The Dev Times #28

Halfway through each month, our newsletter for developers: The Dev Times, brings three reads that our own developers found interesting on the web, and two Transloadit updates that may interest you.

The ultimate guide to iframes

Introduced in 1997 with HTML 4.01, the iframe element is as oldschool as can be. But over the years, overuse, misuse, and security issues have gained iframes a bad reputation. In this guide, Nada Rifki aims to improve your knowledge about this legacy tag while, at the same time, helping you form your own opinion about it. Learn more. ›

Twitter, together!

Are you an open source or event maintainer who shares a project Twitter account? Twitter-together is a GitHub Action that utilizes text files to publish tweets from a GitHub repository. Rather than tweeting directly, GitHub’s pull request review process encourages more collaboration, Twitter activity, and editorial contributions by enabling everyone to submit tweet drafts to a project. Only when a tweet is merged to master, is it actually sent out. Check it out. ›

AutoFlip: An open source framework for intelligent video reframing using AI

Those of you who regularly create and consume content on mobile devices will be well aware that irregular aspect ratios do not always fit the display used for viewing. To address this problem, AutoFlip takes a video file and a target dimension (landscape, square, portrait, etc.) as inputs, analyzes the video content, and develops optimal tracking and cropping strategies, before producing an output video in the desired aspect ratio. Read more. ›

Tech Preview of our new AI bots

We're launching a new line of AI Robots powered by cloud vendors such as AWS and GCP. Two Robots are usuable today already: /image/describe, which can recognize objects in images and returns them like 'Car' and 'Tree', and /speech/transcribe, which takes an audio or video file and returns spoken words. These new Robots will help you to make content searchable, find related content, or provide a good first swing for someone who's subtitling the content. But this is just the start! We'll soon roll out four extra bots: /image/ocr, /document/ocr, /text/translate, and /text/speak. Enjoy! ›

We are changing how Template Names work

We'd like to share a change to our API that we'll be making on April 15, 2020. On that day, we'll change all our customers Template names to a format that is URL-safe. For instance, if your Template was previously called 'Video encode for Apple Devices', the new name will be 'video-encode-for-apple-devices'. This ultimately allows us to make Assembly Instructions more self-explanatory, reduce mistakes, and enable a new secret feature that we're still working on. There should not be any backward compatibility issues, unless you created some dependency on names (rather than IDs) in your internal code. Check it out! ›