8/27/2010 Josh Holat
Written by Josh Holat
Few people can say they’ve written an iPhone application that’s both made it to the top of the charts in iTunes as well as appeared in Apple’s “What’s Hot” section. If you’re looking for someone who has, look no further than computer science alumnus Bruno Virlet.
Bruno, who graduated in August with a Masters, is the creator of the application Genius Scan, “a portable scanner in your pocket.” Genuis Scan combines a simple interface and quick processing that allows it to, as Bruno puts it, “satisfy the most common use cases.” What makes Genius Scan special other than its focus on simplicity and speed, is that it also takes care of cropping and correcting the perspective of any documents the user snaps with the camera on their iPhone. It can then be converted into a PDF and sent to anyone.
Genuis Scan almost eliminates the need for a scanner all together, and can even eliminate the ubiquitous stack of receipts and business cards that inevitably have to be carried back from business trips. Also, “It's quite convenient when you have to email back signed documents and have no scanner at hand,” claims Bruno.
Another aspect driving the popularity of Genius Scan is that its applications reach all sorts of different people. Bruno’s received feedback from professions ranging from lawyers to social workers. The app review site AppPicker.com gave Genuis Scan five stars and declared, "Next time you plan to hit the road don't forget to download a copy of Genius Scan to make life easier for yourself and your accounting department.”
However, to Bruno and his roommate Guillaume Gigaud, Genius Scan was simply a way to test the iPhone App market in their free time while undergoing the masters program in CS and ECE respectively at Illinois.
“Of course, what I was studying [parallel compilers under Prof. David Padua] definitely helped me: all my research and most classes here focus on going faster and we worked a lot on making Genius Scan run fast.” Looking at their success, it seems like that was a good concept to have learned.
Bruno will move on to work for Amazon in Seattle while Guillaume will go on to work for a software company in France. They both plan to continue development of Genius Scan by adding more features to satisfy the large amount of feature requests they receive.