I want to generate some text from my bb10 app to give audio feedback to the user.
(But the screenreader like in the accessibility feature is not sufficient)
Has anybody already successfully got text-to-speech implemented?
There are countless open source projects that do this on PC platforms. You may have your best luck in fitting them to your needs. – Josh C
Any library you would recommend? It should have C or C++ interface and must work offline (no server based solution) and it should not occupy too much memory. – thowa
I had to check to make sure it was written in C++ which it is. It is called ESpeak. I heard about it nearly 7 years ago when I was looking for a speech synthesizer that was powerful/robust enough to sound like a human. I believe it was ESpeak, and back then it was a complicated task to get it to spew out realistic sounding speech.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/espeak/files/
This one looks promising as well; however it is written in java.
http://mary.dfki.de/Download/openmary-open-source-emotional-text-to-speech-synthesis-system-released
Found here https://github.com/marytts/marytts
So GWT best practices encourages one to use some flavour of MVP, which should in theory allow one to write different native views while sharing the presenter business logic.
This seems to be at the heart of the GWT spin off Google project http://code.google.com/p/j2objc/ which converts the non-UI part of your code to Objective-C, allowing you to write the rest natively in Objective-C.
So my question is: If this really hard part of the puzzle is being solved, how hard would it be to include an HTML5 mobile library (like MGWT or Touch4j [Sencha]) into this MVP pipeline to have the best of all worlds?
Having dabbled with http://code.google.com/p/playn/ , this clearly seems to be the blue-print for having a cross-plaftform build system (native android & html5 & java &...), but that project is geared for single screen drawing and event loop for game dynamics and doesn't allow for keyboard input and other typical mobile goodies.
It seems a shame that if so much of the problem has been solved, that it's not possible to go the extra mile. The answer to this question would be the best plan for actioning a solution, including such nigglies as which MVP structure to choose that would ease accommodation of the various widget libraries (GWTP vs MVP 2.1), and if the best approach is to start with the PlayN code base, and start to hack it.. what are the gotchas? Or if another path is chosen, why that one? and why would it be the best??
Thanx a lot. :-)
It is not clear whether your question is - evaluation options for multi-platform app development or mvp.
You can evaluate additional technology which are used with Sencha and GWT
1) mgwt
2) titanium
3) phonegap
You can also reference - Creating a mobile app using Google App Engine and GWT?
Note: PlayN as you mention is more of gaming platform and not suitable for business app.
MVP is definitely doable... and at times you may feel like its a lot of work, but it pays off in the end. Check out the Touch4j Kitchen Sink, which is written using MVP. You can take that down to the device with Cordova if you wish. The code is on GitHub:
https://github.com/emitrom/touch4jks
The repo is actively being worked on (we are updating ourselves to Touch4j 4.0) so it won't run out the gate, but at least you can see and follow the model :-)
Titanium4j is to Appcelerator's Titanium as Touch4j is to Sencha Touch. You may want to check that out as well. Titanium4j and Touch4j rely on GWT.
Cheers.
I want to develop an application for Mac OS X to record audio from one application.
I played around with Soundflower, but it only grabs the full system audio.
I know that I have to use a HAL plug-in. This plug-in is loaded from an application that uses Core Audio and then I can communicate with the plug-in to grab the audio.
My question is: How does such a plug-in look like? Are there examples on the internet? I have not found anything about this topic.
Now that you've decided that using Cocoa injection is a feasible solution to your problem, let's start there.
What you need to do is find out how the ObjC classes in the app are setting up to play audio, and hook in to set a different AU in place of the default system out.
There are two options (besides writing your own custom AU from scratch, which you don't need to do). You can use AUHAL as the AU, and capture the data from AUHAL. This is a bit easier from the point of view of hooking things up, but it means you have to write the code that renderers and saves the audio. Or you can just hook in a save-to-file AU, which is a bit harder to hook up, but once you do it takes care of rendering automatically.
So, how do you hook things in? Well, most of the higher-level CA calls are written to just write to the current output. If the app is doing things that way, you just need to hook in at startup to find your replacement AU and set it as the current output, in place of the default. On the other hand, if the app is writing directly to an AU that it stores in a variable, you have to hook it to store your AU as a variable. And if it's building a graph of AUs, you either replace the default output, or stick yours in front of it, in the graph.
