For what it’s worth, Xcode 6 allows you to provide a single PDF file per asset. Xcode will then render the PDF into bitmaps at all required sizes _at build time_ and include the rendered images in your app bundle. Of course, you will probably have to make a new build when new devices come out.
It’s not resolution independence, but it has the potential to make asset production much less painful. I don’t know if this approach also work for app icons or only for things like button and toolbar images.
Thanks, I didn't know that, I'll be exploring that feature, it'd be nice if they did that for icons - using a script to generate 20 different sizes is getting old. Unfortunately it looks like it is only supported for images at present.
Of course it'd be better if this was done at run time on the device, and bitmap representations cached as required (eventually they probably wouldn't be, even if initially they are).
Author of the blog post here. I had this idea to start a site for crowdsourced podcast transcripts (or indeed any audio content) but never did it. I’d still love to see such a site because I agree that there is so much valuable content.
But transcription is just a huge amount of work and I’m not sure how well you could automate it with the help of software.
Google has some pretty good software for this, thought it might be internal. When they have their "Talks at Google" events, there's a screen off to the side that provides real-time translated subtitles.
There's at least one talk where the speaker addresses this system, and tries to get it to transcribe funny stuff. Can't remember which one exactly, but it might be this one with Randall Munroe (xkcd).
That idea crossed my mind even seeing how many companies failed even during boom times.
Service could be powered by some speech recognition software (maybe more than one) which initially would give insane percentage of incorrectly recognized text. Community could fix those errors (weak link in my plan:)). Afterwards you feed data back to software and train it so next time it would work better.
Training would require marking which person talks when in episode to tune algorithms for each of them. Maybe group them by regional dialects.
Oh, another tiny small thingie - not clear how to monetize that.
Monetization: you could sell the service to professional podcasters as it would increase content on their site, and possibly serve as another place to put ads for their sponsors.
If you focused on a core set of popular podcasts you could package it as a monthly ebook or similar product. While overall people don't like paying for content like that I think it's possible to find a niche market that would.
Agreed about monetization. Ideally, this should be a community thing like Wikipedia but that’s probably unrealistic.
I really think it would be an amazing resource. There would be so much great content that the site would potentially rank really high on Google for a variety of search terms, too (again, like Wikipedia).
I honestly think the blog approach where you highlight sections is the best way to do it. General transcripts are indeed almost impossible to do, especially when there are weekly shows that run for over two hours each episode.
I just tried it, and voice dictation on the iPhone does a surprisingly good job with a well produced podcast. It's missing all punctuation of course, and tends to make a lot of mistakes on small words like prepositions. But for a first pass to edit from, it is surprisingly good.
I asked FastMail support about their US data center a few weeks ago, suggesting they offer an alternative. This was their reply:
"We DO plan to set up a non-US data centre, and are making progress towards this. However it is expensive and time-consuming, and we're not ready to offer this as an extra yet. We will definitely make it known when such an option becomes available."
Aside from posts to /r/funny pointing out idiots on yahoo answers, when was the last time you ever saw anything from yahoo answers that was not a joke (accidental or otherwise)?
Yahoo better start doing SOMETHING to be relevant.
The people saying they do good playing 2nd/3rd place, I think, are naive. 2nd or 3rd place simply means your biding your time until [upstart] comes and eats your lunch.
In the case of acquihires - the fact is that google and facebook are in a talent war. They gobble up the talent, and guess what? that [upstart] eating yahoos lunch will not be [upstart] but google and facebook themselves.
Another user mentioned that they think that Yahoo should create a great VC arm. I FULLY agree with this, as evidenced by the many times on HN I have said exactly that.
So, its a multi front battle yahoo is in: need talent, need innovation strategy {VC/Acquisitions/dropping driftwood/etc}, need acquisitions that facebook/google are strategically vying for and need to create a relevant service.
Quora, while I have my issues with them, IS relevant. In many ways, but the most important way is they DO have a sizeable % of SV braintrust participating.
Yahoo should bring that braintrust's awareness around their brand!
Why not buy Quora, and "extend and embrace" that userbase and seek advice from some of the people on Quora?
There could be a huge PR win here.
"New mom and CEO Marissa Meyer buys Quora, the silicon valley strong Q&A site, meets with users and holds a town hall on what Yahoo users can truly benefit from, accompanied by an all star panel, many of whom are top users on Yahoo's new site Quora... blah blah blah synergy etc"
I think too many people are scared and lazy at Yahoo, lets hope the new mom and CEO has bigger balls than any of her predecessors.
when was the last time you ever saw anything from yahoo
answers that was not a joke (accidental or otherwise)?
Just the other day I typed "1.3 meters in inches" into Google, to use their calculator. Yahoo answers was at the top of Google's rankings.
Yahoo Answers isn't just top for "1.3 meters in inches" - they're also top for "1.2 meters in inches", "1.4 meters in inches", one-from-top in "1.5 meters in inches" and "1.6 meters in inches" and top for "1.7 meters in inches" - not to mention "1 meter in centimeters". Evidently, Yahoo Answers is a market leader in this sort of query.
Would Quora users stick with them if became a Yahoo-owned property? That 8% super heavy user group is 100% of the value. Absolutely core to the quality.
Sort like what Craiglist had in the 90's. You lose them, and Quora is dead. Not sure Yahoo can own Quora w/o killing it just because of who they are.
Quora is/was super relevant to "realtime web" design people -- it was one of the first really interactive realtime apps for a while, along with Asana. It's the kind of stuff you can do with Meteor now.
