Why Didn't They Tell Us Earlier?

When Mac OS X 10.5 ‘Leopard’ came out, it broke our scanner support based on the system’s Image Capture framework. We had been in exchanges with the Developer Technical Support and their Image Capture team at that time to find out why our capture function worked on Mac OS X 10.4.x but not on 10.5. To no avail. After a frustrating six months we moved on and licensed ExactScan Capture which is now embedded into every copy of DEVONthink Pro Office. This works with all TWAIN scanners but breaks with some scanners that are only compatible to Image Capture, not TWAIN.

And suddenly this May Apple released a new sample application implementing scanning with Image Capture on Leopard. And guess what? Image Capture in Mac OS X 10.5 does almost everything differently from Tiger but does not document it anywhere. Why didn’t they simply tell us when we asked last November? Now we’re resurrecting our own capture plugin and the next release of DEVONthink Pro Office will come with both plugins, ExactScan Capture for TWAIN and our own for Image Capture. Whatever scanner you have, one of the two should be able to access it.