Developing the User Experience of an application really depends, forgive the wordplay, on the experience you have with the application. It’s not uncommon to be lost at some UX decisions after looking at them again after some time, feeling them as a bottleneck instead of a facilitation.
Since I am not a sadist, I refactored various UI and UX parts of Spell, introducing many changes with this new release that brings the application to version 1.2.0.
For those of you that love vintage, you can find below the screenshot of the very first mock of the application captured 2 years ago, it was a long journey 😀
Changelog
- Reduced the application size by optimizing resources.
- Improved readibility the for the current character, above the player controls, with underline style.
- The mode sensitive to uppercase and lowercase is now the default option.
- Added dates and icon with counter for the changes log, using Ben Alman’s “isSemVer” script.
- Prevent crashes when the text is too long by limiting the operation to texts no longer than 500 characters.
- Speeded up operation by making the autoplay the default option.
- Improved feedback on content scroll by providing scrollbars, not supported by default on Android webView for sub – content.
- Improved application’s speed and reliability by disabling Hardware Acceleration at application level, causing slowness on Android KitKat and potentially blocking issues on Android JellyBean.
- Language select in settings now displays only entries available also in the current TTS engine, and is updated when internet connection availability is changed, to handle languages that are available only online.
- Improved navigation for unicode tables by splitting each interval into a separate view, with functionality “tap to listen”.
- Speech recognition button is disabled if device is offline, and reenabled when online again.
- Fixed bug for uppercase and lowercase mode accented letters in Spanish and German.
- Fixed bug of back button that was not working during TTS pronunciation due to event touchmove not triggered correctly.
- Fixed bug related to behavior of “next” button when the last character is reached.
- Fixed bug of wrong description in French and German for uppercase and lowercase mode.
