I am writing an OS X application which uses NSSpeechSynthesizer to read text to the user and highlights the word it is reading in the text field (NSTextView). This is done by implementing the speechSynthesizer:willSpeakWord:ofString: method of the NSSpeechSynthesizerDelegate protocol. This method provides the range (NSRange) of the word it is about to speak which I forward to the setSelectedRange method of my NSTextView.
All is well until I stop the reading with the stopSpeaking method. If I set it to read again after this, the ranges provided by speechSynthesizer:willSpeakWord:ofString: seem to be out of sync. It seems that it hesitates calling speechSynthesizer:willSpeakWord:ofString: for a few seconds resulting in the ranges being somewhat behind the speech when it finally does.
I have written a simple application illustrating the issue, which can be found here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12516679/SpeechTest.zip
I hope that someone will look at this code (it really is simple) and either confirm that this indeed seems to be a bug, or (hopefully) tell me what I am doing wrong.
- UPDATE -
It turns out that the problem occurs with non-english voices. I was originally using Ida, which is a Danish voice. I have now tested it with many different voices and I can confirm that it works well with all English voices. However it fell out of sync with Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Dutch. It probably affects other languages as well, but these are the ones I have tested so far.
Ok, I have found the source of the problem and a workaround. It has nothing to do with the language as such, but the fact that most non-English voices in OS X Lion are Nuance voices (made by Nuance Communications). I have confirmed this by testing with English Nuance voices and they indeed have the same problem. It looks like there is something wrong in the api for voices provided by Nuance.
I have created a workaround for the problem by instantiating a new NSSpeechSynthesizer object after the reading has been stopped. It’s not pretty but it works :)
It is a bug, but it has been solved in the update of the Nuance voices for Mountain Lion.
Related
I am kinda of a new user here and don't have enough reputation points to comment/ask on this question: IDE support for Hack Lang.
So, I am hoping that since the last entry provided by Themis Beris someone has been able to get PHPStorm working properly with Hack. I followed the 3 steps described in the post I mentioned, but still get compile-time errors on the classes I've written using Hack. <?hh is not recognized, for instance.
Any suggestions as to how to get PHPStorm playing nice with Hack?
I have no idea what Themis Beris is talking about on the linked question. (He seems to be saying something about PHPUnit, which is a completely separate issue.)
JetBrains has a feature request open for Hack support and last I heard was very actively working on it. But as of this writing (Feb 2015) it's not released yet.
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
I am trying to identify the point in time where code completion (autocomplete/intellisense/whatever) was first introduced in IDEs and would appreciate any pointers.
By code completion here I mean a feature within the editor that suggests methods or functions based on the code that was already typed, and I am interested in programming language related completions (not word processor style completion).
I remember seeing it in Visual Studio and Microsoft Office in the early-nineties, and I don't remember at what point it was introduced, or whether it was actually available in DOS-based IDEs like Turbo Pascal or Turbo C++. On a hunch, I would guess that this was probably introduced in Smalltalk.
For those wondering, I need this information for a research paper and wasn't able to find a credible answer online.
The first IDE that comes on my mind is the IDE of Visual Basic
The Wikipedia article on IntelliSense has a history section and indicates that the first use was in 1996.
VB, Smalltalk, Emacs, Think Pascal, Sun's Forte.
Maybe it worked in some of the early Xerox stuff who knows.
I am quite sure Turbo Pascal had some of these features, and that was even before Windows existed.
Turbo Pascal had auto-indent (woo!) but nothing you'd call auto-complete I don't think.
The first time I ever witnessed auto-complete was circa 1985. It was another pascal development system, with a strange name—maybe it was Alice—at any rate I think it was a woman's name. The editor did auto-indent, auto-completion of control structures (no more typing BEGIN and END), and even some form of syntax coloring. It might have been the first time I saw colors in a code editor.
The screen was stunning! Bland code was suddenly vibrant.
Alas, the product disappeared pretty quick. It was real buggy and drove everybody nuts. It seemed like nothing like it showed up until many years after that.
Edit: It was indeed called Alice, by Looking Glass Software, and I found some info on it here.
