Hello Sadam, When LookTel Money Reader starts up, the camera on your iPhone is immediately activated. There's maybe a 3 or 4 second pause before you hear "Money Reader Running". Once you get that message, any bills that are placed within view of your iPhone camera, and in sufficient light, will automatically be identified. I typically hold my iPhone 4 camera between 4 to 6 inches from the bills, for all currency (including Australian dollars). On the iPhone 4, and I believe this is also true for the iPhone 4S, the light on the camera will automatically come on if there is insufficient light to identify the bill. (This is not true for the iPhone 3GS -- you must first check that there is adequate lighting.)
If you have not had any success with using this app, try the following: Place your bills in a flat stack in your left hand with the iPhone lying on top of them. The iPhone is in the normal orientation for use if you picked it up -- the touch screen is toward you and the home button is at the bottom. The long direction of the bills lies along the long direction of the iPhone, and the width of the bills is only slightly wider than the iPhone. You can have everything centered and lying flat on the palm of your hand. (If you are left handed you can make the same arrangement with your right hand.) Now, simply pick up the iPhone by gripping the sides of the device with your other hand, and lift it straight up from the palm of your hand about 4 or 5 inches. You should hear the app announce the amount, e.g., "10 dollars". VoiceOver will continue to repeat the denomination of the bill in the camera view. You can also use the app on bills that are on a flat surface, but I find it is easier to get a sense of the height and position if you first try this by holding iPhone in one hand and the laying the bills flat in the palm of your other hand. You can try moving the hand that holds the iPhone to different heights, and feel what's most comfortable for you, and how quickly the app responds to identifying the currency. OCR apps work best when you hold the camera fairly steady, at whatever height you raise it to, so when you experiment, first move to a position, then keep your hand in that position while the app runs. LookTel Money Reader should be able to identify currency regardless of which side of the bill is facing the camera, and it works fairly fast (e.g. tenths of seconds), so it will do pretty well even if you don't hold the iPhone camera steady. (However, you shouldn't try to deliberately wave the camera around so that it is never able to focus well on the money.) Since the app reads whatever currency is in the camera view, it's best to have only one bill visible at a time -- e.g. fanning out a number of bills with different denominations will only confuse things. You could place a stack of bills under the camera, then remove the top bill one by one, or you could simply place a sequence single bills under the view of the camera. Incidentally, LookTel money reader will read out currencies whether or not VoiceOver is running. It uses different voices for the different currencies, and they're just different from the VoiceOver voices. If you want to have the bills identified by tones instead of announcement (for more privacy), turn on the mute switch (along the left side of your iPhone, near the top -- it's the rectangular switch that you activate by pushing down.) You'll hear tones with different pitches. One dollar will be a single, low tone. Five dollars will be three low tones. Ten dollars is a single, high tone. Twenty is two high tones, etc. HTH. Cheers, Esther On Jan 19, 2012, at 03:42, Sadam Ahmed wrote: > Hi all, today I downloaded the money reader app on my iPhone 4S. > Unfortunately when I run the app all I'm getting from voice-over is money > reader running. All efforts to get information by taking a picture of a $20 > Australian bill have failed. Is there something I'm missing here. Maybe > someone can give me a hand with this one? Thank you kind regards. > > Sent from my iPhone <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to mac-access@mac-access.net You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/maillist.xml> The Mac-Access mailing list is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free! Please remember to update your membership options periodically by visiting the list website at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/>
