I started the development of ScanIt shortly after I had bought BeOS R4.5. The Media OS didn’t really let you use any new kind of scanner and especially not the one I had sitting at my desk already. In order to get information about the low-level protocol, I registered with Epson’s developer service and started coding. Luckily, BeOS R5 was released shortly after and I decided to skip struggling with the shortcoming of the R4.5 USB stack and switched to R5 completely. The driver was up and running in just a few days when I decided that I didn’t really like to use a command line interface to talk to the scanner. So, I started working on getting the GUI up and running. Since I wasn’t able to test all Epson scanner models myself, the Beta was released shortly after the program had reached V0.5.

 

Because I was developing this software solely to get my USB scanner running under BeOS, I had completely neglected to add support for SCSI and PIO. The day I released the first Beta, my mailbox was flooded with emails asking me to add support for any kind of scanners... This asked for a rewrite of the low-level interfaces to move protocols into modules which then could simply be loaded on demand. New features were added to the GUI letting the user apply all kinds of image processing algorithms to the acquired images. Although a few Beta versions of the latest code base were made available to selected testers, I decided to not release the final version.

 

The versions available here will run on BeOS R5.