This is a devastating Adobe technology. I dub it "SmartSpeak"
If you've ever edited any interview, you're plagued with the 'ums' and 'likes' and other linking words. (If you have short attention spans, skip my text, watch the video and then come back here.)
Somewhere, thankfully forgotten to history, when I was in film school I did a series of interviews where all I did was cut the linking words together. Funny (wish I had a copy to show right now.)
Any way you cut it (pun intended), it's the biggest struggle in construction of documentary/corporate productions - getting concise sound bites created from people who aren't professional speakers.
You end up with a Franken-edit - where you've glued sections together (often out of order, often slugging a word from a different spot to replace a work that didn't inflect that you way you needed) and you prayed that you had a good 3-4 opening seconds for a lower third, knowing you'd cover up the edits with B roll.
Adobe funds quite a bit of speculative technology. They make smart bets and acquisitions, some that might take years to take fruit.
Adobe - don't take years on this. This is as groundbreaking as content aware replace/removal was to Photoshop users.
I'm going to call it "SmartSpeak" because it'll remove linking words making people sound smarter. I also like SmartBite.
From John Nack's Blog:
Adobe’s Wil Li plus UC Berkeley-based collaborators Maneesh Agrawala and Floraine Berthouzoz have unveiled “a one-click method for seamlessly removing ’ums’ and repeated words, as well as inserting natural-looking pauses to emphasize semantic content.”
The problem with a Retina Screen
How am I going to be able to read anything?
Like everyone else, I've been holding off (too long) on getting a new mac. I 'needed' one in October - and for the first time I paid attention to the rumor mills in my life - new MacBookPros would be out any day.
No great prognostication here: At WWDC that Apple will announce a bunch of updates, including to the MacBook Pro. Will it be a MacBook Pro Air? I have no idea. That's too many words for a product name.I hope they get rid of the whole 'air' idea and just have two models of super skinny laptops.
One big rumor right now- a retina screen
Great. I need more pixels and sharper ones. Make it so I can't see the dots.
But the Mac OS is broken in a simple way.
The Font/UI cannot be scaled.
There's been rumors for years, for more than one iteration of OSX, that the Menus will be adjustable. That'd also mean window title size, contextual menus, etc.
Take a quick look at this article from Macintouch - just skip right to the part on Resolution independence.
Bunches of software I use have some custom or tiny UI/text elements. One piece of software has a palette with text that was designed when the mac had 640x480 screens. That palette? Not so readable now. And it'll be nearly impossible to read under a retina display.
I have a feeling that if retina displays come out, Apple will have a 10.7.5 release that will double UI widgets, until Mountain Lion comes along and (hopefully) we'll have a litlte more scalability.