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I know and have Xcode, but I was wondering if there were any other complete development environments that support Objective-C? I'm not looking for solutions with vim or emacs, nor editors like BBEdit that support syntax highlighting, but a full fledged IDE with:
code completion
compilation
debugging
refactoring
Extra points for being cross platform, supporting vi key bindings and supporting other languages.
Note:
I've updated and accepted my answer below as Jetbrains has released Early Access for AppCode, their new Objective-C IDE. Since this has been a fairly popular question, I thought it worthwhile to update the information.
I recently learned that Jetbrains the make of my favorite IDE (Idea) may support Objective-C (though it is unclear how much it will work for iPhone/iPad development). See the thread here for early discussion on this.
In the last year or two, they have started adding additional language support both in their flagship IDE as well as specialized IDEs (for Ruby, Python, PHP). I guess this is just another step in the process. I for one would love to have another option other than XCode and I couldn't think of one that I'd love more.
This is obviously vaporware at the moment, but I think it is something to keep an eye on.
This is now a real product, albeit still in Early Access. See here for a the blog on this new product, which will give you pointers to check out the EAP.
UPDATE: AppCode has now been released and offers a true alternative to using Xcode for Objective-C and iPhone/iPad/Mac development. It does still rely on Interface Builder for layout and wiring of GUI components and uses the iOS simulator, but all coding, including a slew of refactorings, smart templating and static analysis, is available through App Code.
Textmate is an editor like BBEdit but it has the ability to run commands such as compilation, debugging, refactoring (though it will do so via XCode). It also has code completion.
In addition, you can write your own commands for Textmate that you can then run.
I have been searching for something like this that does NOT run on mac for quite a few months now. Unfortunately I think that due to the relative obscurity of the Objective-C language that nobody has ever bothered producing such a full featured IDE for it. Until now, and we only have Xcode.
Using JBuilder I fell in love with the auto-completion and displaying the function 'hints' on the screen while I type. I am that sort of person who remembers the 'ideas' better than the actual syntax and really benefits from knowing right then and there that the code I typed was correct, not having to find out a minute later at compile time. And then to have to try and figure out if I just misspelled something, or if I truly made a conceptual error due to a misunderstanding of proper use of the language. Code completion and hints have always saved time on this for me.
I know some people may look down on this and say the feature is unnecessary if you know what you're doing, but I never claimed to be better than anyone else.
I may have to just give up and try and get OS X running on my PC. Which doesnt bother me in the least, just the rebooting to go back and forth to windows. I've tried to run it virtualized under VMWare but XCode kept crashing :( That reminds me I am going to google 'leopard vmware' and see if any progress has been made in that area.
Another problem in designing a full code-completion system with objective C is that the syntax is a little more forgiving, I dont know the exact technical term (strongly typed?) it is much harder to say exactly what sort of object belongs in a certain parameter and ANY object can be sent ANY message whether it implements that function or not. So you can spell a function name wrong, but it doesnt necessarily mean you made a syntax error... maybe you mean to call a function of that OTHER name and you just want nothing to be done if the function is not implemented by your object.
That's what I would really like to see for Objective-C, is an IDE that once it notices you are sending a message to an object, it displays a list of methods and function definitions that the object is known to accept, and walks you through filling in the parameters.
I think you would waste less time by sticking with Xcode rather than looking for another IDE if you want to develop for the Mac (or iPhone).
Apple made a lot of effort to kill any competitor in that area to make sure any developer wanting to develop for the Mac platform use Xcode and only Xcode.
It might not be the best IDE but it does work well and it is the IDE developers at Apple are using. Somehow it does its job. The frameworks and the documentation are very well integrated.
I use TextMate a lot and also SubEthaEdit but they are not full IDE as you’ve described above.
Best Regards.
Check out JetBrains' new IDE called "App Code". It's still in the Early Access Program, but even with the Early Access bugs it is hands-down better than xcode 4. I've been using it for commercial iPhone and iPad development.
http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/
I would like to second Troy's answer and note that JetBrains has AppCode in early access, so you can try it for free. It has the familiar UI of their other products, and yes, it supports vi! So far it has been very good. I have run into a few issues, and a few vi-isms that don't work quite right, but it is still better than suffering with Xcode. I do text editing with syntax completion in AppCode, but switch back to XCode to get into the GUI builder which is actually quite good in Xcode.
