PDF to Speech Update

The latest version of PDF to Speech is able to open email attachment. The feature is beta, some GUI problem is making the play, skip buttons disappear, but we are working to fix it.

The updates to be added this month are the

• providing pdf-to-speech as a service, which basically will make it behave the same as your media player or pandora.
• The second update will be support for encrypted pdf's. The feature will be added for beta testing at first to work out the bugs with the help of our users.
  

The Dictionary Logger app is slated for improvements in its logging GUI. Other requested features will be added.

Feel welcome to post bug reports, feature request, and general comments.

Dictionary Logger and PDF-to-speech feedback

The Dictionary Logger has been updated since its UI looked awful on the Droid phone. We are testing the new UI hopefully it looks better now. I'm getting a Galaxy S this week, this will help me upgrade the suite of apps for the newer Android OS (2.1 and 2.2).

I've gotten good feedback about the PDF-to-speech app. The project is officially released as open-source using the Apache License version 2 on the Google project hosting site. So I'll appreciate having programmers adding their expertise to the project. The app will still be on sale on the market to finance routine improvements. Spanish support is on the pipeline as well as a new feature I'll leave as a surprise.

PDF to Speech Bug Fixed

A few bugs were fixed in release 1.5.1:

1. PDF to speech is now able to read all pdf files, limited only by the size of the file and the phone's resources.


2. The app will not restart when the phone is tilted ( for phones with orientation enabled)

The next release will have the feature of playing a PDF in the background allowing the user to do other things with the phone while listening.

Spanish support is also on the pipeline.

PDF to Speech Upcoming Features and Bug Fixes

Planned features:

Some users have suggested to make PDF-to-speech behave more like a media player. That is being able to play the pdf on the background leaving the foreground to check emails and use other apps. The feature will start development soon.

Caching the text will be implemented as well. The feature will reduce the wait time to just the first time the pdf is opened.

Bugs in line to be fixed:

A newer version of PDFBox seems has been able to read some of the pdfs that were to being read before. The code is in the process of being ported to pdf-to-speech.

Bug fix: changing screen orientation on my-touch makes the application restart. The caching feature will help eliminate this error.

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.