“I have listened to just about every synthesized voice available and ‘Amy’ and ‘Brian’ are the best by a mile. Computerized voices have in the past suffered from robotic delivery, uneven pitch and laughable pronunciation errors. These new IVONA voices suffer none of these problems. I can’t believe how natural they sound. They have significantly raised the bar in text to speech quality.” – Mark Gladding, Founder, Tumbywood Software.

To judge for yourself have a listen to this press release as narrated by Amy or Brian.

With Text2Go and the new IVONA voices you can convert ebooks, news and articles on the web to speech and listen to them on your iPod, iPhone or MP3 player while on the go. The advantage of text to speech is you can listen at times when reading is impossible, such as when driving, running or working out. Now you can pack more reading time into your day without sacrificing other activities.

Text2Go and one IVONA voice costs $US55. There is a free 30-day trial of Text2Go and the IVONA voices. They can be downloaded from http://www.text2go.com.

Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think of the new voices.

There is a tutorial on the Text2Go website that guides you through the process.

Changes since the beta include

• A faster text to speech process, resulting in quicker ebook to audiobook conversion.
• Support for DAISY text-only DTBooks.
• Improved ‘Split by Section’ command. It now recognises more variations of chapter headings.
• Support for ebooks containing drop-caps represented as an images.
• Correctly reports progress for ebooks with over 100 chapters.
• Now asks the user if they wish to share pronunciation corrections the first time they create a correction. Previously this was on by default.

You can download it directly here. Existing Text2Go users – make sure you uninstall your current version first.

I’d like to extend a special thanks to everyone who participated in the beta test and provided feedback. You input was invaluable.

Each worker spends on average 52.6 minutes commuting to and from work each day, with workers in London having the longest commute of 74.2 minutes per day. The research was undertaken by the union congress and published to coincide with the start of Work Wise UK’s Commute Smart Week.

One way to alleviate this problem according to TUC General Secretary Brendon Barber is for employers to offer flexible working arrangements.

 ”Remote working and flexible shifts can reduce commute times, save on office space and reduce energy costs – saving companies money and helping staff enjoy a better work life balance.”

This is a great suggestion for some jobs but for many, such as those in the service and retail industries, employees must keep regular hours and work from the premises. It’s still possible for an employee in this situation to vary their hours but it requires extending their day at either the start or end. For example, an employee could commute into work early and go to a gym located near their place of employment.

Another strategy is to turn your commuting time into productive time. At least this way the time spend behind the wheel is not a complete waste of time. This exact scenario was the inspiration behind Text2Go. I was spending over 90 minutes in the car every day and wanted to put this time to better use. As a software developer I needed to spend a lot of time learning new technologies. My solution was to create an application to turn articles, and news available on the web into speech and transfer it to my iPod. Now I could switch off the inane breakfast and drive radio shows and listen to information I found interesting and relevant to my profession.

Recently ebooks have been gaining in popularity. There is now a huge collection of top quality novels available on the web. Every genre is available and in fact due to the low cost of publishing on the web, you’re much more likely to find a genre specific to your tastes (now you can purchase those teen zombie romances  you love so much without being embarrassed at checkout time). Many ebooks are free and almost all are significantly cheaper than a paperback, often available for a couple of dollars – the price of a cup of coffee. Text2Go 4.0 has just been released and supports direct conversion of ebooks in the standard ePub format to audiobooks. Chapters from the original ebook are preserved in the audiobook, making navigation during playback easy.

There is an unlimited amount of information on the web, catering to all interests and professions. Now is the time to turn some of that wasted commuting time into productive or at least entertaining time. If you do this, I promise you, your commuting time will seem much shorter and you’ll arrive at your destination a lot less stressed and perhaps just a little more well informed.

For more tips on commuting see

15 Ways to Maintain Your Zen Calm on the Road

8 Ways to iPod your car – from ultra-cheap to ultra-sophisticated

You can download it directly using this link Text2Go 4.0 Beta. If you already have a previous version of Text2Go installed, make sure you uninstall this first.

The beta version is quite stable and I encourage you to give it a try. Having said that, if you do find any bugs, please use the Support… command within Text2Go to let us know.

