HelloTextToSpeech

Introduction

In today's session I will try to teach you how to add Text-to-speech support in your apps. What are we creating today? We will be creating a portable and light TextToSpeechManager class that will be easy to add to your projects. Ever since I held the public talk at the April Android Developer Meetup on this topic I wanted to do a follow up in a form of a blog. The full code source can be found on my github, feel free to fork it and play around with it. The slides from the presentation can be found here.

Text-To-Speech (TTS) also known as "speech synthesis" which enables your android device to "speak" the text that you give it. It supports a wide range of languages, but not all Android devices have them.

Anchorman

Extra, Extra, read all about it!

I would like to present to you Anchorman. My first personal Android project that I managed to finish. I don't know about you, but for me this took a lot of willpower, love, time, sweat and endurance to get to this point. A bit of advice for newbies at this point: First step is always the hardest and the scariest. At the same time, I am happy and grateful now I've made that step and learned a lot along the way. It will only get easier from now on. Enough about my rant, that is not what you are here for :)

What is Anchorman you ask? Anchorman is a Text-To-Speech news reader app. It delivers you the latest news on the go. For ease of use you have a variety of different news categories from GoogleNews. At the tip of your finger you have access to sports, tech, world, entertainment news and etc.

If that is too cool for you, you have an option of entering a custom URL of an article and anchorman will give its best to read it. Don't worry, you have the share link option, so you can share that article with all your friends and family, and also you can load that webpage to your phone's browser from the app.

Programming/Design in this project was done by yours truly and Graphic Design was done by a good friend of mine Vladimir Radovic 

I wanted this app to have a mascot and Vladimir kicked some booty and created this lovable character. Now when I think about it, we still haven't given him a name, so if you have any ideas in the meantime, use the comment section bellow.

This is a free version of the app, and I have a lot of ideas prepared for this project if it attracts enough interest.

You can download the app from the GooglePlay store at : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=markomarks.core.anchorman

If you have the time and will, download the app, take it for a spin, comment it and give it a 5-star rating *wink* *wink*.

Android: Fatal signal 11

Hello there guys,
Don't blink, this will be a quickie :)

I started panicking when I got this exception "Android Fatal signal 11 (SIGSEGV) at ... (code=1)" in the Eclipse environment.

The description in the LogCat is pretty vague and scary, and I lost a lot of time backtracking my steps. The solution to this problem for me was rather simple. The png image I have put in the project was too big.

I have used an image with a 3000x3000 resolution. In the IDE everything looked and behaved ok, but when you were loading it onto your device (my wrinkly Samsung Galaxy S II) it gave that exception.

Oh, and I didn't need an image that big, 96x96 was what I was going for, but stupid me forgot to re-size it. What is the resolution/memory threshold of an image? I don't know, but be wary when using big images in your projects.

Honestly, I would have never guessed that a simple image was the problem. I hope you found this useful and don't go through the torture I did.

Be careful crossing the street,
Until next time,

n-ary Tree structure: implementation and children insertion to a node

Hello and good day :)

Today I will be dealing with an interesting topic to me. N-ary trees. What I usually find on the web is related to binary trees and I was interested in n-ary tree for my own side project and decided to make my own implementation of it. If you don't like it or would like to tweak it just scream and shout in the comment section bellow and I will do something about it, maybe ;)

ImageButton animation

Heya guys and gals, it's me again.

We all love animations, right? Well I will show you a simple technique for creating a cool effect. Not to go too much into detail, this task is simple. On click of an image button start an animation. For those who don't know, to make an AnimationDrawable animation on android, you will need couple of things.

Drawable folders and drawable files

Howdy y'all, how is it going?

Try to plan your drawables ahead. Considering that android doesn't like sub folders in drawable folders, and because of the lowercase naming conventions you need to organize things or you will get lost.

If you plan on adding some animation (AnimationDrawable) to your application it can get out of hand. Every frame needs to be saved as a separate image in the drawable folder with all the other images.

To me, naming conventions of files helped a lot.


Hope this was somewhat helpful, Have a nice day

Update(1/23/2016) - After switching to Android Studio there is a neat gradle command to help you out. You can find more information about that at the following link

Text To Speech gender?

Hiya there, how are you today? After losing a lot of time trying to find out a way to get a male voice for the default android text-to-speech, I finally found a solution that will satisfy me. But for now :P. The only way I could accomplish gender change (for English languages only) in Android's Text-To- Speech API was using the 'setLanguage' method. Of course, there is a way with handling the pitch of the text-to-speech but the results are kinda nasty if you ask me.

Resource file names

Hi guys and galls,
Long time no write. Today we have a short one. The topic of choice is file names you include in your android applications. This will save you a couple of hours of headaches.

Just use lowercase lettering for file names and you won't get any mysterious errors in Eclipse IDE.