Building Dogear’s On-Device Scan-to-Save Pipeline With Apple Vision and Live Text
Discover Dogear, a minimal iOS app for organizing physical books, saving quotes and highlights, scanning pages, and building a beautiful personal bookshelf.
Dogear is an iOS app designed to help you manage your book collection, quotes, highlights, bookmarks, and notes in one place. The app's latest update introduces a "scan-to-save" feature, which allows users to save a specific line from a physical book without having to retyping it. This feature is powered by Apple’s Vision and Live Text technologies.
The app's user interface is clean and intuitive, with an "Empty View" that displays seven trending books from the Open Library's daily list. Users can add books through search, by scanning the barcode, or by importing from other reading apps or CSV files. Once a book is added, users can assign a reading status and view its details, which include saved passages, quotes, highlights, bookmarks, and notes.
The passage-saving feature works by scanning a page using Apple’s document scanner, which frames, deskews, and crops the page. Users can then select the text they want to save using Live Text and Vision technologies. This process is carried out on the device, meaning the scanned page is not uploaded or sent to OpenAI. Instead, Live Text allows users to drag across the sentence or double-tap to extend the selection toward a full sentence.
A second Vision pass then reads the page for structure, identifying where each line sits and guessing the page number from the header.
Written by urgent.news from HackerNoon's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
