WWWJDIC for Android 2.1 Released

The newest release is now live in the Android Market. The highlights of this version are improved Japanese text-to-speech (TTS) and Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich, ICS) support.

Version 2.0 introduced Japanese TTS support using the free N2 TTS speech engine, but apparently (and unfortunately) it is not available from the Android Market outside of Japan. In 2.1 I've added support for two other major Japanese TTS engines: SVOX Japanese and AquesTalk TTS. You can now switch the Japanese TTS engine in the Settings screen, check out the screenshot below. The app doesn't check if the engine is actually installed, so you should install the relevant TTS package before changing the setting (if you select an engine that is not available, Japanese TTS support will be disabled throughout the app). Another improvement in this release: the settings screen is now using an action bar, courtesy of ActionBarSherlock v3.4.0.


Unfortunately, an API to list available TTS engines was only added in ICS, so currently there is no way to automatically find installed engines that support Japanese. If you think the engine you are using should be supported, drop me a line.

Another often requested feature is TTS support for example sentences. This is now available, just press the speaker button on the action bar:


The recently announced Android 4.0, a.k.a Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), brings a lot of features previously available only on tablets to handsets as well. The most visible change is, of course, the redesigned UI, including native action bar support and slimmer tabs. WWWJDIC now follows the ICS display style of action bar on top of tabs in portrait mode, and has been optimized to look nice on ICS. More work on this will be done when I get an actual ICS device. Here's how the main screen looks when running on ICS:



And one last thing: not to blow my own horn, but WWWJDIC for Android 2.0 was voted best Honeycomb-compatible app on the recent Android Developers Lab follow-up event at Google Tokyo. Among other things, this means I get to go to Goole I/O next year :)

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