AirDictate
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Avatron soldiers on with Air Sharing after removing Air Dictate
Avatron's Elliot Chase just shrugs when asked about Air Dictate, an app his company had to remove from the App Store after Apple discovered it made use of Siri that they didn't approve of. "There's no good news," he said while talking to us at Macworld | iWorld 2012. The main issue is over Air Dictate's interface. Instead of using the standard, tiny Siri button on the native keyboard, Avatron hid the keyboard and used its own button. Apple would rather it used the standard UI, however unfitting. "If we make some changes, they might put us back," says Chase. But outside of that issue, Avatron is continuing to update its popular Air Sharing and Air Display apps. In fact, the gang was showing off Air Sharing's beautiful new PDF viewer in San Francisco last week. It features an iBooks-style page flip and a scrubber for quickly scanning a document's pages. Chase said that many users are reading PDFs with the app, and his company saw an opportunity to create a better PDF viewer. The next update, which should be out soon, will add Egnyte to the list of cloud services that Air Sharing is compatible with. Avatron is also working on Air Display updates. An Android version is in development, as is a Mac update that will allow it to work on older versions of Mac OS X . The current version requires the latest version of the Mac OS, but Avatron will release a downloadable version on its website that will work with previous versions, so you can share a display screen with your iPad from nearly any OS X build. There's a beta available now, but the software should be finalized in the next month or so. Air Dictate was certainly a setback (Avatron even had the software's picture marked out on its booth at Macworld as "not available"), but it sounds like Avatron is keeping busy nevertheless.
Avatron retires Air Dictate tool for remote Siri dictation
Avatron is a company well known for their iOS and Mac utilities. We are particularly fond of their Air Sharing apps and Air Display, among others. They have a reputation for building solid, reliable products. I could sense the dismay in CEO Dave Howell's message when he pinged me today to let me know that Avatron would be pulling their Air Dictate app. In order to comply with App Store rules, Air Dictate used a little trick to hide the standard keyboard while offering one-button access to Siri dictation functions. This is distinct from the non-App Store-safe approach I wrote about on Thanksgiving. Howell explained, "What we did was to hide the keyboard and text field entirely. We did that by putting another view in front of the keyboard window. When you press our big Start Dictation button, we map that to a tap on the little microphone button. But how? There's no public method to change the location of a tap event to some other location. The solution to that was the clever part of Air Dictate. We actually changed the position of the keyboard window so that its mic button is directly under whatever point you tapped. Then we move it back again after the event has passed through. Same thing for the Done button." The app relied on interface assumptions that could possibly change without warning in future Apple updates, or could vary with international keyboard layouts. This caused a point of conflict with Apple review. "The cold hard fact is that every update of iOS is likely to break all of our apps for one reason or another," Howell said. "Sometimes new Apple bugs, sometimes intentional changes to their frameworks. You don't have to break any rules for your apps to be broken by an iOS update!" Apple further proposed that Avatron discard their custom interface, which was both eye-catching and streamlined, and ask users to locate and tap the microphone button directly. "Apple's suggestion was that we should throw away our custom interface (sacrificing its convenience for the blind and disabled, who would have trouble tapping the tiny mic button), and just throw up a standard keyboard. We don't want to do that so we're not planning to release any more updates to Air Dictate." RIP Air Dictate.
Air Dictate app brings Siri's voice control to Macs, makes you feel just a little more important
Well, this was probably inevitable. Given that we've already seen Siri respond to custom commands, replace your remote and adjust the temperature in your house, it shouldn't come as a surprise that someone, somewhere has figured out how to make her control Macs. That's what's going on with Air Dictate by Avatron, a new app that allows you to dictate memos and other Very Important Business so that it appears in your text editor, without you having to type it yourself. Once you download the $1 app, you'll need to visit Avatron's website, download the Air Dictate Receiver software for your Mac and make sure the two devices are connected to the same WiFi network. So far as we can tell, it should work with any application that accepts text input, though for now it's only compatible with Macs and the iPhone 4S (sorry, jailbreakers).
