Never Buy Read Iris, or Anything Else, from Iris Link

This person isn’t the first to have problems with the rip-off/scam artists known as Iris Link. This company is well known for making software that fails to work and doesn’t have features advertised, providing extremely poor customer support, failing to provide serial numbers for previously purchased software, and much worse. In my particular case, it took over a week, plus an email and two phone calls, to provide me with the serial number when I purchased Read Iris 11 for OS X, because of what they said was a flaw in their software. I’m now having troubles with my Read Iris 12 license, and have discovered that Read Iris 12 doesn’t work quite right with voiceover, and that it has serious bugs impacting OCR quality. Iris Link released an update that fixed, as far as I could tell, a grand total of zero of the problems. Currently, OCR quality is better in Read Iris 11 than Read Iris 12. That’s one hell of an upgrade! Someone should start a class action against these people.

The original complaint that enspired this post follows:

Hi all.

On September 25th I upgraded to readiris 12 for the mac for $40. It
didn’t work with voiceover. I called iris and after trying to get it
to work for me the customer service person supposedly processed a
refund. I thought I had seen a refund come back in but I think now
that it was just the authorization expiring. So this morning I checked
my account and found that $40 from readers had been processed on
October 5th–a whole week and a half after the initial processing. I
called iris and the person who answered the phone asked for an RMA; I
wasn’t given an ram. so I was told I’d have to call back in two hours
and talk to somebody named Casey who supposedly must have been the
person I talked to on September 25th. But this person I talked to this
morning said he didn’t know how Casey would look it up if I didn’t
have an RMA. I offered to give him my order number but he refused,
saying he couldn’t look it up that way. Since this isn’t the first
time I’ve seen delays or misplacement of information with Iris I told
the man that I wouldn’t be buying from the company again and planned
to file a report with the Better Business Bureau. He told me not to
threaten him and I said I wasn’t threatening, that I planned to carry
this out. He launched into what a big company they are and how many
euros they make a year and how they weren’t interested in scamming me.
I told him that the point was that the refund should have been
processed and the money certainly shouldn’t have been finally taken
out of my account a week and a half after I had requested the refund,
especially since I filed the request the same day I downloaded. He
told me how it’s a long process to refund–funny, it’s not a long
process to charge me and I’ve seen companies refund reasonably
quickly!!! I will be calling back and talking to Casey but I’ve also
filed a dispute with my bank which temporarily credits me wit the
money while they investigate. Merchants do have 30 days to refund
which I think is way too generous at least in this case. At any rate,
since this isn’t the first time I or somebody I know has had a refund
problem, though it was eventually resolved, I won’t be buying from
this company again no matter how good their product may become. I’l
use iris 11 as long as it works on the mac and after that if there
isn’t another program to scan adequately I’ll just have to go back to
using Abby Finereader in Windows. It’s not so much the time it takes
for a refund I’m griping about; it’s the fact that I was finally
charged again on October 5th after the authorization had apparently
expired, the fact that I wasn’t given an RMA, the fact that the person
on the phone passed the buck and wouldn’t even take my order number
and try to investigate or take my number and have Casey call me back
(I know they ask for your order number to process the refund so I
doubt his claim that the order number wouldn’t have been helpful!) and
it’s the fact that Carla and I too if i remember correctly had to call
again because refunds hadn’t gotten processed correctly!!! I’m sorry;
readers 11 was a good program, but I won’t be buying from this company
again.

–

Cheryl

OS X Scanning: The Saga Continues

As readers of Thursday’s posting may remember, I was attempting to scan documents using OS X. After getting the scanner set-up and installing the correct drivers, I purchased Read Iris. However, I didn’t have a serial number.

This morning, my serial number problems got resolved. At 9:00 sharp, I called Iris tech support. I spent seven minutes and thirty seconds on hold (the exact number from my phone logs), before the system gave up on finding anyone to talk to me and sent me to voicemail. I called back again right away, and spoke to someone in sails. They told me that the serial number was included in the email with the download link. I told them it wasn’t, and read the email off of my screen. Sails decided they couldn’t help me, and sent me to support. Support also told me that my serial number was in the original email. Once again, I told them it was not. So, they read me the number over the phone. They never did explain why the system failed, and my serial number wasn’t in the original email. Oh, well! At least, after 5 days, one unanswered email, and two phone calls, I finally have my software!

