Hi, everyone! Over the last few months, I have been working on improving some of my older Android apps that haven't aged as well as I would have hoped. While I was able to cover almost everything, there still was one app I needed to work on: SpeechLab. Some background informationI wouldn't say that SpeechLab has aged terribly, but it's not like it has aged super well either. You see, I released SpeechLab way back in the fall of 2019. Not only was that a long time ago, but it feels a lot longer given all that has happened in the mess of a year that is 2020. Anyway, this was at a time when I was still new to writing Android apps, so there were definitely some stupid decisions I made when writing SpeechLab because I didn't know better at the time. There were quite a few issues I had with SpeechLab. For one, the user interface felt clunky. Rather than using sliders for the volume and pitch of the artificial voice, I thought it would be a great idea to use pickers instead... I am just as confused as you are. Not only did this prevent fine-tuning of the voice in a major way, but it felt extremely clunky and messy. Thankfully, I have replaced the pickers with sliders, which I definitely should have been doing since the beginning. Of course, that wasn't the only thing I improved in this update. There were numerous bugs that needed fixing too. I also made a much better app icon! Put simply, I have made a ton of improvements: some major and some minor. What about the "...or two" thing?I released two updates for SpeechLab. The first one was the main update with all the added features and the new icon. The second one was essentially a bug fix update that made a few small improvements to the app that I forgot to do before releasing the first update. The conclusion...I probably should have updated SpeechLab sooner, but I'm glad I finally got around to it, even if I was a bit late. I must say, I've actually had a ton of fun working on these new updates for it! Anyway, I hope you like the new and improved SpeechLab. You can check it out here!  The new user interface! |
About a year ago, I reviewed the 2014 Mac mini on this blog. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that it was still an excellent machine for productivity tasks, but it could also handle some more intense things you threw at it. Thus, it became my daily driver up until I upgraded to a 2017 MacBook Air a few months ago. That being said, I’ve still been using it some, so I thought I’d briefly share how it’s holding up these days. Here are my thoughts on this miniature Macintosh one year later! Performance Over the last year, I’ve been impressed by how much this Mac can handle. It’s rocking a 2.6 GHz dual-core Core i5 with 8 GB of RAM and a Samsung 860 Evo 1 TB SATA SSD. What all that jargon essentially means is that it’s a moderately powerful little computer, although it certainly isn’t going to put newer Macs to shame. Regardless, I’ve been able to do lots of coding, video editing, and schoolwork on this computer, and it has generally worked pretty well. Granted, it can take a while...