The major new feature is ebook to audiobook conversion. Text2Go reads ebooks in the open ebook format know as ePub (.epub), html (.htm or .html) and plain text files (.txt). The ePub format is preferred. If you have an iPod, Text2Go will create an audiobook complete with chapter marks. If you have another MP3 player, Text2Go will create one MP3 file per chapter and name them so they will appear in the correct order.

There is a tutorial on the Text2Go website that guides you through the process.

Here are a few sources of ebooks to get you started.

• Smashwords, a great source of contemporary works by independent authors
• epubbooks.com, a nice selection of free, public domain classics in the ePub format.
• Project Gutenberg, the original, most extensive source of public domain classics.
• Finding Free eBooks, free ebooks from all over the web.
• eBooks Just Published, my own site announcing reasonably priced and free ebooks.

 This new version includes the following minor enhancements.

• Improved hotkey support. You can now define hotkeys for commands that work in Internet Explorer, such as  Add Text, Speak Selected Text, Text2Go, Check Pronunciation, etc.
• Support for larger audio files. Text2Go was previously limited to producing audio files up to 2GB in size. This was a limitation of the Microsoft .wav audio file used as a temporary file during text to speech. Text2Go will now save speech directly to an MP3 file, avoiding this limit. A side benefit is that outputing MP3 files is now faster as there is not need to convert from a .wav file to an MP3 file.
• A number of minor bug fixes.

Let me know what you think.

Hotkeys can be configured by going to Options… and selecting the Hotkeys tab.

To add a hotkey, select a command from the list, click in the text box where it says Press hotkeys, and hold down the key combination you want to assign to the command. When you’re happy with the key combination, click the Assign button to assign it to the command.

The Text2Go toolbar has been enhanced to include controls to skip forward and back a sentence or paragraph. These additional controls only appear when text is being spoken.

Skipping back a sentence or paragraph is a little tricky. If you’re more than 2 seconds into a sentence or paragraph, Text2Go will take you back to the start of the current sentence or paragraph. If you’re less than 2 seconds into  a sentence or paragraph, Text2Go will take you to the start of the previous sentence or paragraph. This works in much the same way as music players work when skipping back a track.

If you’re wondering whether Text2Go is compatible with Windows 7, I’m happy to report the answer is a definite yes! I’ve been running Text2Go without problem on Windows 7 64-bit since the release candidate. I didn’t have to make any changes to Text2Go to support Windows 7. Text2Go already supported Windows Vista and there aren’t a huge amount of architectural changes between Windows Vista and Windows 7. This means that just about all software than runs on Windows Vista will run on Windows 7. I’m really loving using Windows 7. Microsoft really have got it right this time.

• Must not be hardware-locked. I didn’t want a support call every time someone upgraded their PC and they needed a new license issued for their new hardware.
• Must be simple to activate a license. Entering a 32 character alpha-numeric license key always seemed very tedious and error prone.
• The license should contain some personal information, such as the customer name and address. This would hopefully discourage customers from ’sharing’ their license with others if it could easily be traced back to them.
• Must be a .NET solution as my app is written in C#.
• Being a microISV, the license system must be reasonably priced.

After lots of research I found the perfect solution in .Net Reactor. Instead of using license keys, it used a license file. You could embed all sorts of arbitrary customer information in the license file which could be extracted and displayed in your application. Not only did .Net Reactor provide a licensing system, including support for trial periods, but it also offered quite sophisticated code obfuscation and protection. It was a complete solution and it was very reasonably priced at ~$200.

In order to embed customer information into a license file, the license file had to be generated at the time of purchase. It’s obviously not possible to pre-generate licenses if each needs to contain personal information. This meant some sort of integration with the payment processor was required. Luckily .Net Reactor provides a license generator for ShareIT. As soon as an order is processed, ShareIT runs the license generator to create a personalized licensed file, which is then emailed to the customer.

Choosing the .Net Reactor licensing system meant that it made sense to choose ShareIT as a payment processor. I was quite happy to do this. Their fees were reasonable and they provided all the features I needed.

Now you may be thinking that this is a very neat solution that ticks all the boxes. For a while I believed this to be the case to. Customers purchased Text2Go and their personalized license file was emailed to them automatically. They didn’t need to enter a long license key. Instead they only needed to save the attached license file into the same directory as my application and restart it.

What could be simpler than that? Well a lot of things it turns out, including entering a 32 character alpha-numeric license key.

