Flash Notes 1.1 is live!🎉
Main theme; make it simpler for the new users, especially when they are learning foreign languages.
Flash Notes is introducing UI for Note Configuration. It allows you to edit all the magical tags through an easy to navigate UI. In other words it is a form based UI to edit note content... Sounds weird when you write it, and I was very reluctant to implement it, but it is in fact solving a massive problem of discovery of app capabilities. The concept of blank canvas is aesthetically pleasing, but how do you tell the user what they can do with it? Tutorials help a bit, but you need some place to e.g. list all the languages supported.
A nice side effect of the form based UI is that now there is a place to tell users how to download additional languages. Which ones are the Apple premium ones.
BTW: The pronunciation of iOS/macOS premium voices is really something.
This however points to a new puzzle. Should the app use OS native languages and tell users how to download voices, or embed the text-to-speech engine. The latter feels like unnecessary duplication of OS capabilities but will offer better user experience. Decisions, decisions, decisions…
Version 1.1 brings another change; it finally integrates AI generation (LLM) with language selection. My favourite pastime right now is to write a few flashcard answers in say Chinese and then play with prompt language selection to generate content of the flashcards and just listen to them. There is something weirdly amusing in listening to flashcards where both sides are... foreign to you. They all have a unique melody to them.