an hour ago by endisneigh
I really like this - but I'd rather just pay $200 once than pay a subscription. If an issue is maintaining the models, you should make that a separate line item where you can pay as a subscription for updates or pay for the model on a yearly/monthly basis as necessary (some people might be OK with the level of OCR at any given moment).
What would be really interesting is if you could have some hardware that hooks into the HDMI port and with every flicker of the screen record and OCR everything, and add some diffing and compression and some really cool categorization algorithms and you could have something amazing.
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Obviously this is an MVP but I imagine the perfected version of this would be able to see the difference between screenshots and use some sort of strongly-connected-component like algorithm and figure out which things are "browser" which things are "browser--hacker-news", and so forth. Create a great UI around this idea and even better UX and you have something interesting.
Hell, miniaturize some camera and hook it onto glasses and you have that one Black Mirror episode.
2 hours ago by elil17
I’d be pretty unwilling to pay a subscription service for this because I know I’d only see the value after having it for quite a while. On the other hand I’d gladly pay $100 upfront if I knew I could have it forever as a desktop app.
2 hours ago by riedel
Strongly reminds me of Google Desktop [1]. I wonder if there is still alternatives around. Searching my own computer is still such a terrible experience. However, it seems not much business can be made out of this.
4 hours ago by pfraze
This is pretty clever. It's taking periodic screenshots of your screen and running OCR on it, then indexing the results.
Other than feeling a little icky about an app watching my screen -- not to mention picking up literally everything I do -- my main question from the demo video is whether it's able to intuit the URLs when you're looking at Web pages. There's going to be a fair amount of things it can't just link you to, in which case all it can offer is the screenshot it took. (Which is useful to be sure)
4 minutes ago by wly_cdgr
>> Other than feeling a little icky about an app watching my screen
Doesn't your OS already know everything that's on your screen (and hard drive, for that matter) at all times?
3 hours ago by lovemenot
>> Other than feeling a little icky about an app watching my screen
I understand that feeling, but it is misguided.
We have become so used to feeling creepy while being watched by others, that we get the same feeling when just watching our self.
There could be many reasons for Apse to fail, but this should not be one.
3 hours ago by jarcane
This reply assumes someone else cannot get ahold of that data.
3 hours ago by lovemenot
Agreed. It's the difference between privacy and security. I think the issue here is the former.
4 hours ago by skykooler
I'm curious as to how quickly the storage space usage grows with all those screenshots.
2 hours ago by sfg
"It depends. Screen resolution and multiple monitors affect how much storage an image takes. For a general guideline, if you have a 1080p monitor and run it nonstop for a full 8-hour workday, you could expect in the range of 200-500MB.
Apse is fully configurable. If you find it takes too much storage, it can be set to delete snapshots after a certain number of days. For space savings, by default images are saved at a lower quality. If you would rather keep full-quality snapshots, you can set that in your configuration as well."
3 hours ago by parsecs
(I'm just talking out of my ass but) I'd imagine the screenshots can be compressed pretty efficiently, as the content of any photographic detail like images/picture don't need to be preserved with outstanding quality..
2 hours ago by selcuka
I guess the screenshots are not stored, only the text extracted using OCR.
2 hours ago by uomo
Based on the “How it Works” section of their website, it looks like both the screenshot and the text are saved.
2 hours ago by Grimm1
I like seeing this, I’ve had multiple discussions about building something similar but always run into the same difficulty with convincing individuals to pay for this. I however see a great b2b idea in this because finding stuff in a company, especially a large one, is a complete pain in the ass and they definitely have the budget and willingness to pay a reasonable subscription price. The difficulty here is Google actually has a product for that in gsuite/workspace but they’ve let it languish on the vine. So the question there is, was it not something they saw being able to make money, or not able to make enough money for a company already operating on hundreds of billions in revenue? I kind of hope someone decides to find out though.
2 hours ago by counternotions
Scary thing is if Google offered this as a free app, most people would happily use it.
3 hours ago by keiraarts
I’ve been wanting this for myself for so long; very happy it was built! Would love a one time payment option though.
an hour ago by thealistra
Maybe stupid question, but can’t someone do an open source bash loop that will run a screenshot and ocr script every second and kill your business?
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