Early Signs There’s a Problem

I started to get the odd email from customers who couldn’t work out how to license Text2Go. Initially I just sent them a short email explaining exactly what to do and this fixed their problem.

At the time I assumed the customer simply didn’t bother to read the instructions they received in their license email. One of the problems was that although ShareIT allows you to customise the license email sent to the customer (i.e. so you can include clear instructions on how to license your application), they insist on including a huge amount of their own legal jargon both before and after the customisable section. This means the email sent to the customer ends up looking like the fine print for an insurance contract. I don’t blame anyone for taking one look at it and thinking I’m not going to read this.

I contacted ShareIT and asked if it was possible to fully customise the licensing email sent to customers. Their response was a flat no. They didn’t even promise to consider it as a future enhancement. What annoys me is that every few months they send out an email announcing new enhancements they’ve made to their system. All they ever announce are new, sleazy ways to upsell worthless services or better ways to manage affiliates. Nothing that ever improves the experience for the customer.

I should have switched payment processors at this point but because the .Net Reactor license key generator only worked with ShareIT I was effectively locked  in. I still believed saving a license file to a folder was easier than entering a registration key.

I’m embarrassed to say this sad situation continued for a couple of years. It wasn’t causing me enough pain to justify completely redoing my licensing system and switching payment processors.

The Final Straw

Eventually there were three incidents that made me realize enough is enough. The first was a customer who just could not work out how to save their license file into my application folder. In the end I arranged a time and connected to his PC using the remote desktop application Copilot and licensed it for him. He was very grateful for the personal service but it was a unnecessary waste of both our time.

It was at this point I realised that some people don’t understand what an attachment is and how to save it to a location on their hard drive. Some would try to open it and then their PC would complain that it couldn’t find the associated program for this type of document (the license file had a .license extension). Matters were made worse by the increasing popularity of web mail clients and their less than friendly handling of attached files.

The second incident occurred during a recent Bits Du Jour sale. I sold a lot of licenses during this period but also had a corresponding increase in support emails from new customers asking how to frickin’ activate their license. This clearly illustrated that not only was there a useability problem but as my sales increased there would be a corresponding increase in support requests. My current solution was not going to scale.

If this wasn’t enough evidence that something needed to be done, I received two emails from a frustrated customer. They were both received on the same day and sent to different email accounts. It’s always a good indicator a customer is pissed when they send multiple emails to different accounts in a short space of time. This is doubly true when each email is uniquely worded. Copy and paste is not nearly as satisfying when you’re venting your frustration.

There’s a temptation to focus on ways to attract new customers rather than improving the experience for existing users. It’s also very easy to adopt an attitude that a certain section of your users will be ‘technically challenged’ and they’ll always have problems. It’s their problem, not yours. I have to admit that in this instance I’ve been guilty of both crimes.

Once I made the decision to overhaul my licensing system, I decided to rebuild it from ground up. The overriding goal was to make it incredibly simple to license Text2Go. In fact, I felt so guilty for the needless frustration I’d inflicted on a significant percentage of my users, I not only wanted it to be incredibly simple, I also wanted it to leave the customer with a warm, fuzzy feeling. They deserve nothing less. They’ve just paid me real money.

Here is the set of requirements my new licensing system must meet.

• A simple license key based system
• Use pre-generated keys. This doesn’t mean anything to the end user but it does mean I’m now free to choose any payment processor. No more vendor lock-in. I can choose a payment processing company that provides the best experience for the customer.
• Provide a simple means for the customer to license Text2Go without needing to enter the license key.
• Don’t require a restart of Text2Go.

The New Licensing Solution

I’ve kept .Net Reactor to do my code obfuscation and protection. I’ve just turned off its licensing system and replaced it with the Infralution licensing system. I’d heard very good reports about this system and haven’t been disappointed. In addition to the key based licensing system, it also includes code to run a time-based trial period for your software. You get the C# source code for the licensing technology that you need to embed in your application. This means you don’t need to ship yet another DLL.

It also includes a sophisticated License Tracker application that allows you to track sales and customers. As its name suggests its main purpose is to keep track of each customer’s license key. It has a powerful import feature that can import sales data from all the leading payment processors, including ShareIT. It can also import sales information from emails in Outlook.

