bitcake

“Man’s triumph over nature.” I completely agree with Misato after having ac problems at my house in Florida (x_x;)

I’ve been walking almost every morning for over a month now. At first I could only walk slow and for a short distance, but I’m currently able to do a little over a mile and at a decent speed. Walking outdoors with my current health is more challenging than just being out of shape. If I look straight ahead, the whole world is turning clockwise as I move forward. An impossible (as well as frightening and nauseating) sight to behold. I find it best to keep my gaze down and try to divert attention to my legs burning to a crampy crisp ^^

Not much to report on MangAI. Latest version (v1.12) has been running strong. I haven’t received a single bug report. In the mean time, the difficult research I have mentioned in previous posts is currently at a standstill. That feature is automatic panel detection. Besides from the obvious crazy difficulty this entails, there are a few things keeping me from pushing harder:

• The processing time for panel detection is ridiculous. It requires multiple passes of pixel-by-pixel analysis per image. Even on a fast computer, this will severely increase processing time.
• With MangAI, the idea would be to break each page into individual panel images ordered by reading direction. To me, it seems like this would only really be useful on tiny screens like phones to make text more legible. Current gen phones, however, have amazing screens. I find manga on my iPhone 5 to be perfectly legible and easy to read by zooming and panning. Not that I ever want to read manga on my phone when I have a tablet or laptop.
• Manga was designed for full pages. Breaking each page into pieces may negatively affect the experience.
• There are many instances where a single panel takes up so much space that you have to zoom to read anyway.

I’ll probably halt automatic panel detection research for now. If I were programming this for use with a comic reader rather than a processor, panel detection would be a lot more alluring since you could still have the full page shown to you but have each panel highlighted as you read. Try the Marvel Comics app to see what I’m talking about (of course, their panels are manually detected by Marvel staff).

Let me know what you think about MangAI having automatic panel detection. Is it something you would use if available? I don’t even know if it’s possible, but if enough people want it I can continue research. Also please let me know if you have any other requests for MangAI.