Talking App KitVoice Activation

Talking App Kit Receives Significant Update – Available Now

By December 16, 2021 No Comments

 

Talking App Kit was created to help iPhone developers quickly install talking abilities into their apps. Now, Talking App Kit receives a significant update enhancing every part of the kit (downloadable now). This was a big efficiency update. The kit became smaller, lighter, faster, added more support, and works smoother than ever. The kit takes only one click to install, and one line to begin speaking and listening in your app. Give it a try.

 

 

What’s Been Updated

 

1) Forwards compatibility for the framework – Swift Library Evolution Support. Works with all Xcode versions.

No matter how many times Swift is updated, how often Xcode updates, we’ll never have to release a new re-compiled version. Our pre-compiled Swift frameworks contain interface translation files for future versions. This has been tested with Xcode 12 and 13. It works great. It was hard to achieve, because of so many requirements for evolution support to work. This is a new thing as of 2 years, so people are still afraid of distributing Swift code pre-compiled. We are pioneers on this front.

2) Device and Simulator support for the framework.

We have simulator support now! It runs on simulator, and as we’ve seen, talks too. Listening may work also. I’m not super concerned with testing this as operation on simulator is not critical. The main items here I wanted to address was the horrible error they’d see when Xcode automatically selects the simulator. They might have gotten stuck before.

3) Bitcode support.

This is a big one. This gives anyone using our kit the ability to achieve a MUCH smaller app size in the App Store once they submit their app. Instead of requiring our whole framework, Apple will smartly take only the slices necessary for the person downloading (AKA iPhone only, or iPad only). I’ve been eyeing it for a long time, but unable to achieve due to dependent frameworks (not ours, but namely Opus and Ogg which we use to stream audio). I’ve recompiled these old-timer frameworks using source into simulator/device builds which contain both and with bitcode support.

4) Clang & Swift optimization.

This is also big. I was able to turn on both types of optimization resulting in faster and smaller code in the end. This was not on before, because of Opus and Ogg. After recompiling these manually from source, I was able to gain optimization.

5) XCFramework style adopted.

This is Apple’s newest format, as of 2 years ago. This allows simulator and iPhone frameworks to be compiled inside the same package and any other platforms also. Therefore, we could add Apple TV support and still ship the same framework file. Everything in one umbrella. Apple also does smart things with this type of framework to optimize behind the scenes.

6) Beautiful documentation.

We now ship with our framework packaged inside Apple’s new auto-generated documentation (.doccarchive) only available on Xcode 13. It looks great.

7) Installer issues fixed, faster, and installer reporting.

We now get emails when anything goes wrong in the installer, even if they just click cancel we get an email with their computer name. On other errors, we get more information like their bundle identifier, app name, and more to help us diagnose instantly if there are ever problems.