This tool means I can always reissue the same license key to a customer, should they lose their key. It also means I can trace a license key back to an individual customer, in case  it appears ‘in the wild’.

The changes I’ve made to Text2Go have been relatively small. I’ve added a ‘Register…’ menu command and an associated dialog box that allows the user to enter a license key.

When the user enters a valid license key I do a couple of things to demonstrate my appreciation and hopefully leave the customer with a good feeling about purchasing Text2Go.

I display a thank you message, along with a picture of a rose. I also play a very short set of musical notes, similar in some ways to the Windows startup sound or a powerup sound effect in a game.

Small things I know but I hope it leaves the customer with a positive feeling.

One of my goals was to provide a way for the customer to avoid having to manually enter a license key. For sophisticated users this is no major burden. They just copy the license key from their purchase email and paste it into the licensing dialog.

For less sophisticated users I can see two problems with this. The first is that some people will have trouble finding the ‘Register…’ command. Like looking for the tomato sauce bottle in the pantry, sometimes you just can’t see something even when it’s right in front of you.

The second problem is some people will have no idea how to do a copy and paste. They’ll have to manually enter each character. It will be tedious and error prone but unlike the licensing file, they will eventually manage it.

Painless License Key Registration

I’ve come up with a rather neat solution that will register Text2Go simply by clicking on a URL in the purchase email. No hunting for the registration dialog or entering a registration key.

In the last major release of Text2Go I built in a very simple web server. This was added to provide integration with all the major web browsers. What it allows me to do is issue a command to Text2Go through any web browser’s address bar. People have talked about the address bar being the new command line. This is quite literally the case for Text2Go.

For example, to register Text2Go I use a URL in the following form.

http://localhost:61061/register?key=xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx

You can see that 61061 is the port Text2Go listens on, register is the command and it has a single key argument.

When the user clicks this link, their browser is started which will in turn send the request to Text2Go. Text2Go will validate the supplied key argument. If it’s valid, Text2Go is registered. The same registration sound is played but instead of the thank you message being display in a dialog box it’s returned as a web page. It the key is invalid, then the returned web page states this fact.

If anyone’s interested in using this technique for their own application, you may want to read the article I wrote for Code Project.

Resetting a 30-day Trial

Anyone who provides a 30 day trial for their software will know they get the occasional request to extend the trial beyond the initial 30 day trial period. This is almost never because someone’s trying to game the system. Instead it’s most often because someone has downloaded and installed your application, tried it for a couple of seconds and then got distracted. It’s not until a month later that they get some time to get back to it and give it another try. Unfortunately by this time, their 30-day trial has expired. It’s at this point you will get an email asking for an extension to their trial.

The Infralution licensing system provides a method to reset the trial period. The trick is working out a way of calling this method. You can’t just add a Reset Trial button to you UI or everyone will use it to extend their free trial period indefinitely.

I want to be able to send the customer a URL they can click to reset their trial period. However I can’t allow this URL to be used over and over to extend a customer’s trial. Therefore what I do is pass today’s date as part of the URL. When Text2Go receives the request it checks the date supplied is either today’s date or has occurred within the last 7 days and will only reset the trial if it falls within this period. This gives the customer one week to reset their trial period. After that time, the URL will no longer work. The date passed as part of the URL needs to be encrypted in some way. Otherwise the customer could easily change the date, once again giving them a way of indefinitely extending their free trial period.

To achieve this I wrote a very simple program that combines a date with a secret password and generates an MD5 hash.

It’s this hash that is passed to Text2Go. Text2Go also knows the secret password. It performs the same calculation, combining a date with the password to generate a hash code. If the two MD5 hash codes match, then it must be valid and the trial period can be reset. If it doesn’t match, it generates a hash for the previous day and checks again. It will do this for up to 7 days. Note that because MD5 is a one-way hash, it’s not possible to extract the actual date. All that can be done is to try to reproduce the hash code by trying a number of different dates. This is perfect for our situation as we only ever need to try 7 dates.

One of the other problems I had was what to do with existing customers. They are all using a version of Text2Go that uses the old file-based licensing technology. I didn’t want to support two licensing mechanisms so I decided to migrate them to the new licensing system.

This meant generating a license key for each customer and mailing them their key. Due to the number of existing customers, this needed to be automated.

