Practical Android Apps

Pdf-to-Speech 11.0.1

2012-10-03T17:18:00.003-07:00

Version 11.0.1 is out with some fixes. As always, this blog post contains somewhat technical description of changes. It is meant for hard-core users and developers looking to partner with Practical Android Apps. Users in general are invited to follow us at Google+ https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/103037044611920202429/103037044611920202429/posts

Changes:

Freeze (ANR) addressed: over the previous update, the number of freezes has been reduced. The freezes where due to the way Pdf-to-Speech has to interact with the android services. Using my background in parallel computing, I redesign the complete Text-to-Speech service to make it virtually impossible for the app to freeze. Now, all the modules are able to share resources without deadlocking one another.
Fixed find/replace tool: Better practices where used to avoid error when saving certain symbols on the find/replace tool.
Switch Google Account: The initial release of Google Drive support did not include switch Google Accounts as a requirement. This version ensures the previous Google account's file information is cleaned before loading the new account. The user must have multiple Google Account's on the device for this feature to be noticed.
Support for text codecs: The support for codecs on text files was revisited. Better use of libraries was used to provide reliable support for Lating-1 (ISO9986), ASCII, and UTF-8. UTF-8 is the standard used in the US, and Android OS standard.

Version 11.0

A user suggested support to open hyperlinks from the sentence viewer. This feature was added for hyperlinks that are spelled out on any document (doc, pdf, txt, or epub). Also, the hyperlinks encoded in MS doc files are now linked on the sentence viewer. Future updates may include hyperlinks encoded into the pdf file.

What is cooking in the oven ?

The Web-to-Speech feature on the current version will be improved with a redesign of this use case.
The Front-end shall be tweaked to display more than one sentence at a time.

Other user suggestions that are on the TODO list for future updates include:

The find/replace tools will be redesigned so the user can do straight find/replace words. But for more advanced users, a find/replace tool that accepts patterns will be added.
Other features will be published as the release date nears !

If you are not a Pdf-to-Speech user already, you can find the app at:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.practicalapps&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImNvbS5wcmFjdGljYWxhcHBzIl0.

and at

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Android-Apps-Pdf-Speech/dp/B0073TZ1AA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349309723&sr=8-1&keywords=pdf+to+speech

Let me know if you would like to see Pdf-to-Speech on a market that is more convenient given your device.

Pdf-To-Speech 9.5

2012-04-02T12:22:00.002-07:00

As we continue to practice fast release cycles on Pdf-to-Speech, version 9.5 adds support for Microsoft Word (.doc). I used code from the Apache POI project to parse the .doc documents. The library works seamlessly and the feature is now part of the app.

There is an Apache POI library on code.google.com. However, the project does not seem to have too much activity. If other fellow developers are interested in the version we forked for Pdf-to-Speech, let us know and we will release the code under Apache 2.0 License.

Also, development on an Intent API to allow developer's apps to use Pdf-to-Speech is still an open proposition. However, we first need to see interest from fellow developers.

We are now focusing on providing features to increase user's access to their data, no matter where it is. And the addition of Google Docs-to-speech is still on the pipeline.

Pdf-To-Speech 8.9

2012-02-29T13:17:00.003-08:00

The latest update of Pdf-to-Speech sports an automatic header and footer extractor. Thanks to B. Real feedback, we've added automatic footer and header extraction. The update is immediately available on the Android Maket and will be available on the Amazon Market soon.

For version 9.0 we plan to have ePub format support. A rebuild of the file loading tab is on schedule as well to make the tab focus more on the searching tool.

For version 10.0, we are pondering adding Google Doc's to speech. We welcome feedback on the usefulness of this feature.

As Real's feedback shows, we depend on your feedback to make pdf-to-speech a more useful tool for your every day needs. You can post your feed back as a comment on the Android or Amazon market, on this blog, or at Pdf-to-Speech's Google+ page here.

How to take out footer And headers in your PDF

2012-02-22T16:31:00.013-08:00

Follow this link to read a tutorial on the use of the Find/Replace tool in Pdf-to-Speech. The tool is useful to take out the header and footer from the PDF documents when read with text-to-speech. The tools is also useful to replace words with phonetical equivalents.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/14zkZQKtko5VPANSWcDcFQowc-n6WfDRE2PGhTeiYQKg/edit

Pdf-To-Speech 9

2012-01-02T10:41:00.000-08:00

On January 1, 2012 Pdf-to-speech 8.5 was released. The update addressed a force-close that was happening when the phone comes off standby while playing a pdf file. The settings tab was improved to comply with Android setting's standards. This year, the pdf-to-speech app will receive additional bug fixes to improve stability on multiple Android phones.

For version 9 of the Pdf-to-speech, I would like to release an Intent-based extension of the app that will allow other Android app developers to turn multiple other document formats to speech using pdf-to-spech's engine (epub, oppenoffice, etc). I will be releasing the API's and documentation on how to do this as the work is done. In the mean time, I welcome interest and suggestions by fellow developers.

Pdf-To-Speech 8

2011-08-02T20:32:00.000-07:00

We have listen to users' suggestions and the most commonly requested feature is speed. So the next version, version 8, will have an experiment Pdf reader that can be three times as fast on a Galaxy S or comparable phone, and can be twice as fast on a Xoom or comparable tablet.

The figure to the right shows how long it takes for the app to load the first page of Moby Dick, a 1047 page document. On average, the reader will now take about 3 seconds to read any random page on the document (images and other media can delay the reader).

The update is almost ready. The feature will be provided as experimental because there are many PDF creators, and it will take some time to verify the Fast PDF reader can process multiple types of PDF files. So be sure to give us your feedback.

Pdf-to-Speech 5.0

2011-05-02T19:58:00.000-07:00

We added OCR to Pdf-to-Speech. The app can now be used to read text in pictures that are embedded in a PDF document.

To use the feature. go to Settings and select Google Docs as the text extraction engine. A few things to note:

Google OCR is in beta and a quota is in effect, so the service may stop as the quota is reached.
Pdfbox, the default text extractor is better at reading Pdf's with columns than Google OCR.

Upcoming updates will allow the app to read jpegs and pngs.

Pdf-to-Speech 4.0 Release

2011-04-22T18:36:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-09T23:20:00.000-07:00

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

2011-02-02T02:28:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-10-30T14:37:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-19T16:51:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-10-16T12:48:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-04T18:15:00.000-07:00

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.

PDF to Speech Update

2010-09-08T12:20:00.001-07:00

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

2010-08-08T14:28:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-26T12:02:00.001-07:00

A few bugs were fixed in release 1.5.1:

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

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

2010-07-03T23:57:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-25T22:21:00.000-07:00

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

The current sentence is shown on the screen.

A control to adjust reading speed was added.

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

2010-06-11T14:55:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-07T14:53:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-21T18:41:00.000-07:00

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

2010-01-26T17:11:00.000-08:00

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

2009-05-23T12:28:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-04T23:13:00.000-07:00

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.