. He also said the missing space after words selected from the word prediction box will be added in the update.
In addition, he wrote: “If you bought the app based on the OCR feature, the following video shows how to get a refund for an app: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozmpIxEjK-8”
I haven’t checked out the video yet, but I figured I’d share with those who wanted to get a refund.”