Pdf-to-Speech 4.0 Release

Finally, version 4.0 has been releases. The major features added were:

• Bookmarks. They include the option to add a comment as suggested by one of the users.
• Tabbed GUI: The information was starting to get too crowded for a single minimalist screen. The tabbed GUI hopefully will keep things clear and still be minimalistic.
  
• Search: The load screen includes a search option that will help you find files on the phone or on the web. The web search will only look for pdfs on Google. Notice that a similar action can be done from your desktop adding the keyboard filetype:pdf to the end of your search query.
• Wait screen is gone: while the program was speed up, the real problem for users was not the wait, but being locked out of the app while the text is being extracted. The new implementation does this in the background, leaving the user free to exit the app, or browsing other tabs while the pdf is extracted.

Keep the feedback coming. There is a list of other features that will be added in the future. The major one expected in the next month is adding OCR to read the pdfs that cannot be read by pdf-to-speech at present. The OCR feature will also allow for reading of photographed text.

Mouse Surfer

Today we released mouse surfer. The app will turn your phone into a computer mouse. The app fixes a couple of issues present in other android mice. First, it uses physics based movement so you can cover large spaces on high resolution screens. This feature is also really pleasing. It was inspired by way the GUI moves on the Android phones.

Second, the mouse self-configures. One problem with many Android mice is that they require the user to configure the mouse by setting in network information. This can be ok for some Android users; but if the mouse self-configure, all Android users would see the convenience in this. So the mouse will self-configure.

Self-configuration brings the mouse down to a usability level similar to a regular hardware mouse. The user simply downloads the driver, installs it and that it! the mouse will take a few seconds to configure it self.

The main use-case for the mouse it to use it to browse the Internet, watch Netflix, DVD, and flash based videos like Hulu.com and cnn.com. The mouse can be used for any other purpose. However, from experience, the mouse can be hard to use to draw, or to write very long papers, so don't throw out your old mouse just yet.

Get on the Android Market

PDF-to-Speech 4.0

There are some improvement we are considering for version 4.0 of PDF-TO-SPEECH.

• First, we will give the app a face lift. The number of controls have grown as more features have been added to the app, and a GUI redesign is in order to reorganized the new options.
• Second, we will add bookmarks. The automatic bookmark is already implemented. This one is the one that remembers where you left off when you close the app. The new bookmark feature will allow you to mark a place in the document.

Thanks to all our customers for constant feedback. Always feel free to let us know about issues and feature requests.

PDF-to-Speech Update (2.0.7)

Small fixes.

*The language list won't disappear.
*Opening a gmail attachment and coming back to it later won't report a missing attashment.

Features:
*added contrast change for day/night use.
*speed up pdf reading 2% (more coming soon)

Svox update: Svox is aware of the problem and are working to improve their service's compatibility with other Android apps such as pdf-to-speech.

SVOX Bug

SVOX does not seem to be getting along with PDF-to-speech since SVOX's last update. We'll keep you updated on this bugs status.

A couple of known bugs will squash this week:

*Language list shows an empty list sometimes

*Returning to a previously open email attachment will not work.

PDF-To-Speech (bugfixes)

On version 2.0.5

Base on very constructive user feed back, here are the bug fixes for this week.

* fixed stutter when reading the next page in the background.

* fixed having to pres play twice to get the program to stop when coming back to app.

* won't crash if swiping finger on sentence read seek bar. Instead the sentence seek will

be shown on the screen. when the user releases the seek button, the app will continue to

read at that point.

* The last page remembered is the last page read and sentence was too far behind current page and sentence. this is fixed to update the page and sentence more often.

* Was skipping last sentence in page if the sentence did not end with a period.

* took out unnecessary Internet access permission.

* the changes in speech speed and language settings are applied immediately.

PDF to Speech Update

PDF-to-Speech has been updated to run in the background like a media player. The update is considered beta while some bugs are iron out. The bugs however are no show-stoppers and will be fixed in future updates.

We suggested to the Android market to allow for beta version of programs to be posted on the market, so that we can release updates faster, and use the help of our users to find and fix bugs.

The next update will be mainly the bug fixing.

The big bug in the list for the next update is to enable the program to handle bigger PDFs.

Thanks for embracing the app, and providing so much feedback.