Wooji Juice @wooji@indieapps.space

Transcriptionist has a full User Guide that feels a lot like the default "Help Book" system in macOS, but it's cross platform: near-identical experience on iPad (& iPhone isn't much different, just changes the navigation slightly to accommodate the smaller screen). And it's not HTML, it's native SwiftUI, so it's instant to load, can easily include the icons for various buttons, etc. Behind the scenes, its just Markdown, with a little extra on top for special formatting. Same system for FAQs.

Thing is, SwiftUI doesn't support outlining of text — and while you _can_ shadow text, it doesn't provide a way to shadow only _part_ of a text string. Wonder if anyone can guess how these things were achieved instead?

More Transcriptionist details: I wasn't originally intending to give the search highlight this (slightly iMessage Stickers-y?) fluorescent border+shadow look, but the regular boring yellow box is actually surprisingly tricky to achieve in SwiftUI. Experimenting with workarounds, I found a way to do these instead, and kinda liked how chunky and tactile they feel.

Whether it's something to load into another app, or just your preferred style of Markdown, you can create your own. And you don't have to learn any fiddly ${formatting} %codes or anything — type exactly the text you want to appear, and when you need pieces inserted from the transcript (the text itself, or details like names and times), you can insert Shortcuts-like tokens that let you pick what you want from menus.

One is exporting. There are a bunch of formats, like subtitles, Markdown, and some HTML/PDF styles including my current favourite, Chat Bubbles. But perhaps you want to get your transcripts out of the app and into a special text-based format?

If you've been following for a while, you'll know I just released Transcriptionist, a new iPhone/iPad/Mac app for turning speech into text, searching and exporting it. But I wanted to follow up with some of the details you might not have seen.

Today being iOS 17 day, it’s not an ideal day to be launching a new app! But cuz of the integration with Ferrite, which in turn needed to be launched for iOS 17, it all got bundled up together. And cuz of the Slow Motion Social Mediapocalypse over the past year, it’s harder than ever to get the word out. So if you can spread the news, that would be much appreciated! (Here on Mastodon I have all of 22 followers, as opposed to the couple thousand over on the ex-bird-site, but, it is what it is…)

Transcriptionist 1.0 is now out, and slowly making its way through various App Store servers (for me, it’s showing up on iOS, but hasn’t quite made it to the macOS App Store servers — but YMMV depending on whereabouts you are in the world). It’s joined by Ferrite 3.1 which is enhanced for iOS 17 and can also export direct to Transcriptionist.
https://www.wooji-juice.com/products/transcriptionist/

Ferrite 3.1 (iOS), and Transcriptionist 1.0 (iOS and macOS) submitted to the App Store! 🫣 And now to hurry up and wait…

OK, Transcriptionist Press Kit uploaded — https://www.wooji-juice.com/products/transcriptionist/ — still need to finalise the design of the (non-coming-soon) pages.

Dusted off my memory of how web stuff works and prepared the "coming soon" page for Transcriptionist: https://www.wooji-juice.com/products/transcriptionist/ still working on gallery, press kit, etc

Another experiment is that I've opened up around 100 slots on a public TestFlight. Haven't decided whether I'll keep it open, but I've not tried it before and I wanted to give it a shot. So if you would find this useful: https://testflight.apple.com/join/ppYPASJO

• Multitrack transcription: put each person on their own track in Ferrite (or record them to their own file & import all into Transcriptionist) and it'll show who said what. Also means it doesn't get thrown off by crosstalk.
• Of course, can play back audio (up to 2x speed) & tracks progress alongside speakers.
• Search (inc. regexps) and replace.
• Export in a bunch of formats — or create your own with built-in editor.
• Wide accessibility support: VoiceOver, Voice Control, Dynamic Type etc

Hey! So I have something new to announce. It's still early, and kind of an experiment for me: a new iPhone, iPad and (native) Mac app called Transcriptionist. It takes speech and turns it into text — privately, on-device — and a bunch more besides.

It can be used as a companion app to Ferrite (a new update will integrate to transcribe your shows) but is a great stand-alone app too.

• It's accelerated with the Apple Neural Engine, so it's very fast
• It can transcribe almost 100 languages

Finally found what I hope will be a suitable home for Wooji Juice in the federated world of Mastodon. About six months late, but here now…