See TN2091 for some sample code fragments for most of the hard parts for most of the possibilities. It doesn't show you how to put them together, and it's got a lot more about setting inputs than outputs (because that's harder), and the terminology can get confusing, but if you read it carefully, you should be able to find the parts you need.
If you haven't yet built a simple AU host and AU plugin before, you really should take the time to work through the whole Audio Unit Development Fundamentals guide. (And if you don't think you really need to know all that to do something simple, you're wrong. Why CoreAudio is Hard explains half of the reason; the changes between OS X versions versions are the other half of the reason.)
You probably also want to look at CocoaDev's CoreAudioAndAudioUnitsTutorial page for a placeholder page for a complete tutorial that nobody's ever written, with links to a lot of useful stuff.
Meanwhile, if injecting the whole MTCoreAudio framework into the app is feasible, it comes with a ton of nice, complete samples. In fact, even if you aren't going to use the framework, it's worth reading the Overview documentation, and possibly the source code.
I am just a beginner in Titanium and searching for few sample source code to learn from and run. Downloading and working with kitchen sink or with the API is a big pain, to understand as well as to work with.
Although everything is there in both and they have given sample but that seems like not an implementation. I just want to have some source code to learn how, when and where to use the elements? How things work, how are they integrated etc.
Usually at the Q&A section there are samples of code. Just search what you are looking for: http://developer.appcelerator.com/questions/newest
The Wiki provides examples: http://wiki.appcelerator.org/display/guides/Home
Even this website provides code samples, check out the Titanium Tag: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/titanium
And last, but not least, there seem to be more and more code samples in the API Docs: http://developer.appcelerator.com/apidoc/mobile/latest
Good luck!
As an option, you can find good application samples on CodeCanyon. They're not free but you can learn a lot by examining how to start from scratch to build an application like;
Simple Foursquare like apps
Photo gallery apps
TODO apps etc.
http://codecanyon.net/category/mobile/titanium
I found this Forging Titanium series on Vimeo.com to be one of the best. Just watch out this complete series. Beside providing you with basics and advanced limelight on elements and functionality, also provide link to many github public repository we can follow and get numerous sample codes.
What are the software/ Wiki you use to write and share your specs about the developers, testers and management?
Do you use Wiki system, and if so, what Wiki software you use?
Or do you use Sharepoint to manage and version the specs? One problem with SharePoint 2003 as specs platform is that it's very hard to collaborate among different people.
For backward compatibility sake, I would also like to have the platform able to import Microsoft Word seamlessly. And it would certainly help if the interface is similar to Microsoft Word.
Any idea?
I've used Confluence at a number of places, it's a pretty powerful wiki and very good for creating specifications that can be shared amongst various parties. See:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/
There's some more information here on the advantages of using Confluence:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/170352/confluence-experiences
EDIT: I've updated this to deal with the Microsoft Word import feature you mentioned. Confluence supports this through the Office Connector here:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/office-connector.jsp
There's also a Sharepoint connector:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/sharepoint-connector.jsp
plus a whole bunch of plugins:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/sharepoint-connector.jsp
Some of these are user contributed also. I can't recommend Confluence enough as a commercial wiki.
I've also used JSPWiki, which is open source. it's ok but not as good as confluence, see:
http://www.jspwiki.org/
You could try Google docs - I have successfully used this in the past. It supports import / export to MS Word, and it has great support for multiple user - see http://www.brighthub.com/internet/google/articles/8236.aspx.
It supports versioning, allows you to chat with other people who are currently working on the document, and shows you a list of all the changes others have made to the document (without needing to close / reopen the document).
If you want corporate support, Google also provides that - see Google Apps for business.
We use SharePoint -- it's not ideal, but it does a decent job. If I were you, I would seriously look at getting off SharePoint 2003 and on to MOSS (SharePoint 2007). It's not perfect, but it's substantially better. Here's a little bit on using MOSS as a wiki. I think in general wiki's are a good tool for getting people up to speed on your system. We used to pass around "getting started documents" and now we have all that type of stuff in our developer portal.
