Using Google Drive Document OCR from Parse Cloud Code - parse-platform

I would like to build an app using Ionic/Parse that allows me to take a picture with a mobile device camera, and do text processing of the image. From what I gather open source libraries are a little finicky, so for the purposes of prototyping I was hoping to use Google Drive's OCR capabilities.
The user would take a picture of a document, and my Cloud Code would send the picture to google drive, perform the ocr, and on ocr success, the picture would be sent back to my Parse db.
I am looking for some wisdom on this approach...Is this realistic or am I just totally off my rocker? Is there perhaps a service that integrates the two things? Am I just going to waste the same amount of time getting this to work as I would trying to integrate an open source OCR library? From an implementation prospective, would I run into authentication/data format/whathaveyou issues?
Hoping for some, been there tried that, these are some useful lessons..
Thanks!

Disclosure: I run this service.
Approach seems reasonable. http://ocrestful.com does exactly what you're describing, via an all-REST API. Permanently free tier available.

Related

How do you get a Google Apps Script code to be available for every single spreadsheet in your drive without copy-pasting?

I am using a shared Google account and the rest of the people with access to the account have even less programming knowledge than me. I have a custom function that greatly helps us to reduce the time we spend on a repetitive task but we need to do that task on many sheets and more sheets are continuously being added to the Drive.
They are not too comfortable with bringing up the Apps Script editor each time the code needs to be run so I have been trying to add a custom menu to the GSheets UI so the function can be run just by clicking on one button.
Is there a way for me to get this menu to appear on every single GSheet in the Drive?
I have searched high and low for the answer to this question and have been asked to use libraries and to publish the script as an add-on. I read that libraries might slow down the script execution and the editor still needs to be brought up so I tried the add-on method instead.
After spending hours navigating through the confusing maze that is the Google Cloud Platform and Google Marketplace SDK, I found out that to pass OAuth verification, I need to have my own domain and we just don't have the budget for domain hosting.
Any help or solutions offered would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Suggestions for image database server with search engine

I tried searching Google. Really, I did.
I am looking for a server that stores pictures/images/3D models, or read the images from some other source (like git or something like), and provides a search engine to those pictures, based on keywords or even based on the picture itself.
This is something similar to what Google Photos or Flickr do, but I need this in a closed environment, that's why those won't work for me. So I need a server/software that I can use on my own infrastructure. Open source or proprietary, doesn't matter.
Thanks for the help!

How to automatically download all new images appearing on a newsfeed on Facebook

I am attempting to write a script or make a FB App to automatically download images from profiles on Facebook at a designated time during the day, and have it repeat each day. After this is accomplished I aim to implement the reverse of this to upload images within an album to a profile, but that will be for another day. These are going to be profiles that I am friends with, or public profiles.
Having some issues determining where to start as it seems this isn't done on a regular. Can anyone provide a direction for me to head in? I have looked into the Facebook Developers website, as well as on stack overflow and haven't seem to find any solution that is close. I have stumbled upon examples on how to autodownload from Reddit, but Facebook is another beast entirely it seems.
Is this something that can be accomplished via Java or Python, or should I actually go through the Facebook API? At a bit of a loss as to how to proceed.
ANY help would be appreciated as I am not a web developer. I mostly dabble with MATLAB and Java so this is a bit outside of my expertise.
Once again to summarize, I am seeking to auto download images from Facebook profiles either as they are posted or at selected times. Also this idea could be changed to download from Instagram if that is somehow easier.

Desktop app vs. Web app development differences and similarities

Forgive me if there is vagueness in this question. In a nutshell, I've built websites for several years, working with PHP, Javascript, JSON, AJAX, HTML, CSS3 and ASP-(many years ago when I didn't know better).
Lately I'm coming across projects where the clients prefer the app on their desktop (offline) rather than on the web.
Is it going to be a long road ahead to learn this? I can't get my head wrapped around going from web to desktop. Could someone give me a 50,000 ft overview of what I need to research? No details needed.. just an overall approach.
Are there packages out there I should read into which give tools for running a system "offline" so to speak? I'm not sure of there terminology or even where to start.
One of the main reasons is that features like Imagemagick seems too slow to process images online. The client would like tool where they don't have to rely on the speed of internet. Go Daddy is useless when it comes to upgrading their tools and I hope to do a standalone system for image processing.
Also, I'd like to get into making desktop widgets like time tracking tools, or anything that can be self-contained and running from a downloaded program that I would create.
Is this a really bad idea?
Try Auto it, it has a tiny foot print and it is great for writing small tools. It does have an GUI editor.
example of auto it widget
auto it widget
Other than that you could use industrial strength Microsoft Developer studios for either VB or C# . You can even do apps in VBA excel.

Using views from other apps as CoreAnimation Layer

All,
How can I use (NS)Views from other applications as Layers in my CA app. I.e. I'd like to display a Keynote presentation as Layer in my CA app.
I found the iChatTheatre API which looks promising - however I'd need the oposite. An API to get the contents from an app - not to provide it.
Any pointers?
Thanks.
Take a look at the "Son of Grab" sample.
It shows you how to use the CGWindow*() API that was introduced with Mac OS X 10.5
The API allows you to get the content of a whole window, so you have to find a way to get the portions of the window you are interested in.
I don't believe there's a public way to do what you're talking about. Your best approach is probably to reverse-engineer the iChat AV system (the receiving side) and see if you can replicate it. Some initial work has been done by the ICP project. It's very sketchy, but it's a start.
Another approach is the QuickLook API, which has the advantage of not having to run the source application. So far Apple hasn't made the reading side of that API available either. Ciarán Walsh did some handy reverse engineering on QL a couple of years ago, and I've played with that approach, but it is somewhat klunky. You can generate the panel as Ciarán explains, but put it off screen. You can then copy the contents into an NSImage using NSBitmapImageRep -initWithFocusedViewRect:. Unfortunately you can wind up with some funky visual artifacts in this (like scroll bars in some cases), but for some applications it can be effective.

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