The License Tracker application has a very powerful feature for importing customer and sales data from payment processors, such as ShareIT. I can export my sales data from ShareIT as an XML report and then import it into License Tracker. However none of these orders will have license keys assigned to them, as I was using the file-based licensing system at the time the orders were generated.

I needed a way of assigning a license key to each order before importing it into License Tracker. To do this I created a simple application that would take a list of license keys, scan the XML sales report and assign a license key to each order. Now when the sales data was imported into License Tracker, each order had an Infralution license key assigned to it.

I then wrote a second application that would scan the XML sales report (that now included license keys) and for each customer, extract their name, email address and license key and send them an email containing their license key. They could use this key to relicense Text2Go when they upgraded to the new version.

Finally Free to Switch Payment Processors

Once I’d switched to pre-generated keys I was free to switch payment processors. I have changed to FastSpring and couldn’t be happier. Their system allows a fully customisable email to be sent to purchasers. Now I can send just the instructions needed to license Text2Go, which are now not much more than ‘click this link and you’re done’. Their order page customisation is also very flexible, although I don’t really make full use of this as I have my own shopping cart page and just jump directly to the FastSpring checkout page.

The FastSpring administrators’ interface is a joy to use. It has a gorgeous web 2.0 look and more importantly is very responsive. It’s layout is all very logical and it has really useful context sensitive help on each page. I found this was more than adequate and didn’t have to read through their user manual at all.

FastSpring prides themselves on great support and that’s definitely been my experience. Their staff are all very knowledgeable and they respond within a few hours, even on weekends.

Lessons Learnt

In summary, here are some of the lessons I’ve learnt.

• Keep your licensing system as simple as possible. It only needs to be sophisticated enough to keep honest people honest.
• Be very careful when choosing any solution that locks you into a single vendor. Work out how much effort/pain it’s going to cause you to get out.
• Work to keep your existing customers happy rather than always trying to win new customers.
• Continually work on improving useability and removing confusing areas of your application, including areas that only affect a small percentage of your user base.

The first problem I ran into was where had they moved the text to speech options. There’s no longer a Text to Speech applet in the Control Panel. If you view the Control Panel by Category you have to first click on the Ease of Access category.

Then you need to select Ease of Access Centre.

You’re then presented with the following confusing dialog, ironically titled Make your computer easier to use.

You need to select Use the computer without a display.

Now click on Set up Text to Speech.

This is the same familiar dialog that’s been around since Windows XP. No changes here and unfortunately it’s now been buried in the most obscure location.

Now there is a quicker way to access the Text to Speech settings dialog but it’s even less intuitive than the above, if that’s possible.

First you will need to switch your Control Panel view from Category to Large icons or Small icons. Then click on the Speech Recognition applet – yes I know speech recognition is the opposite to text to speech, bare with me.

You can see in the left column there is a Text to Speech link, kindly included for wayward travellers. This will bring up the text to speech options. It’s much quicker to access but so unintuitive, you’ll have a hard time remembering it.

Microsoft really need to bring back the Text to Speech applet and display it in the Control Panel when viewing by Large or Small icons. Here’s hoping they add this back in before the final release of Windows 7.

I was also hoping that they would have included a male voice as well as the female voice, Microsoft Anna, that comes with Vista. Many people have complained that they lost the male voice, Microsoft Sam, when moving from XP to Vista, even though Microsoft Anna sounds a lot better than Microsoft Sam. Microsoft, I hope you’re listening.

The first thing I did was upgrade the RAM from 1 to 2 GB. The RAM is very cheap (it cost me AU$70, although I hear you can buy it for around $20 in the US) and the upgrade is simplicity in itself. See this excellent guide for details.

I downloaded Windows 7 RC 1 as soon as it was available to MSDN subscribers. I burnt the ISO image to DVD and then copied the installation files across my home network to the second partition on my EeePC’s hard drive. As the EeePC doesn’t have an optical drive, I wasn’t sure if it would be able to successfully install directly from the DVD drive mounted across  the network. I feared it would reboot during the installation and then discover it didn’t have the right network driver and no longer be able to access the installation DVD, In the end I think this was unnecessary as the installation first copies all the necessary files to the hard disk anyway.

