Thursday, February 20, 2014

Changing Android Text-to-Speech (TTS) Engine (and other hints)

Changing the Android Text-to-Speech (TTS) Engine step-by-step in three different Android versions, as well as pointing to some alternative TTS engines, are the objectives of this post. The main reason for creating it is to provide additional troubleshooting support for Wrkout users, who may be having issues with the speech feature present in the app.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Loading app/web page from Android intent when app is disabled

In Android, it's pretty easy to load a page from Facebook or Twitter or a similar one, from our very own app. By passing an intent with the request, the related app will automatically show up with the desired content. If the app is not installed we can detect that scenario so that, for instance, the browser starts up and loads the link for the wanted page. With Google+  it's even simpler, as we just need to pass the web URL. Android then selects if it should use the Google+ app or a browser (taking into account users' preferences).

However, what if the app is installed but has been disabled (for example through App Quarantine)?