If you are an old vi-guy like myself, it is invaluable.
The short answer is: No. There are thousands of IDEs but Xcode is the only one which you seriously can name IDE. I suggest you have a look at the tries of GNUStep (in form of Projectcenter, Gorm) and then you can imagine the state of affairs.
I believe KDevelop is the only full IDE that supports Obj-C, but I'm not even sure how fully it supports it, having never used it myself. Worth a shot, maybe.
There are a few programmers text editors that support Objective-C, but I like Editra, mainly because I also write Python on Windows\Nix and it has great features. Editra runs well on all platforms and has a nice plug-in that supports Mercurial, GIT, and Subversion if you need them. Another nice thing, its written in Python. Editra Home
Found another, though it sounds less than ideal:
ActiveDeveloper - doesn't appear to have active support (last update was in 2006). Mac only.
KDevelop sounds like it only supports Objective-C syntax and only through its C support. I'm going to check it out anyway.
Textmate has a couple screencasts for Objective-C (here and here). It is Mac only, but otherwise looks pretty good. It is hard to tell from the screencast how strong the integrated support is as it seems to just have a lot of scripts to handle the code. Also, I can't tell if it does true code completion or just expansion for snippets.
So it doesn't look like there is anything out there that hits everything. I'll probably do most of my development on Mac, so I'm thinking I'll try out TextMate with XCode to see if it is any better than straight XCode. I'll take a quick look at KDevelop.
Thanks.
Is it possible to access the iSight camera on a macbook programmatically? By this I mean I would like to be able to just grab still frames from the iSight camera on command and then do something with them. If so, is it only accessible using objective c, or could other languages be used as well?
You should check out the QTKit Capture documentation.
On Leopard, you can get at all of it over the RubyCocoa bridge:
require 'osx/cocoa'
OSX.require_framework("/System/Library/Frameworks/QTKit.framework")
OSX::QTCaptureDevice.inputDevices.each do |device|
puts device.localizedDisplayName
end
I don't have a Mac here, but there is some Documentation up here:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Hardware/Conceptual/iSightProgGuide/01introduction/chapter_1_section_1.html
It looks like you have to go through the QuickTime API. There is supposed to be a Sample Project called "MungGrab" which could be worth a look according to this thread.
If you poke around Apple's mailing lists you can find some code to do it in Java as well. Here's a simple example suitable for capturing individual frames, and here's a more complicated one that's fast enough to display live video.
There's a command line utility called isightcapture that does more or less what you want to do. You could probably get the code from the developer (his e-mail address is in the readme you get when you download the utility).
One thing that hasn't been mentioned so far is the IKPictureTaker, which is part of Image Kit. This will come up with the standard OS provided panel to take pictures though, with all the possible filter functionality etc. included. I'm not sure if that's what you want.
I suppose you can use it from other languages as well, considering there are things like cocoa bridges but I have no experience with them.
Googling also came up with another question on stackoverflow that seems to address this issue.
Aside from ObjC, you can use the PyObjC or RubyCocoa bindings to access it also. If you're not picky about which language, I'd say use Ruby, as PyObjC is horribly badly documented (even the official Apple page on it refers to the old version, not the one that came with OS X Leopard)
Quartz Composer is probably the easiest way to access it, and .quartz files can be embed in applications pretty easily (and the data piped out to ObjC or such)
Also, I suppose there should be an example or two of this in the /Developer/Examples/
From a related question which specifically asked the solution to be pythonic, you should give a try to motmot's camiface library from Andrew Straw. It also works with firewire cameras, but it works also with the isight, which is what you are looking for.
From the tutorial:
import motmot.cam_iface.cam_iface_ctypes as cam_iface
import numpy as np
mode_num = 0
device_num = 0
num_buffers = 32
cam = cam_iface.Camera(device_num,num_buffers,mode_num)
cam.start_camera()
frame = np.asarray(cam.grab_next_frame_blocking())
print 'grabbed frame with shape %s'%(frame.shape,)