Per John's comment, I looked up this feature comparison. I have to go back and look at what features I'm using that are not in WSS -- I might be paying for licenses I don't need! :)
We use email. I know it isn't elaborate, but it is easy to use. Everyone has it installed and there are no licensing issues. All spec changes are sent to an super set email distro indicating the updates and the location on the network share where the spec can be found.
We use Alfresco, in its Community version, from both its Share and Explorer web interfaces.
Quite useful, with a document library, wiki, forum and calendar.
We curently host about 1.8 Go consisting mainly in docs, versionned and sometimes automatically converted to PDF (by creating an automatic content rule).
FTP, WebDav and network share are also used to access to the same repository.
You could take a look at Microsoft Groove - the collaboration software that Microsoft bought a few years back.
It's bundled free with premium versions of Microsoft Office.
You can customize the workspace with discussion boards and can fairly seamlessly store collaboratively-edited Office documents.
We use MediaWiki for dos & specs. Wiki definitely wins anything like Microsoft Word or SharePoint - it allows you to develop a documentation in "first refer, then describe" = "divide and rule" way. Perfect for developers - they used to think the same way. The process of developing a documentation is almost ideal: you start from TOC and drill down until you write the document for every link you put earlier.
MediaWiki is quite customizable - there are lots of extensions there. The most necessary ones are:
Source code highlighter - CSO_Source
Our own templates integrating wiki with class reference.
Others are InterWiki, FileProtocolLinks, YouTube (we use customized version of it to display HD video), ReCaptcha, SpecialDeleteOldRevisions, Maintenance.
Some integration examples are here.
And we use Google issue tracker to track the issues. Its main advantages:
Imput usability: the process of adding\changing the issue is really convenient there. Earlier we tried Track Studio - the same actions require 2-3 times more time there, so it died fast simply because most of us hated to use it.
Customizable grids. See the examples. Really helpful.
Atom\RSS support. So everyone knows what's going on.
There is a Gurtle tool integrating it with TortoiseSVN. Really helpful.
Its main disadvantage is that it can't be closed from the public access. This makes it simply unusable in many cases.
If you want a UI similar to Word, why not use Word with SharePoint 2007? You're on 2003 so the experience is there. Upgrade to SharePoint 2007 and you can have the collaboration, Word features, document sharing, and so on.
This is the kind of thing Microsoft wants people to use Office for, so there's a ton of doco out there about how to configure your SharePoint and Office environment to support collaboration.
There is something that Google do in this direction and it looks really cool: wave.google.com. It would be a great step in collaboration and worth to wait it.
Here we use Google Docs it makes the documents available to everyone write or read only, public or private among people that have or not Google accounts, it also can import Word docs, not to mention that it runs directly into the browser so it has high availability with zero cost and zero setup, also its computer/OS agnostic, we have a nice experience with it.
Also perhaps you should take a look at Basecamp or Backpack at 37Signals, any of then might also fit your bill.
We use DocBook for all of our specifications (and other customer-facing documentation). DocBook is an XML format that lets you easily generate documents in just about any format, including PDF, which is how we distribute things to clients to get them signed off. We can divide a document into files (by section) and commit everything to our source control system (Subversion). Because it is all XML (i.e. text-based), Subversion's automatic merging and conflict resolution works great if two people work on the same file. We have a set of stylesheets that all of our documents use, so all documents share the exact same style/format, with no extra work on our part.
And if you don't like editing XML files directly, there are GUI front-ends that provide a reasonably WYSIWYG-like experience. I believe that most people in my office use XMLMind. Still, we happen to all be technical people so if we had to write XML directly it wouldn't be an issue.
As a sidenote, we also put out release notes. We have some XSLT that lets us write documents like this:
<bugs>
<bug id="1234" component="web">JavaScript error when clicking the Kick Me button</bug>
</bugs>
We then have a script that runs through our Subversion repository doing an svn log from the previous release tag to the current release tag, and some Bugzilla integration to automatically generate release notes on-the-fly.
(also, for most internal-only documentation, we use MediaWiki, which is also a great way to collaborate.)
We use OnTime. It was originally only used for defect tracking, but we've started using it to track features as well. These can be used to document the feature as it evolves during development. Features can be grouped together into sprints or releases, and time can be tracked against each feature. If you are using SCRUM, you can also plot burn-down charts for each sprint. It also has wiki functionality.