Friday, April 22, 2011

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.

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