Synchronization

[ernestsera]

While looking at the wish-list thread for TextAloud 4, I was surprised to see that no one actually suggested proper synchronization between the articles list across your program platforms. I use textaloud on my iPhone and iPad and it would have been a great convenience if changes in my desktop articles list would automatically be reflected on my iPhone app -- same way OneNote, Evernote, OneDrive and other cloud services work. Because of this, I don't find myself using the app on my phone that often despite having bought several voices for the app years ago. My workaround for this has been to save all current articles in a Dropbox folder and then manually opening each one on my phone via the app. Of course, once you're done with say, half of the articles on your phone out of a random fifty -- as well as deleted them on the device -- inevitably, when you go back to your desktop computer, you'd have to manually delete the articles you've already finished on your phone one by one again. This is incredibly tedious (manual "synchronization") so I often find myself ignoring the app altogether -- just might as well export the articles to audio files.

The Instapaper plugin is wonderful and all... but mere web articles are not the only text sources we use. Considering that almost everyone these days already has a cloud drive account (e.g. Dropbox) or other, why not give the option to synchronize our articles data folder from the desktop program and phone/tablet app to a cloud drive.

Maybe in the next version of the phone/tablet app you release, we could finally have true synchronization of articles between all the available TextAloud platforms.

Ernest