Monthly Archives: October 2010

Making the iPhone talk to Coursework

I recently was asked about 'scanning' capabilities of the iPhone, which brought me to this - currently $0.99 - application, called JotNot Pro. I was very impressed with this one. It launches the camera to take pictures of documents, steps the user through some adjustments, then processes the picture and removes what it sees as clutter or gray areas, so the end result is pretty clean. It generates PDFs and can combine several pages into one document, if so desired. The PDF document can be forwarded per email, per fax (at a cost), or uploaded to Google Docs, Evernote, Dropbox or Box.net.

The interesting part though, is that JotNot also has WebDAV connectivity, which brought me to the idea to directly upload into the Materials section of Coursework. (Disclaimer: Please do not violate any copyright and fair use regulations when trying this!)

Use the "i" button to open the Settings panel of JotNot:

Scroll down to Sharing and open Webdav/iDisk:

Enter Stanford Username and password, turn iDisk off and enter the Webdav URL for your course:

Go to the document to upload and hit the forward button:

Choose WebDAV/iDisk, which will open your Materials folders on coursework, then send:

Voila.

Here is the view in Coursework:

JotNot lets you also access your camera roll directly, so any photos stored there can similarly be uploaded.

There are some little inconsistencies in the folder and file naming between the coursework website and how they show up in iPhone. Secondly, it is only possible to set up one WebDAV connection up at one time, which is annoying if you have several courses. Other than that it worked like a charm. I'd love to know if anyone else has tried something similar.