Where's Epson Scan for OSX Lion?

It's been more than 6 months since I migrated my MacBook to OSX Lion and I'm quite happy with it. After I doubled its memory to 4 GB I was even happier. I use a lot of memory, because I tend to have lots of Safari-windows open and some other applications too.
However migrating to Lion cost me one important application: Epson Scan. It doesn't seem to have been updated to run on Lion. That's a disappointment. I miss being able to scan several pages and put them all into the same pdf-file. And of course the good picture scanning.
What I have replaced it with is the Mac's own preview application, which offers only jpeg-pictures as output; no pdf. With that I can get by, but there's no multi-page option.
If anyone reading this blog can point me to a better solution I'd be grateful.
While I'm complaining, I might as well mention the weather too. When is spring coming to Sweden? Yesterday's visit to the driving-range nearly killed me, because weather looked reasonably warm, while in fact the strong wind was freezing cold.

iOS 5.1 niceties

It's about a week since I migrated my iPhone from iOS 5.0.1 to iOS 5.1. Similar experience as when migrating from 5.0 in that battery time has improved again. I'd say it's about 100% better, which means battery time has become acceptable. That means a lot to most of us, i.e. those of us who are old enough to have owned a stupid phone (= not smartphone) with battery times of a week or more.

The second most popular feature is probably that the camera is available straight from the lock-screen. There's an icon to hint at how to open the camera: you can simply sweep the screen in the vertical direction to open the camera app. That's a typical Apple solution: simple and elegant and obvious. 

Smartphones are fantastic

The smartphone has become many people's companion. Whenever there's dead time, we pick up our smartphone and do something with it. While waiting we read news feeds and even books, play games, watch short movies, browse our picture album, update and browse Facebook and Twitter, search for new apps or some other content. We did this even before the smartphone, but the experience wasn't as rich in those days. We would listen to music, which was stored on the device, or the FM-radio, maybe even read news feeds, call someone, send SMS, browse through the settings and set another ring tone.

Smartphones are indeed fantastic versatile devices, but there still is one important feature missing from them: payment. There are payment methods based on SMS, but they are limited in scope. 

Payments have been moving away from cash for about two decades and therefore payment terminals have had to be exchanged once in a while. That's costly for small traders, who aren't keen on ever fancier payment solutions. Consequently, the smartphone as wallet is not going to happen very quickly. I expect within seven years the smartphone will be as good for payment as a credit card is now in 2012.

When cultural history is written in about 50 years, I think the smartphone and the pad-computer will be seen as particularly important devices, the devices that changed the world. Wireless technologies will be seen as the enablers that made the lift-off possible.

Elephant Super Memory Challenge v2.0 is in the App Store

The new version has been reviewed and is now ready for sale. We changed the names slightly, though not for all languages, as follows:

• Dutch: Olifant geheugen: Kunt U dit memoriseren?
• French: Challenge Elephant Super Memory: pouvez-vous mémoriser cette?
• Swedish: Elefantminne: Kan du memorera detta?

The names were kept unchanged for the English and German versions.