My father-in-law is having to revert to his G3 iMac to use his Epson 3170 scanner, as the (so-called) Smart Panel software that comes with the scanner does not support OS X 10.4. It's a 2-year-old scanner, no longer in current manufacture, and there is no rush to support it.
The basic scanner support works fine under Tiger. But his major issue is that he wants to remain as far away from the "technical details" as possible, and the Smart Panel software provides him with one-click functionality to scan-to-file, scan-to-print, and scan-to-email.
I've suggested using VueScan (highly recommended), but as that would involve scanning to a file, then importing the file into a Mail document, this is deemed "too complex", and he has gone back to the G3 iMac.
I think I could manage to get him to drive the process from iPhoto, if only it were obvious (or possible?) as to how to select the scanner as the image capture device, and invoke it from iPhoto. Since iPhoto has a one-click Mail interface, I think this would isolate him enough from the complexities of the scanner and provide an easy means of placing scanned images into his Mail documents.
Wouldn't it be nice if iPhoto had support for scanners approximating the support it has for digital cameras and media readers? Nothing fancy -- just allow the user to select camera or scanner, and click "Import" to activate the Image Capture process.
In my best of all possible worlds scenario, an Image Capture preferences pane with a reasonable approximation of the VueScan scanner settings would be perfect. But in the Real World, it looks as though I'm going to have to build (using AppleScript Studio, most likely) something to emulate the actions of the Smart Panel software, using Photoshop Elements to scan the image and pop it into an email document.
