PDF to Speech Update

Today we released PDF to Speech version 1.3. The features we added are:

1. The current sentence is shown on the screen.


2. A control to adjust reading speed was added.


3. PDF-to-speech now report to Android as an app able to open PDF's.

Bug fixes.

• The IO Manager was not working correctly the first time it was used due to its agreement dialog. However.


• Off-by-one error when reporting the current sentence being read fixed.

Remaining bugs:
*Some PDF's are not being read, we are working on a fix for this.
*The Reader has a limit on how many pages it can load. Documents with more than 700 pages may not work. For example, a PDF of Moby Dick cannot be read.

Referee

With the Referee Android app, you can play with your friends showing them the yellow, and red card. And you can sign a goal along with YouTube video of Andres Cantor. Place questions or comments on this blog entry.

PDF to Speech

Today we released PDF-to-Speech into the Android Market. The App will let you select a PDF file from your SD card, and it will read it to you. Some of its features are:

• Seek to sentences within a page


• Seek among pages


• costume blue-themed UI

Requirements:

• You'll need Android 1.6 or higher to install this app.


• The app will install text-to-speech if not present


• The app will install OI File Manager if not present

This is the first version. Future versions will support more PDF format variants. And seamless support for Spanish and Italian are coming, although rough support is already available.

Some PDFs variants that are not supported at the moment are encrypted PDF files, documents created with OpenOffice and other non-standard pdf creators. The program will not be able to read a pdf file that has scanned images, even if these images have text. The best way to know if the app will work for you is to get it and try it on the PDF's you plan to hear. If a dialog message is shown, or the reader just reads the page number until the end of the document, your document is not supported yet. More formats will be covered in the coming months.

Another restriction is the size of the PDF file. The program has been updated to let the user know if the file is too big. All the restriction will be fixed as soon as possible.

Android ideas

If you have a small application for an Android phone, and it has a small niche so you don't expect it will be develop in the next year, let me know about it. I can do the leg-work and could probably develop the app for you.

You get the opportunity to use the app and my thanks of course.

Oh, I would release it for free (ad-supported), and eventually open-source it on Google hosting website.

This month, I released a couple of android apps: RAS (Radio Alphabet Speller) and Referee (show the yellow card to your friends when they have it coming)

New app and keeping old promises

I have just released an app on the Android market. the application is called RAS (Radio Alphabet Speller). The application will turn your words into Radio/telephony letter, also known as a phonetic alphabet.

I went over previous comments, and realize that a year has gone by, and I never released the code for the pedometer and the nutrition application. Both work fine, but they are not exhaustively checked for bugs, so I won't put it on the market. But I will get then on Google open source projects. I will post the name of the projects when I create them.

Sorry for the delay, and I understand if the few fans of the code have moved on. But if you are still interested in working on the code with me, here is one challenge the nutritional diary faces. We need to have a database with existing nutritional information available for the application, I had the RPC (Remote Procedure Call) code necessary to have the app interact with an external nutrional dabase through RPC. But the datadabase needs to be designed, the code to access it, and somebody (or some app) needs to populate the tables. I'll be busy this year finishing up a PhD Dissertation, so I will release the code, and hope somebody can pick it up. I'll be available for for help though.

There are other nutritional applications on the market, but this one should be the only open source one.

The pedometer is another story, in that case the only thing that could make the software useful is if the Nexus or the Droid have with them a more sensitive accelerometer and compass. I'll post the code, and somebody can test is. I only have a G1, which by now feels dated.

The RAS took me about 6 hours to make. I will release other applications in the future that are simple to code and have a very small niche. for the end-user reader, let me know of any idea you may want to see in your Android phone, and I promise the app will be GNU open source if it makes to the market.

Pedometer Project Freeze

We'll freeze development of the pedometer project. The G1's accelerometer sensor only does 4 to 7 reading per second. This means that it is possible to count steps for slow walking but not fast walking or running.

We will release the prototype code we have so far, but no Android Market application will be made based on it. If the sensor in future phones improves, we may come back to the project.

For the near future, one way we may get this to work is to create a standalone pedometer with bluetooth enabled so that we can access it from the phone and provide neat analysis tools. This is outside our expertise, but it would be a nice challenge for device engineerings out there.

Updated FitAndroid Beta

Android SDK keeps changing every few months, which is good because it usually brings better tools with it. But bad because it tends to break old code.
The testing Nutrition Diary has being released today updated with Android's new SDK (1.5). We hope to start bringing this open source project to the Android Market this summer.

The updated source package can be downloaded here.