Dead Ink Vinyl

Doh. I picked up an Epson Perfection 4490 Photo scanner and was hoping to use VueScan to avoid installing Epson’s scanner software. Scanner software has been the source of many headaches for me in the past. Usually, the manufacture’s installer insists on putting much more than just the TWAIN driver on the computer.

Unfortunately, way down in the VueScan release notes, under “Mac OSX Release Notes” is this little clause: To use the Epson Perfection 3170, 4180 or 4490 with VueScan, you need to first install the Epson software for this scanner.

Grumble, grumble. I missed that earlier. So I went to Epson’s Web site and downloaded just the OSX driver. The driver’s installer is a bit strange — it creates a folder with another installer inside of it — but when I was done running that installer, it seems that Epson’s driver was present and no new unwanted applications were to be found cluttering my drive. Therefore, I’m not overly upset with the need to install an Epson driver. [Updated 01Dec@2203: In fact, the installer did drop two applications into /Applications: Epson Scan and Epson Scanner Monitor. If no major harm comes to my system from dropping them in the Trash, then I'm still okay with the whole thing.] VueScan detected the scanner the first time it was launched after the driver was installed.

I haven’t used VueScan at all yet, except for a quick proof-that-the-scanner-works scan, so I can’t give a review of its performance. I can say that its UI is very functional, but lacking aesthetic appeal I’ve come to expect from Mac applications. It’s like a UI I would design, rather than the UI a good Apple developer would design. I’ll probably have more to say later once I’ve used VueScan some more. Oh, and I’ll probably have some feedback about the scanner, too. Sometime. In the future.

My former co-worker and good friend Tod Liebeck has started his own blog about development of the Echo2 Java Web UI framework. It’s off to a good start. Go read it.