Registration of the software was another process. It took three forms, a serial number, a key, and a bunch of other information they already had. But after another half hour, it worked, and I was ready to scan.

I haven’t yet, however, recognized everything correctly. I’m having problems with images getting cut-off, zoomed strangely, etc. But those things, at least, have nothing to do with Iris Read. Image Capture on OS X isn’t obeying the image measurements I type in; it only respects cropping information provided by the mouse. I’ll post when I figure this next problem out.

Scanning and OCR on OS X

I’ve had a mac computer for over a year, now. However, for all this time, whenever I needed to scan and OCR something, I’ve been using a back-up Windows laptop. Mostly, this was because I didn’t have any OCR software on the mac. I did briefly test out the scanning abilities of the mac, just to make sure things were working with my scanner, but I never seriously tried to scan something…until today.

The first step, of course, was plugging in and recognizing the scanner. I figured this would be a no-brainer; it’d been done before, and it should just happen, again. I plugged in the USB connection, and hardware growler notified me that I had connected canoscan. Yay! I figured all was still well in scannerland. Just to be safe, though, I pulled up Image Capture to do a test run. “No image capture device connected.” Huh? It worked before!

After some help from Aardvark, I found an Apple support article that told me I may need to download updated drivers from the website. I guess some update broke something, somewhere. Thankfully, the Canon website it sent me to was nearly perfectly accessible. Unfortunately, it was then that I realized I wasn’t exactly sure of my scanner moddle.

The first trick I tried, of course, was to go look at system profiler, and see if it would tell me anything helpful:
CanoScan:

Product ID:        0×1900
Vendor ID:        0×04a9 (Canon Inc.)
Version:        3.07
Speed:        Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer:        Canon
Location ID:        0xfd100000
Current Available (mA):        500
Current Required (mA):        Unknown (Device has not been configured)

Well, that was useless. The next trick: scan my scanner with KNFB Reader didn’t work, either. It told me text was cut off at the edges, but it couldn’t recognize the raised text on the back of the scanner. Oh, well. I suspect I remember my scanner moddle correctly, anyway. I just wanted to try and make absolutely sure before installing drivers. The last “trick” is to just go ahead and install what I think is the correct set of drivers.

Lucky for me, the second drivers I tried were the correct ones. After a more-or-less friendly install process, and a reboot, my scanner could be used. I opened up image capture again, gave it another test, and all was well.

With the scanner finally working, the next step was to get some OCR software. According to this guy, Read Iris Pro was the best. I’ve also read that omnipage was accessible, but it had several bad reviews when it came to OCR quality. Neither product had a downloadable demo. After some research, I eventually went with Read Iris. The online shopping cart was, however, confusing and hardly accessible. Links were unlabeled or mislabeled, and the entire purchase process was long and confusing. Anyone with a Visa card will understand the true horror of the process when I say that it insisted on sending me through the Verified by Visa program, a program that most websites (including Amazon, Paypal, and Google Checkout) all avoid because it has been proven so broken and insecure.

I did, however, finally make my way through it, and was emailed an FTP download link. Figuring that was all I needed, I downloaded the software, mounted the DMG, and moved the .app into my applications folder. To my surprise, that application was, in reality, a poorly named installer. Why it wasn’t packaged as an installer package, as is the correct procedure on OS X, is utterly beyond me. It required several mouse clicks to get through, it froze voiceover at several points, and was generally an awful ordeal. I have no idea how crap like that got through anyone’s testing process, to be declared accessible. After about half an hour of fussing, I completed the install.

When I started the application, for real this time, I was asked for a serial number. The problem is: nobody from Iris Link emailed me one! Figuring that the processing system they used was, perhaps, running slowly, I waited for two hours. When I still had no serial, and thus couldn’t get any work done, I emailed Iris. While waiting for an answer from them, I started this weblog entry, in order to kill time until I could do useful work. After getting the entry up-to-date with my adventures thus far, I did my daily work-out, and hit the shower. Still, I haven’t gotten either a reply to my email, or my serial number.

So, after a day of set-up, I still haven’t managed to scan a single document on OS X. Hopefully, I’ll have gotten the information I need from Iris sometime tomorrow. Interestingly, while searching for product reviews of Iris Read, google gave me several links offering torrent downloads of the software I’m attempting to purchase. I suspect that, if I had just downloaded the torrent, I would have my software by now. I’m not sure why Iris feels the need to punish honest customers with extremely unreasonable wait-times. I mean, seriously: they write state-of-the-art OCR software! Couldn’t they have an online activation system at least as advanced as the hobby developers selling $10 utilities? If you ever feel the need to make an online purchase from Iris, this is something to keep in mind: the company doesn’t answer emails, and at this point only God himself knows when I’m going to get the software I purchased.

