Author: Fritz

Apple’s SwiftUI announcement during last year’s WWDC (2019) was a welcomed surprise for Apple devs. The framework embraces a more declarative and reactive approach to building user interfaces—a complete paradigm shift from interface builder and storyboards. In a way, SwiftUI brings the joys of Swift to UI-building, signaling a coming departure of Objective-C inspired systems.

SwiftUI 1.0 (unofficial versioning), though, proved to still be somewhat a prototype framework, showing signs of its infancy. There were:

Continue reading What’s New in SwiftUI 2.0

Frontier Design’s Video Star is a freemium video editing and creation app with a rich, deep toolkit that allows users to become the stars of their own music videos. From transitions, to blur and color effects, to adding 3D objects and text, and beyond, Video Star has a seemingly endless trove of fun capabilities to explore.

Continue reading Video Star: Creating custom artistic styles for music videos with mobile machine learning

Vertex animation is the keyframed animation of individual vertices of a mesh. It is very beneficial for very complicated motion like that of cloth, hair, or water. It uses a flex controller bone to move the model through a series of flexes — one for each frame.

Vertex animation is included in almost all video or computer-based games. To animate the character, one just needs to vary the sampled line based on the current time.

Continue reading Vertex Animation in Lens Studio for Snapchat Lenses

Ever wondered what the 27th letter in the English alphabet might look like? Or how your appearance would be twenty years from now? Or perhaps how that super-grumpy professor of yours might look with a big, wide smile on his face?

Thanks to machine learning, all this is not only possible, but relatively easy to do with the inference of a powerful neural network (rather than hours spent on Photoshop). The neural networks that make this possible are termed adversarial networks. Often described as one of the coolest concepts in machine learning, they are actually a set of more than one network (usually two) which are continually competing with each other (hence, adversarially), producing some interesting results along the way.

Continue reading StyleGAN: Use machine learning to generate and customize realistic images

ML Kit by google is yet another very efficient and clean way of integrating basic machine learning into your mobile apps. It offers some easy to use prebuilt base APIs:

The best part is that you can use these services on-device (without needing any internet connection for external server calls) or on-cloud (wider training base requiring server calls). Most importantly, this can be integrated in both iOS and Android apps.

Continue reading Text Recognition and Translation on iOS Using ML Kit and Google Translate

With React Hooks growing in usage, the ability to handle a component’s state and side effects is now a common pattern in functional components. React Redux offers a set of Hook APIs as an alternative to the omnipresent connect() high order component.

In this tutorial, let’s continue building a simple React Native app where a user can save notes. In part 1, we used the Redux Hooks API to manage state. This post is in continuation of that previous post:

Continue reading Using Redux with React Hooks in a React Native app

If you follow me, you know that this year I started a series called Weekly Digest for Data Science and AI: Python & R, where I highlighted the best libraries, repos, packages, and tools that help us be better data scientists for all kinds of tasks.

The great folks at Heartbeat sponsored a lot of these digests, and they asked me to create a list of the best of the best—those libraries that really changed or improved the way we worked this year (and beyond).

Continue reading Top 7 Libraries and Packages for Data Science and AI: Python & R

Human pose estimation refers to the process of inferring poses in an image. Essentially, it entails predicting the positions of a person’s joints in an image or video. This problem is also sometimes referred to as the localization of human joints. It’s also important to note that pose estimation has various sub-tasks such as single pose estimation, estimating poses in an image with many people, estimating poses in crowded places, and estimating poses in videos.

Continue reading Human Pose Estimation Guide (2023)

A notification is a message you can display to users outside of your application’s normal UI. When you tell the system to issue a notification, it first appears as an icon in the notification area.

To see the details of a notification, the user opens the notification drawer, can tap it to open the app related to it, or take an action directly from the notification. Both the notification area and the notification drawer are system-controlled areas that the user can view at any time.

Continue reading Android Notifications

While working with any kind of client app (be it mobile or desktop), you almost always need to have permanent storage in place that can allow you to store data, even when your application is stopped or closed by a user. Usually, such storage can be used to save the data from your app’s last use, or for saving data that was fetched from the internet so you don’t need to fetch it again, etc.

Continue reading Abstracting SQL queries with Room Database in Android