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Comment by pfraze | Hacker News Reader

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)

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>> 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.

This reply assumes someone else cannot get ahold of that data.

Agreed. It's the difference between privacy and security. I think the issue here is the former.

I'm curious as to how quickly the storage space usage grows with all those screenshots.

(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..

Yeah I bet there's a lot of stuff you can do to greatly reduce space usage without even nerfing resolution or losing color. For example if you are always using the same desktop background you could save that once and then just store a reference to it for all subsequent screenshots where it also appears. Also, window chrome and things like webpages and IDE windows will compress well, since there are so full of long runs of the same background color

I guess the screenshots are not stored, only the text extracted using OCR.

Based on the “How it Works” section of their website, it looks like both the screenshot and the text are saved.

https://apse.io/faq/

"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."

>> 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?

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