I can’t comment too much about the installation process itself. I set it running and then went away and did something else. I’m not sure how long it took but when I returned it had finished and there were no problems. It had all the necessary drivers for my EeePC.

The most pleasant surprise I noticed was that Windows 7 was using the Aero interface. When Vista first came out there was a lot of talk around how everyone would need to upgrade their graphics cards in order to run Aero. Netbooks are not known for their powerful graphics processors and the EeePC is no exception. Not only does Windows 7 default to Aero on my EeePC, it runs like a dream. Everything feels very snappy and all the effects, such as fades and zooms are silky smooth. Gone are the piecemeal window repaints that were so common in XP and previous versions of Windows.

The most obvious change is the enhanced task bar at the bottom of the screen. It’s double the standard height (although you can change it to use small icons), allowing much larger application icons to be displayed. This has allowed Microsoft to cleverly combine quick launch icons and running applications. A running application now appears on the task bar as single, shiny icon. If you’ve pinned the application icon to the task bar permanently (equivalent to adding the application to the quick launch bar), then when you run the application, Windows simply highlights the pinned icon. Hover over the icon and a thumbnail preview of the window is displayed. If the application has multiple windows or tabs, then multiple thumbnails are displayed. This works so well that I never want to go back to the old taskbar.

Windows 7 comes with a number of desktop themes. I noticed that there was even an Australia theme. The Australian theme has a number of stunning wallpaper images, which it seems to cycle through at regular intervals. I’m not sure whether these images ship with Windows 7 or are being downloaded from Microsoft in the background. Either way, they look brilliant.

The nice thing about Windows 7 is that any application that is compatible with Vista is most likely also compatible with Windows 7. All the major architectural changes happened in Vista. Windows 7 is more about refining an existing platform to make it easier to use, faster and much better looking.

To date I’ve installed

• Office 2007
• Visual Studio 2008
• Expression Web
• Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0
• iTunes
• Firefox
• Google Chrome
• Opera
• Safari
• Snagit
• Audacity
• Text2Go

All applications run flawlessly. I thought I might have trouble with the oldest application, Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 but it seems fine. Windows 7 did block the installation of an old media driver during its installation but this is most likely a good thing rather than bad.

While talking about application compatibility I should mention that Windows 7 RC1 seems to be very stable. The only problem I’ve had to date is that after it comes out of Standby while plugged into my home network, it seems not to be able to find the network again and requires a restart. This is certainly something I can live with.

Windows 7 RC1 has won me over. That fact that it runs so nicely on my netbook means I’ll have no hesitation in using it for my new desktop PC that I hope to buy in the next month or two. Finally I can move off Windows XP. I won’t be looking back, except to remember that XP has been such a solid workhorse for so many years, too many in fact.

Windows 7 RC1 is now available as a free download from Microsoft at least until the end of June. It’s the Ultimate version which includes goodies such as Media Centre. It’s free to use for a year,  after which time you’ll be able to purchase it and upgrade to the final release.

This is possibly the best marketing move Microsoft have made in years. It’s the ultimate free trial period. No one likes to reinstall their OS and applications from scratch. After using the OS for a year, you’re likely to have collected a huge number of applications and configured each to your own needs, making a reinstallation a very onerous task. Most people will likely just pay for a license to save them the hassle. It will be interesting to see if they’ll be forced to buy an Ultimate license of can downgrade it to one of the Business or Home editions? I would like to see Microsoft reward early adopters by allowing them to buy the cheapest Windows 7 license and still retain all the Ultimate functionality.

Windows 7 RC1 is also likely to find its way onto the PC’s of the most influential members of the community – the early adopters, developers, IT journalists and bloggers. The fact that it’s the best Microsoft OS ever, a big step up from Vista and a huge step up from XP is only going to win lots of friends and advocates.

It will be interesting to see if PC resellers start offering Windows 7 RC1 as an option when buying a new PC. I wonder if Microsoft would encourage or discourage this? Given that resellers are no longer forced to sell an OEM version of Windows with every new PC, I don’t see why they couldn’t. The only thing that may stop this being common practice is the fact Microsoft have placed a time limit on how long Windows RC1 will be available for download and activation. This may even prompt a rush of new PC sales before the end of June so that people can run Windows 7 RC1.

