Utter is now Utterly
Presenting: Utterly, a macOS app that puts a GUI on top of Apple’s built-in speech synthesis technology.
My previous attempt, Utter, has been rewritten with state-of-the-art tools and the newest of operating system version. Also, I added a picture of a cow to the app itself (instead of just the icon).
Backstory
I once wrote a little Mac utility called Utter. I had been using this command line utility to get my Mac to speak to me (the say command, essentially, but enhanced), but wanted a GUI. There was no source I could find, so I delved into the world of NSSpeechSynthesizer and made Utter.
It was fun and I learned a lot, but it had some issues and quirks I could never quite figure out. It’s written in Objective-C, but the newest hotness on Apple platforms is Swift. I actually really like Swift, and returning to my old Objective-C code felt even more arcane than it already did when I first tried using it, so I figured it was time to get serious and rewrite the thing (plus finally add a picture of a cow).
Swift Rules
The whole rewrite, except for a few details that finally got implemented recently, probably happened in a day. Swift just makes more sense to me after using things like Ruby and Golang, and its syntax is a lot less verbose. Maintenance should be a lot easier to do now that it’s built with today’s tools and tech. And now I have a final Swift project I can use to make more from!