I have been recent very good luck with this method. Sometimes I have to do a word or two clean up but for the most part, if I see a printed date it can be a appointment in my iPhone pretty quickly.

As an example, on the plane last night I saw that William Shatner has a new show coming out. I used to jot that down on a piece of paper, or type into my iPhone as a note. Later, I started taking a picture of these. All the above only work as good as how often you look at your notes.

Here is a snap I took with Genius Scan, a free app that takes a picture and allows you to straighten it up if it’s a curved piece of paper or a whiteboard at an angle. In this case, it is just so you can see the text from the little print in the back of the magazine.

Using an app called Prizmo (full review to follow soon), I took another picture (could have used the same, it can use images in the camera roll too…). The app allowed me to crop down to just the text, it then cleans up and runs OCR to give back just text. The app does very well at magazine text and Business cards.

You can get the text out of the app in a large variety of ways out of Prizmo depending on how you want to use it. In my case, I ‘copied’ the text to use elsewhere in the iPhone.

The text from above is then pasted into a SimpleNote page. This app is free, offering cloud syncing but in this case I’m looking for another feature they have. A date as text in SimpleNote shows as a clickable link.

I did cheat this time by cleaning up the word ‘adaptation’. It is surprising how many times I have used this method that I don’t have to. I could have not done this at all actually since this text doesn’t go past this point. For this instance, I copied the name of the show… tapping the date link opens up the built-in calendar app with a new appointment. I put it as a repeating for a few weeks and pasted the name in. That’s it… the whole process takes less than a minute after you do it a couple times. I could have just taken the picture and run the process later when sitting waiting for my lost luggage.