In an email that has been circulated far and wide, Winston Chen, the developer of Voice Dream Reader, has discussed what will be coming in version 4 of the app on iOS. The new update, which has been submitted to Apple, contains support for 3D touch actions on the iPhone 6S and 6S plus, a new mode called Pac-Man reading mode, finger reading, and scanning. Scanning allows you to do a firm press on the fast forward button to double the speed of the reading voice. Releasing the 3D touch will return you to the speed you were at before performing the 3D touch. This is an iOS only update, there was no indication as to the state of development on the Android platform. The portion of the email describing the new features has been added below.
What's New in 4.0.0
A Beautiful New UI
Grid view and cover images in the library.
Improved library organization: filters, flags, and sort order. Visual appearance of the entire app uses the current color theme.
Experimental rich text and image support for all documents. Library Synchronization
Your entire library, including folders, reading locations, bookmarks and annotations are synchronized across all your devices using iCloud Drive.
New Reading Modes
Finger reading. For beginners to read by at running a finger under each word.
Pac-Man. Harvard and MIT developed speed-reading method for everyone to read at 2x speed with no loss of comprehension.
Sentence mode. Speech pauses at every sentence. Useful for beginning readers.
Repeat mode.
Option to rewind to beginning of the last sentence when you pause.
New Voices
Alex, free high quality voice in iOS 9.
New premium child voices from Acapela in US, UK, and Australian English, US Spanish, and German.
Acapela's new flagship German voice: Claudia.
Emotive variations of Jeroen, Antoine, Margaux, Dimitris and Will.
Other New Features
Set PDF margins to exclude text in header and footer.
Up to 4X speed for recorded audio.
Support for 3D Touch, split-screen multitasking and Spotlight search.
Safari extension to save Web pages and Web addresses.
Evernote file attachments.
Background download for files and voices.
More accurate language detection.
Option to hide header and footer in full-screen mode.
Category: News
Cool. Careful with the synchronization though. I have a lot of audio books loaded in there. If it tries to sync that across iCloud drive, well... that will be rather interesting to say the least.
darknexus Friday, 01-Apr-2016 08:00 AM ET:
It's out now. I updated last night. It took a while to upgrade my enormous library, but it went fine. Luckily, iCloud Drive sync is turned off by default. So far, the thing I'm liking most is the ability to use Alex to read my text files. Much appreciated.
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