• Support for Internet Explorer 8. Text2Go has it’s own accelerator that can be added to IE8. If you still using IE7 or heaven forbid, IE6, then upgrade to IE8 immediately! IE8 is a huge advance over IE7 and a pleasure to use.
  
• Support for all major browsers, including Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari (for Windows) and Opera. This has been achieved by creating a Bookmarklet (a little snippet of javascript code that can be bookmarked and added to your favourites toolbar) for each of the Text2Go commands. This approach adds no overhead to your browser and is highly configurable – you only need add the Text2Go commands that you use.
  
• Enhanced speech playback controls for listening to text at your computer. There is now a dedicated Speak button on the Text2Go toolbar and it’s also possible to pause and resume speech playback.
  
•  Enhanced error reporting. There is now a Support menu item in Text2Go which automatically creates a new email message and attaches a zipped copy of the Text2Go error log. This will better help us track down bugs and problems specific to your machine. The Text2Go error log is in plain text so you can satisfy yourself that it doesn’t contain any personal information.
  
  
• A few minor bug fixes.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Today however I threw caution to the wind and was pleasantly surprised. The download and install proceeded smoothly and I was up and running again in no time.

The most innovative new feature is the ‘Genius’ feature. This uses information in your current music library to do two things.

1. When you click on any song in your library, a list of recommended albums and songs that are similar to your selection are displayed in the Genius sidebar. These can then be purchased from the iTunes store. You can preview recommended songs in the sidebar by clicking on the music symbol next to each song. Playback is instant and seamless, although not with high quality audio. The selection pictured is for Jack Johnson’s ‘If I Had Eyes’. You can see it’s recommended a couple of albums I don’t have, including their ratings. This is nice but not truly revolutionary. The more interesting selection is the songs from other artist that it recommends. For this particular song, it’s worked really well. When I listened to the previews, they all had a very similar sound, falling into an easy listening, tuneful, predominately acoustic style. This feature promises to be a very easy way of growing your music library.
2. The other feature of Genius, which won’t cost you anything to use is it’s ability to create a Genius playlist. Again you start by clicking on a song in your library but this time if you click on the ‘Genius’ button located in the status bar at the bottom right of iTunes, it will create a playlist containing a selection of similar sounding songs from your own music collection. Again it does quite a good job of picking similar songs. One thing that wasn’t obvious was how to transfer the Genius playlist to your iPod. It turns out that you don’t. Instead you can save the current contents into a new playlist (using the ‘Save Playlist’ button in the Genius playlist titlebar). By default it’s given the name of the song used to seed the playlist. Once created, sync your iPod and it will appear just like any other.

According to Apple, the Genius feature will learn over time as more and more people start using the feature and it collects more information about the makeup of everyones music collections.

The other major change in iTunes 8 is a visual one. The album display has been revamped to remove the wasted space that was present in the previous version of iTunes. One thing that caught my eye was the flashy new genre display.

Nice, but what does it do when it encounters an unknown genre, like the Text2Go genre that Text2Go uses to classify all the text to speech tracks that it produces. Of course, it just displays the standard grey music symbol, as it does when an album doesn’t have any associated album art.

I wasn’t very happy about this, so I thought I’d look under the covers and see if I could add my own graphics to iTunes genre display. As you can see from the screenshot, you can and it’s not very difficult.

First you need to create a 256 x 256 pixel jpg image and save it into the following folder.

C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.Resources

The existing genre image files are present in this folder and are named as follows:

 e.g.

genre-dance.jpg
genre-hiphop.jpg
genre-pop.jpg
genre-vocal.jpg

etc.

The final step is to add an entry to the file genres.plist, also found in this folder. The file is in xml format, so it’s very easy to understand and edit. Here is the entry I added for the Text2Go genre. The matchString is used to specify the genre name and the resourceFile specifies the image file to use.

<dict>
   <key>matchString</key><string>Text2Go</string>
   <key>resourceFile</key><string>genre-Text2Go.jpg</string>
</dict>

Save your changes, restart iTunes and your image will be used for the genre.

Overall I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the new features in iTunes 8, especially the ability of Genius to create a playlist to match any song in your music library.

Text2Go users can download an image for the Text2Go genre and follow the above instructions now. I’ll add an extra step to the installation script in the next version of Text2Go to do this automatically.