Apse 2.0 Release Announcement

It's been a while since I have written about Apse here. I've still been working on it, and am happy to announce version 2.0 is now offically released! 😄

This is a substantial improvement over version 1. Both performance and general usage have seen big upgrades. I'm very happy with it! Here are the changes you'll see in v2.0:

The big features

💥 OCR is around 50% faster now. That means you can take snapshots more often, or keep the same frequency and see much lower CPU usage. This is thanks to both smarter preprocessing before OCR happens, and some performance gains in the OCR process itself.

💥 Dramatically better layout detection. In previous versions, the OCR algorithm read straight across the image left to right. If you had multiple windows open, or multiple columns in a document, the OCR'd text would be interleaved. Now regions of text are grouped much more intelligently.

💥 A visual indicator APSE is working during long running queries. Okay, it's a loading spinner. I've done some pretty convoluted advanced searches, and it's reassuring to see yes, your results ARE coming, be patient for once would you?

Smaller changes

Various UI improvements. The manual snapshot interface is clearer. There is also a much better indication of when your license key is expired, and how to fix it.

OSX Mavericks is no longer supported. Sorry. You'll have to upgrade to an OS released in the last three and a half years.

What now?

You can check out more information about Apse at apse.io or see a summary of the changes for all versions here.

I'm always happy to talk - if you have questions about it or any feedback, please get in touch! Happy searching.