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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   2949 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 16, 2025

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I've been thinking along the same lines recently. All this power, and nothing to do with it.

I plan to leverage more translate technology this summer while traveling internationally.

Unique capabilities tend to be locked behind high-quality paid apps at the least it seems like. I have a digital reference for knot tying which is really awesome. It shows you a progression of how to tie a not, classifies them based on usage, and let's your rotate and adjust the view. Great for camping with a bunch of other idiot nerds.

PDF scanning has gotten great.

Someone went ahead and built the application I've dreamed about making myself for 3 years for managing trips. It's not the way I would have done it, and it needs some serious work in the desktop/web UX department, but even the free version is nice. I'll admit this is just a fancy spreadsheet so it's not a true net-new capability.

knot tying

That is a great app. I just bought it, and I'll use it a lot, but I still want to complain about this class of thing in general. That is, monetizing publicly available info for mobile formats. If I didn't have a stash of Googlebux about to expire, I'd have passed on principle.

On a PC, if you wanted to look up how to tie an Alpine Butterfly, you'd quickly search it on Google or Perplexity. If some site was selling a tutorial for $5 you'd automatically move on to the next available free one, because we don't live in an age where the Mountaineering Guild gatekeeps access to the secret knowledge of rope folding, and it's near trivial to put up a site with the instructions for free. It bothers me a bit that developers get away with selling the same thing as a mobile app simply because of the added annoyance of trying to do it with a small screen + thumbs.

Yes, the presentation here is excellent. The UI is near-perfect, but also, I bet I could have Claude vibe-code me one with little effort.

I think this is more about the incredibly nice interactive UI than gatekeeping the actual knowledge of how to tie a knot.

I have no problem searching whatever arbitrary thing I want on my phone, or indeed typing paragraphs of text: if all this app did was present pretty text instructions I'd have no interest, it's easy to get those text instructions to my phone any time I want for free. But I want to learn knot-tying and don't really understand it, and this seems like a significant improvement for learning.

If you think that sort of thing is easy to code through AI, you're welcome to throw an open-source and free version of it up somewhere, you'd be helping out rope enthusiasts everywhere and making a convincing case that the developers aren't doing anything important. I suspect the easy-to-code version of that app loses a lot in usability though.

Scanning and OCR is a good one I forgot. As @Ioper mentions, it's been good for a long time, but the advances in OCR in particular are pushing things like translation forwards.

One new app I have got on my phone now is https://recipekeeperonline.com/, one of those paywalled apps you mention. It's allowing me to digitize my entire cookbook collection, and it really is pretty impressive how well it converts a huge number of different recipe formats into pretty perfect ingredient lists and steps, without any involvement from me

Wasn't Pdf scanning just fine as far back as in 2015?

It seems to me that major advances have been in the cameras and the video/photo processing. If you don't care about that then there is little to no functional difference between the current phones and phones from 2013.

In my experience, you could always convert a picture into a .pdf, but faithfully and easily converting a physical page into a properly formatted, clear .pdf is a much more recent innovation.

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