For what it’s worth, Xcode 6 allows you to provide a single PDF file per asset. Xcode will then render the PDF into bitmaps at all required sizes _at build time_ and include the rendered images in your app bundle. Of course, you will probably have to make a new build when new devices come out.
It’s not resolution independence, but it has the potential to make asset production much less painful. I don’t know if this approach also work for app icons or only for things like button and toolbar images.
Agreed about monetization. Ideally, this should be a community thing like Wikipedia but that’s probably unrealistic.
I really think it would be an amazing resource. There would be so much great content that the site would potentially rank really high on Google for a variety of search terms, too (again, like Wikipedia).
Author of the blog post here. I had this idea to start a site for crowdsourced podcast transcripts (or indeed any audio content) but never did it. I’d still love to see such a site because I agree that there is so much valuable content.
But transcription is just a huge amount of work and I’m not sure how well you could automate it with the help of software.
I asked FastMail support about their US data center a few weeks ago, suggesting they offer an alternative. This was their reply:
"We DO plan to set up a non-US data centre, and are making progress towards this. However it is expensive and time-consuming, and we're not ready to offer this as an extra yet. We will definitely make it known when such an option becomes available."