TO BE Continued…

First DVS Porgramming in Itunes 8

The WGBH has just released the first DVS programming into the itunes store, and it can be downloaded for free, ready for use on your computer, or your shiny new talking IPod Nano. To quickly find the two part program in question, a biography of President Roosevelt, do the following:

1. open itunes
2. under store on the menu bar, click search.
3. interact with the itunes store, and instead of all, select Itunes U in the popup.
4. In the title box, enter DVS.
5. Stop interacting with the store, and go to the songs table.
6. Press voiceover m on each of the two parts of the program, and select get selected.
7. Wait for your programs to finish downloading; you can see the download progress in the downloads library playlist.
8. When your downloads have finished, they will show up under the movies playlist in your library.
9. Play the movie like you would any normal movie; no need to do anything special to get the DVS audio.

Enjoy!

Apple Store Opening at Fairview

Another apple store is opening in Toronto! Yay! The apple announcement follows. This one is right near us.

Come to the new Apple Store, Fairview, and bring your curiosity. It’s the place to test-drive any Mac, iPod, or iPhone and catch free workshops to learn all the latest tips and tricks. When you get there, find our Concierge in the orange shirt. The Concierge is your guide to everything from checking in for an appointment to instant checkout. And if you’re one of the first 1000 visitors, you’ll get a free Apple T-shirt.*



Genius Bar

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testing MacJournal

This is a test of MacJournal, a blogging and journaling program for the mac. Unfortunately, I get a “server error” whenever I try to download entries from my blog, but perhaps wordpress doesn’t yet support that feature. Or perhaps it’s just broken in some way or other. This test entry will see if MacJournal can post to the blog, or if it can neither post nor download.

Why I Will Probably Never Switch To A Mac

I originally posted this article to my column on newsvine. It got over 50 comments; click the previous link to read them.

So, newsvine has had a lot of mac stuff lately, mac stuff that serves only to remind me how much I hate, loathe, and despise Windows® with every fiber of my being. Unfortunately, for me at least, Windows® is the ultimate Hotel California: “You can check out any time you like, but you can *NEVER* leave!”

The reason I, for one, will probably never drop windows® is that I can’t afford the risk; I think this would hold true for a lot of people. Sure, you can walk into a store and have a quick look at an OS…but that doesn’t tell me much about if it will serve my needs. What if I blow my funds on a mac next time round, and then in three weeks discover the system just absolutely cannot do something I must have done? These sorts of questions are things no apple store salescreature can answer. I’ll give you some examples:
1. voice chat: I regularly voice chat with various Windows® people for various reasons; can mac be made to run my voice chat application of choice, or something related?
2. Notes: I have over 6 years of notes stored in a particular application (no longer developed or supported, but I have so much invested in it that I’m pretty much trapped); how can I move all these over to the mac? Formatting and layout absolutely must be preserved at all costs.
3. I have over 8 years of writing stored in Microsoft .doc format; it would suck to lose this.
4. I’m completely blind, and use a screen reader; the mac has one built in, and no 3rd party screen reader at all. Can the built in screen reader support my webbrowser of choice? What about a mac office application? Spreadsheets and slideshows? How flexible is it in allowing me to create templates to support random 3rd party software of my choice?

All of the above questions, as far as I can tell, cannot be answered without owning a mac. But I’m not ready to own a mac until I have answers to all of the above questions. Rather circular, you know? While I’m sure I’m somewhat of an extreme example of this, it probably holds true for every other Windows® user to some extent. See, I’m at the age where I grew up with Windows®. My first computer was Windows® 95®, and my second was Windows® 98®. I upgraded to Windows® 98SE®, and took the plunge to Windows® ME®. When 2000 came out, I was there; then I got XP®. Now I own a server, and it’s Windows® 2003®. Yes I’ve got a pocket PC, and of course it’s windows® SE®. My life is invested in this platform, and I hate it. What can be done? When someone has this much in one particular platform, how on earth can they uproot and move on to something better? “They stabbed it® with their steely knives, but they just *can’t* kill the beast!”