SC Voice – the road to v1

Wait! What? A freebie! YAY!!!

Thank you!

Love the Release Plan cleanup. The red X’s were depressing. Onwards!

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What red Xs? Can’t see anything here? Happy coding. :slight_smile:

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The filled icons are somewhat annoyingly prominent in the sense of a shout in a quiet room.

02%20AM

Is the following acceptable?

25%20AM

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I see what you mean and agree that the second ones are nicer.

What is not entirely clear to me: What is the first button for? And the third as well?—The second looks like “play”, the fourth like “download”, that seems clear.

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Aminah had this wonderful idea of removing the two existing speaker icons and replacing them with the single “comment” icon on the left. Clicking this will play both the Pali and the English quote. We realized that it is the Pali that folks would wish to hear repeatedly rather than the English. Therefore, deleting the English speaker icon is acceptible. Interestingly, the English speaker icon was never selectable with the TAB key–it was only there for sighted users. With Aminah’s simplification, the two experiences of sighted/assisted are now fully aligned.

Aminah also had the insight to suggest that this icon might also serve for voicing the meta-commentary of a sutta, i.e., the “blurb”. I will implement that part of her design next week.

Aminah did wish to distinguish the speaking of a quote as shown above from the speaking of the blurb. The difference is that the quote is scriptural while the blurb is abhidhammic. She wished to use the outline form of the dotted comment bubble (see first picture), but that was technically difficult because Google has not provided easy support for their outline icons. There are therefore a limited number of outline icons available for our use and you will see this comment bubble also in single suttas for playing the blurb.

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I’m not entirely sure what you are talking about, or whether we are on the same page.

When playing a sutta, this is how it looks on my screen:

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Oh. You are quite right. The picture you posted is of the Sutta Player.

The picture I posted is a blowup from:

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I see! Thank you very much for explaining!

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@karl_lew as always, we stand in awe of what you have accomplished.

Jan 19 will be fine for a V1 launch, but I would not like to see it any later. At the moment it looks like we will keep working with our team at STX until the end of the month. So Jan 19 gives us time to add Voice to the main app and test it. But any later will be getting pretty thin!

So if you need to move any features to 1.1, please go ahead.

And there’s a whole bunch more since then. I will ensure that Blake has pushed the latest versions to Git, then let you know.

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Thank you Bhante for the heads up. Aminah has kindly smoothed out my life, removing all obstacles for Jan 19. We shall not be late!

If Blake could post latest versions to git by Jan 18, that would suffice. I would like 24 hours to process the new content, and 24 hours gives me a buffer independent of time zones.

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Okay, we’ll make sure that happens.

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Aminah, I realize belatedly that we hadn’t completed our discussion of the new icon design for the sutta view (vs. the search results view). Because of the deadline, I’m implementing a compact version of your sketch:

  • I’ve omitted your suggested “listen to blurb” chat icon for now since I’ve realized that the screenread will actually read the blurb in section 1. Adding the chat icon would be redundant, but let’s revisit in v1.1.
  • There was no ellipsis “…” icon, so I arbitrarily chose the folder icon just to see if that might work for you. I will actually hide that icon for v1.0 since we haven’t worked out the “Other Resources” interaction.
  • I really like your idea of lending more prominence to Other Resources. You’ve suggested a modal dialog for that. That will work, although I have some hesitancy to use a “Settings” component for navigation. I haven’t thought about this deeply in the rush to v1.0, so I’ll be omitting the Other Resources icon until we can talk freely with less urgency.
  • I’ve left the section Play buttons in. They seem to be of value, although I don’t use them much given the SuttaPlayer.
  • I’ve noticed that the existing SCV doesn’t speak sutta acronyms well, so I fixed that for v1.0
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@Blake, I will be updating content from SuttaCentral starting now. This will provide a steady barrage of requests. If this is a problem let me know and I shall stop the batch job.
This will take a few minutes…

Update completed. No changes. I will repeat this on Friday as part of SCV release of v1.0.

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:anjal:

Just to double check, you now have everything you need for release?

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Possibly not. There might be another content update in the next 16 hours (Bhante just made some corrections). I’ll re-run the content update tomorrow morning. Until then I’m in “code freeze” just testing.

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Blake just updated the git source, I am checking it now, unless there is some problem this will be the final update.

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Running final content update for v1.0. This will impact SC servers for about 20-30m…

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Hmm. No changes. I think we’ll have to revisit this in v1.1.
I still see the MN79 typo (Middles Discourses). My script pulls from the live SC site, not Github, so I’ll need to take a look at that code.

I’ll proceed with v1.0 release shortly after breakfast.

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Awesome!

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Release v1.0 of SuttaCentral Voice at UTC1605 (~10m) COMPLETED

Release v1.0 features Aminah’s redesign of the SuttaCentral Voice user interface. You will notice a cleaner, slimmer design that relies on icons. It’s so HARD to make things simple! Thank you, Aminah!

In v1.0 we also have downloadable play lists. For example, suppose you want to listen to two suttas. Both of the following will get you a downloadable playlist:

  • AN3.76-77
  • AN3.76, AN3.77

NOTE: If your downloads are long (e.g., DN33), you will experience timeouts. Simply retry. The timeouts will require a lot more work to resolve. Basically the solution will be to have pre-computed sound samples for everything and that’s a tall order. Right now we TTS on demand.

Also of interest is that preferences can now be stored in cookies. The new UI avoids those pesky cookie pop-ups, so you’ll have to set your cookie preference manually.

There’s a lot of new code in the new release. Please let us know of bugs, features, confusions, etc.

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