Shameless plug: my current project https://www.nekostrips.com aims at making the process as frictionless as possible. Still very rough around the edges, but useful for hobby purposes. I have several improvements in the works.
Awesome! I will follow the development and try it out!
Any plans to open source it? Is there a roadmap? My guess is that you’ll be adding custom font support (some unicode isn’t support by mainstream fonts and you can probably find a niche by supporting minority languages). also i suppose you’ll be adding bulk export to common comic book formats like cbz or cbr?
Firstly, thanks for your message, it genuinely made me smile :)
As for your questions:
- No plans to open source it, unless I stop working on it.
As for the roadmap, it is extensive. In random order (both in terms of importance and release horizon) I am planning:
- exports as archives (if I remember properly, .cbr and .cbz formats are just renamed .rar and .zip respectively) as you mentioned
- proper font selection/customization (and eventually, bring your own) as you surmised
- workflow improvements (shortcuts, bulk commands vs current clicking item by item)
- specifying bubble type, from visual type (text in closed bubble opaque or not, text over background) to purpose
(speech, onomatopeia, in-world written text, meta explanation) and source (who is talking, to whom, etc)
- moving the current "zoom" level from chapter to series: link to Knowledge Base, for easier lexical reference
(with regards to man(ga|hwa|hua) names are often transcriptions of
foreign words / names which are often translated back with varying degrees of success).
- multiplayer
- making the app not just usable but ergonomic on mobile screens
- a lot more.
I will add a roadmap section on the app.
Origin story:
I worked as a translator (handwritten medical forms, business communications) during my studies and got interested in what was considered the state of the art for CAT tools. I ended up building my own out of scripts, macros and rule-based processing because nothing provided the ease, flexibility and low overhead I was looking for.
With nekostrips, I am convinced I can deliver a compelling tool for comics.
If you or anyone else feels like discussing further, you can contact me through the form on the app, or on social networks.
Maybe someone with experience in the field and more up to date info will correct me, but
I did some research on the subject 10 years ago while entertaining the idea to launch a VOD service in France, and the right holders expected that such a service would:
- pay them a percentage of the price of the rental, which could not go below a certain amount,
- pay a yearly license (~3500€/year just for my country for a popular movie) per language audio track,
- handle on their own sending technicians to rip the masters to then host them on the platform.
I don’t exactly remember the minimum price per rental, but the economics didn’t make sense in terms of what we wanted to attempt, so we gave up. One would have to pay an enormous amount in upfront license costs without being able to generate a big volume of views by undercutting the competition in the case where technical excellence could allow us to cut prices.
This is also mentioned in various Netflix help pages, like here, which says 5-7 subtitle languages are shown by default, and you need to change UI language to see the rest: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13245
They can then leave the walled garden and buy cheaper apps on android and if they are satisfied with that, good for them.
I absolutely relish Apple’s walled garden, not just for me, but for my aged parents and aunts whom I help with their devices. Barely any UI differences, security for inept or careless users. And I know that the UI will move at a glacial pace, which is a feature for that demographics.
What if a ream of social and mental issues could stem from people of high intelligence feeling alienated due to their being so different from their « standard intelligence level » fellow humans?
That strikes me as wishful thinking by intelligent people who consider the problems they and their surrounds suffer to be unique and blamed on 'the others'.
I don't think the difficulty of the entreprise is what matters, but rather the ROI. Not to mention that no one has a claim on space (yes, there are treaties, but should one nation / group of nation leave others in the dust, I doubt they would pay much attention to those treaties).
Do you really consider having kids and adopting to be interchangeable? I am asking honestly.
I think it is hard to raise a kid, and adoption makes it much much harder (opinion based on anecdata)
I don't consider them interchangeable. But the thread is about people's reasoning for deciding to have children and so I asked a followup question about a specific reason where I thought for that particular reason, adoption might have been the "superior" option." I understand it's a complicated decision.
That being said, I can definitely see why adopting a "troubled teen" would be more difficult than having your own kid. But is adopting a baby really that much different than having your own?
My wife works at the extreme end of the foster system: special needs kids with trauma. For the most part, kids are kids. You have a non-trivial chance of a special needs kid if you make it or adopt it. The bio-parents are generally the problem, which iswhymanyadoptive parents refuse all contact with them and move to a different city, oradopt from a different city.
Yeah, and giving up on the biggest and richest market in the world ? The companies that do will soon see competitors grab for the cake, while the others will clean up their act and maybe even improve how they treat their customers in the US and rest of the world (though I am not holding my breath for that one)
While I think it is a step in the good direction, I am skeptical as to how successful this measure will be.
The problem at stake is that Chinese buyers are not buying property in Vancouver for speculative investment purposes only.
They see these properties as safe stores of value in order to diversify their risk profile in case the situation in Mainland China or their own financial situation goes down the gutter,
and / or to support their future potential effort to gain Canadian residency / citizenship for themselves or their kids,
and / or to vacation outside of mainland china once in a while.
Sure, this tax will hurt some of them, but the number of Mainland Chinese people with the means to write off such an amount as the cost of security is massive.
Source: lived in Mainland China for a few years, worked for this specific demographic.
If they're not just in it for short-term speculation, then they can rent the house out and hire someone to manage it. Make some more profit while contributing to the Vancouver economy and rental market.
This would go against the ideas of being able to go to Vancouver on a whim, and finding things as they were left,
or being able to jump on a plane in case of Mainland China Meltdown and directly move into their house/flat.
Those apartments are not meant to be rented, they are safe places.
Contributing to the Vancouver economy and rental market?
This demographic could not care less, this does not factor in their decisions.
(I have only empirical evidence of this mindset, but I would be willing to expand on what I base my reasoning on.)
My current side project, a Computer Assisted Translation tool targeted at comics, manga, web toons, etc
(editing to add: currently NOT USABLE ON MOBILE)