We are seeing a handful of users with a yahoo.com email domain.  The user names look “real”, but the email account doesn’t match the user name, or in any way look human-generated.  The registration responses are also “fishy”, in particular the “Android Device” prompt!

We are assuming this is part of some kind of hack or phishing exploit.

If you own one of these accounts, please make contact via email, or those accounts are going to be deleted, and you can re-register with something more suitable.  Or easier yet, edit your Account Profile, and update the “Android Device” prompt with a real device name!

Thanks for your understanding.

A minor update for Dictator.

• Correct an error in one of the Dutch (NL) strings (abbreviation for “seconds”).
• During Text-to-speech, you can use the Volume keys to cancel speech.  This is handy when you have the “extra” speech segments turned on!

Please bear with us while we make repairs to Dictator for the latest versions of Android.  We aren’t sure when this happened, but for sure it is in Android 5.x.

Mind you, it’s not just us, but every app that makes “non-trivial” use of the Speech Recognition subsystem.

They have made changes to the Speech Recognition system implementation, in a way that breaks Dictator.

Specifically, you cannot activate the Quick Keys to create or extend dictations after the first time, until you re-load the main screen.  If you are not using Quick Keys for activation, you may not have noticed any issues.

A visible artifact is the progress indicator appears to get “stuck on”.  It actually disappears then quickly reappears; this is part of the gankery.

We apologize to you, on behalf of the lame developers on the Speech Recognition subsystem.

You may know of the gPodder.org site, which among other things, has a web-based endpoint that returns OPML for searches and its own top list of feeds.  To do more with it, you must create an account.  With an account, you can manage a centralized feed list and sync it amongst your desktop and multiple other devices.

This is the main motivation for adding OPML support to Synder, so we can provide you with access to a great source of feed discovery!  We have gone so far as to pre-load those URLs into the Feed Farmer startup lists.

This is also the motivation for providing generated “Add Feed” and “Preview Feed” links into the content for OPML results.

The only downside so far is availability.  The search endpoint has been “down for maintenance” for several days.  Hopefully that doesn’t last too long.

We are happy to announce support for the Open Search extension SearchSuggestion.  This is also the same format consumed by browsers.  It is close enough to Atom/RSS that we shoehorned it in.  The only thing lacking is Separator element support.

We are proud to announce we have an Android 4 beta for our Exchange Web Service (EWS) client, eXchange My Contacts!

The best feature is now XMC is both a Contacts and Calendar sync provider.  This means 100% native app integration with both your Contacts and Calendar apps.

The user interface is getting revamped too.  The pre-existing Calendar screen is removed.  Everything else has been given the Fragment/Tab/Action Bar treatment.  Now you can access sync logs, folder search, etc. in one place.

Please join our Google Group if you wish to participate.  Note: this is a paid application, so you must purchase if you haven’t already done so.

We will be pushing a new Android 4 version of Feed Farmer to Beta, so please hop onto our Google Group so you can get an early preview!

Update

We have just pushed this to Google Play, so you can find it there now.

Highlights

Some of the changes include:

• Revamped to use the Action Bar and Fragment User Interface.
• Uses Android’s built-in Download Manager for all downloads.
• Control over whether to use Data Network for feed and attachment downloads.
• New per-item reading format tracks the read status of each item.
• Control over how often to download feeds and how many items to retain.
• New setting to add attachments but not automatically download them.
• Controlled browsing experience using multiple “layers” of browser windows, to navigate between feed items and Internet content independently.
• All Internet pages are scanned for feed discovery.

Watch for the Beta debut coming soon!

The gallery below contains some previews of the beta version, check out the first 6 images.

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We have just created a new Google Group for support, and to make it easy to participate in all of our Beta Software programs from one place:  here.  If you were joined to any of the previous (Google) groups, you should re-join the new one, as we will be deleting the other ones.

For your convenience, we added a new page to this site, with an IFRAME containing the Google Group.

If you found things down for a while, it was because we were busy updating things with the latest version of WordPress.

Everything should be back to normal.

If you want to participate in the Darts Scorecard Beta, just join the Google Group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/darts-scorecard.

Once you are joined, you can access the download link from your device at https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.escapellc.CricketScorecard.

You can go to the Gallery or our previous post for updated screens.

Thanks in Advance, and don’t miss out on your chance to provide us with valuable feedback!

Darts Scorecard Beta Changes

The first bit of welcomed news is full integration with the Android Action Bar, no more backward compatibility hacks!  We have also moved all of the separate screens (Scoresheet, Stats, etc.) into one screen, thanks to fragments.

The only bad news here is for older devices, they are not getting any updates, sorry.

Setup

There is now an opening setup screen with all the settings available at once.  The defaults are taken from the Settings the first time you open.  You also return to this screen after every Game Over.

Since you can access all the settings at once, the other modal dialogs are gone, and the associated clutter in the menu.

Gameplay

The first thing to notice is all the visual effects (i.e. gradients) are gone!  Everything uses a dark color scheme.

For all players, the game-level stat display has been moved to above the round display on portrait orientation.  You now get two rows of stats along the bottom edge.  For landscape orientation, similar tweaks but in the opposite direction.

For x01 players the Dartboard View UI has been enhanced with haptic feedback and sound effects, just like other system UI have.

For Cricket players we have inverted the chalks to go with the dark background.

Scoresheet

No changes here other than removal of visual effects.

Stats Gallery

No changes here other than removal of visual effects.