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Data Entry in the 21st century.
Jan. 5th, 2023 07:00 pm Our condominium replaced the air conditioner condensers on the roof, and to register for the extended warranty the manufacturer wants the model number and serial number of each of the roughly 40 condensers.
Each condo owner also owns the condenser for that unit so I was asked to let each owner know their model# and serial#.
Kitt Oster and I went up on the roof and used an iPhone to make a video: point the camera at the condo number written on the condenser, then bend down to point it at the label at shin height with the model# and serial#.
To get the data I needed:
* We sent the video from the iPhone to the mac using Airdrop.
* I played the video in Quicktime Player. When it came to a label, I paused it, and used the arrow-keys to advance by single video frames to a frame where the text of the label was clearly in view.
* I double-clicked on the text and Apple's Vision framework recognized:
A) That I was clicking on text
B) Recognized the entire serial number as a contiguous piece of text and visibly selected it.
* From there I copy and pasted the number into the appropriate cell of spreadsheet.
So much quicker and easier than wandering the roof with a notebook and a pencil then hand copying that data one digit at a time into a spreadsheet.
I'm amazed and delighted by the built-in tools of macOS - this new addition of OCR in many places is something I didn't know I needed, but now that I have it I use it all the time.
Each condo owner also owns the condenser for that unit so I was asked to let each owner know their model# and serial#.
Kitt Oster and I went up on the roof and used an iPhone to make a video: point the camera at the condo number written on the condenser, then bend down to point it at the label at shin height with the model# and serial#.
To get the data I needed:
* We sent the video from the iPhone to the mac using Airdrop.
* I played the video in Quicktime Player. When it came to a label, I paused it, and used the arrow-keys to advance by single video frames to a frame where the text of the label was clearly in view.
* I double-clicked on the text and Apple's Vision framework recognized:
A) That I was clicking on text
B) Recognized the entire serial number as a contiguous piece of text and visibly selected it.
* From there I copy and pasted the number into the appropriate cell of spreadsheet.
So much quicker and easier than wandering the roof with a notebook and a pencil then hand copying that data one digit at a time into a spreadsheet.
I'm amazed and delighted by the built-in tools of macOS - this new addition of OCR in many places is something I didn't know I needed, but now that I have it I use it all the time.
