Hello everyone, overnight my Speech Central app updated to the latest version. Now it runs much slower, consumes a lot more battery, and I've noticed that the device heats up significantly during app usage. I have an iPhone 14 with the latest iOS system update. Additionally, since I use eSpeak NG as the text-to-speech synthesis, the app reads text with an English accent (my native language is Serbian), even though in the VoiceOver settings, I have configured it not to change the accent when reading another language. Because of all these issues, I am considering discontinuing the use of this app. I'm curious if you have experienced similar problems with the latest version of the Speech Central app, and what is your opinion on whether these issues might be resolved with a future update?
Comments
RE:
For the first thing, heating issue it is a known bug and it will be fixed as soon as Apple approves the new version. It has already approved the new version for the Mac that was submitted at the same time so it is reasonable to think that it is a matter of hours.
For the second thing, that is the Apple's issue. As you rightly noticed this is operating system function. At the moment Apple doesn't support that feature in its currently (and fairly recently) recommended user interface framework for new apps called SwiftUI. As such you can expect more and more apps to come with that problem until Apple fixes it. I suggest everyone who is interested in to write to Apple. Unfortunately this doesn't affect many people so I am not sure how much and how quick Apple will get interested in.
Finally I believe that this is a local sensibility of country where we both live in. If you get a free app and it works well for years and it doesn't work properly for a few hours people in "normal" countries (and that is 99% of the world) wouldn't go after such fairly strong expressions like this.
I'll post some more regarding the new version in a few days when I am 100% sure that everything works well for everyone and I get some writings/videos prepared.
New update
Just to confirm that the new update is now live.
@2
I'm sorry if my comment offended you in any way. I am grateful for your work and the existence of your application. In my comment, when I mentioned considering changing the app, it was done with the intention of seeking suggestions for similar apps for iOS devices. This update caught someone in the moments while preparing for a college exam. Just imagine what it means to struggle with using an app through which one reads literature for an exam that is in 2 days. I work in an IT company, and our software is not delivered to the client until it passes all testing phases. It's not about me belittling your work; on the contrary, I am truly thankful for it. However, the fact that I have the opportunity to use the app for free doesn't mean I shouldn't complain if something doesn't suit me. I wish you a lot of luck and success in your future work. Sorry for my bad english. English is not my native language and I hope that you can understand me.
RE:
First I would like to say that I am not looking for excuses for bugs - they should be avoided as much as possible and fixed as soon as possible.
As such I would like to admit one error as the app was planned to be released on 25th January and was planned only to pass the review by now and wait for some more testing for the final release. This worked as intended for the Mac's app (that I had to release manually after this mistake) and I am not sure what has happened with the iOS app and whether it is mine or Apple's fault that it went through the release.
I can't say for sure if everything worked as intended whether those problems would be identified and fixed, but there would be higher probability for that.
Either way this a completely new app written from scratch as the old app has used some technologies that couldn't be well maintained anymore. The app has been in work for a year and a half and tested for 2 months by nearly 500 beta testers, just certainly some code changed in the last few days wasn't as much tested as the code that was ready 2 months ago and some more testing was welcome.
But even with all of that, I can't take your claims regarding the software testing as valid. Either your company knows more than Apple which tends to have quite a few major bugs in major new releases, or you are just too young to make such a claim. There is no method that in 100% of cases prevents problems like this especially in projects of this scale.
@re
Bugs are a normal occurrence when a new application is launched, and that's okay. However, if I experience device overheating, slow performance, and similar issues, my friend encountered a situation where, after an update, all items from the "Books and Articles" section were deleted, and they are nowhere to be found in the application, neither in the archive nor in the recently deleted section. It is important to mention that both of us have iPhone 14, and it seemed logical to me that testing was not conducted under all conditions.
Regarding the company I work for and my claims: I work in a company that specializes in developing software for business solutions, and my role is a project manager. Our testing is not based on quantity (meaning we don't have 500 testers) but on quality (simulating all potential working conditions). I understand that for mass consumer applications (those used by a large number of people), testing is conducted based on quantity.
What I don't know anything about is the procedure for deploying an application on iOS and Mac platforms. Therefore, if the problem arose due to those factors, I have no problem apologizing, but I also assert that you have no right to be upset if I express my opinion about the application itself.
I will repeat once again: thank you for your work and effort; the previous version of the application was very useful for me. Regarding the current version, it would be good if it were faster, if there were no pauses between sentences when reading documents, and if the issue you explained, which is not your fault but related to the SwiftUI framework, could be resolved. Best of luck and success in your future work.
Explorting Books?
In earlier version I was able to export my books with contextual menu, now the option is missing. I have a collection of books that I need to store on my book reader and but Speech Central does not offer that option anymore. Is there any workaround for this?
RE:
OK, I believe that now all notable problems are resolved.
The first notable problem was that one small feature (context menus for headlines reader) introduced in the final days of development lead to a horrible performance decrease. Like that before that you could have a smooth experience on at least 10 hours long document not divided in the chapters. After this the threshold was at maybe just an hour or two, depending on the device and many other factors.
The second notable problem that on the iOS device rendering of generic icons have triggered some immense computation. As such most users weren't affected by this as majority of web pages, all PDFs and majority of ePubs have non-generic icons, and also if the items were ever just viewed in the list on the Mac the problem would disappear too. This immense computation would degrade performance, heat up the device and eventually result in the app termination by the operating system. The bad thing was that no one provided any clue regarding this so it took few days to figure it out. The good thing is that intensive thinking on what it might be has lead to significant unrelated performance and stability improvements that would take quite a time otherwise.
Regarding the database/storage transition problem, I guess that you know that transitioning the database is something that isn't easy. There are more than 100,000 users and very large part of them did transition on their device last week. Imagine if your company performed several dozens of thousands of transitions of complete databases. I don't think that you would say that it wouldn't fail a single time out of that. And on top of that my transition is executed on the device that has unstable app model which means that the app could be paused or even terminated for the trivial things like the user turning off the screen in that process. As such I am very proud to say that the number of problems of this type is still not above 10 (I think it is exactly 10 at the moment), so less than one in thousand of users. And for those users the old data is backed up and it isn't lost, some of them have successfully competed the process by now, for some of them it appears that likely their new storage file is corrupted, but that can be fixed too just fixing the problems while digging in the dark takes some time.
My only suggestion is that you shouldn't take that authoritative approach "I develop software" if you don't have enough knowledge in the particular field, as in my humble opinion average non technical user has better knowledge regarding the estimation of the nature of problems like this than someone whose knowledge was twisted by his particular field of work. As said it isn't hard to compare those reports to any other fundamental software upgrade reports and see that things like this do happen, actually it is more surprising if they don't happen.
RE: Exporting Books?
In the initial version there wasn't such a feature for several reasons - problems in development, consideration of alternative solutions, fairly low usage (not to the level that it should be removed as a feature just to the level that most people won't notice it missing).
I considered to use the export feature instead of previous share feature as that is similar and I could implement it easier. However based on the user feedback I came to the conclusion that using "share" is necessary.
Apple has introduced share to its latest framework that I use just as of iOS 16/macOS Ventura and it appears unnecessary hard to implement - most developers claim that it is even impossible and that there is some bug on Apple's side (but some claim that it is still possible but at some point I had to give up and leave it for later).
The alternative was to use legacy technologies - and that was super simple on iOS but very hard and likely impossible without some risky hacks on macOS.
So the current situation is that in the last week this was implemented on iOS using that legacy technologies. I am not sure what approach to take on macOS, but in some future it will be resolved either as the "export" function or if I figure out how to implement Share there (which would be preferable but as said might turn out to be impossible).