I am wanting to incorporate the built-in text-to-speech tool on a mac to a website. Basically, the website will show a list of tasks, and in a different view mode, it will only show one task on the screen. In the "one task" mode, I want to to the "text-to-speech" software on Macs to read the task. I would want to do this on a PC too, if they come with a similar tool built in (unlikely).
Is there some JavaScript command I could use to tell it to start speaking the text, or is this way too advanced for JavaScript?
There isn't any JavaScript command but you can use:
http://www.jtalkplugin.com/
https://github.com/kripken/speak.js
Both seems like a good option to gain the ability to 'start speaking the text'.
Text-To-Speech is part of the os and not of the browser (or any HTML specifications for that matter). Thus there are several hypothetical ways of triggering it:
Call a js function that does a call to the underlying OS
I have not hear yet of any browser that implements that
Call AppleScript from JS
I have not hear yet that this is possible
Create a browser extension that is capable of calling AppleScript/Underlying OS/Shell command...
Probably your best bet but then the webside is non-function without the extension
I don't think you can access OSX's text-to-speech feature directly, but if you're looking for a text-to-speech solution, you should look into speak.js:
Speak.js on GitHub
Working demo of speak.js
Related
I'm making a game with HTML/CSS/Javascript because it's the code I'm most comfortable with at the moment. I'm only really doing this as an exercise in game development and plan to learn C# later. But for now that's what I'm using, and I have a question about it.
Obviously when making a website, you want your website to be compatible with all web browsers equally. Right now, I'm using Chrome to test/debug my game, and I've decided to develop this game with Chrome in mind. But not everybody has Chrome, and not everyone would want to download it in order to play my game.
Is there a way to run an HTML/CSS/Javascript file in a Google Chrome "environment" without having the actual browser installed? Just it's code engine and none of the rest of the browser.
I've been reading about their V8 Javascript engine that they use in Chrome, and am wondering if that is part of the answer I'm looking for. What I'd like to do is include this "engine" in an installer with my game files and have it install like any other game.
Hopefully this makes sense. This may not be possible/exist, but if someone knows something I don't or an point me in the right direction, that'd be amazing. Thanks!
You could look into Node-webkit which essentially allows you to write desktop applications in html/css/js. When you distribute your game along with your node webkit executable, it is always run in the same environment. You can see some cool examples on their demos and examples page.
Usually a common path to convert web application to native desktop applications is to use a "thin" browser as app container and ship it.
A lot of current applications out there are using this trick (Spotify, Slack, etc...) and it works pretty well.
I've read of some people using the CocoonJS game engine framework and successfully ship it with this techniques.
To most famous wrappers, that I know are node-webkit or electron (AKA atom-shell).
Once you include your game in either one of those you can just "compile" it (it is not a real compile, but just to give you an idea) and ship it: with some tricks it is also possible to publish it in the Mac/Win app stores.
In case you want to focus on mobile instead, there are similar frameworks but I don't really know which are the most common.
Note: if you're using fancy WebGL or very advanced stuff these tools may have some issues sometimes.
So essentially you want to install the JS engine to use it with any browser? In this case, the answer is: nope. Browsers act different, they don't have a standard interface, nor have this "swapping" capability in mind.
In case you'd be asking for an embedded browser inside an app... well, isn't that worse than installing Chrome? You may embed webkit/V8, but it's a hard way and you'd know programming.
So simple answer is: you'd make it compatible for at least the evergreen browsers (Chrome / Firefox mainly). Or reduce your target to webkit based only browsers (or in your case V8, i.e. Chrome, Chromium and the forks).
If you want that your game is only for chrome, because you read V8 documentation, you can create it as an extension. There'sn't other way to install your JS, because browser interpret javascript, not compile it. And the docs you need is found at: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/getstarted
I would like to be able to know when arbitrary JavaScript successfully executes a command in a web browser. The medium doesn't matter, it could be a log, stack trace, event signal, it just has to be something that can be programmatically analyzed.
I've thought about this problem for some time now and I have not been able to come up with an adequate solution. I'm no expert with JavaScript though, so I'm wondering what ideas you have?
Since you'll probably be wondering why, it's just something I'm very interested in.
Any input is appreciated. Can you help me?
EDIT: I've investigated using something like Firebug to monitor JavaScript functions, however I wasn't able to determine if Firebug can be run programmatically on a simulated Web Browser (like a web-browser control in ASP.NET, which is what I'm currently using.) Does anyone know if it can?
You can use the profiler of Firebug.
Go to the console tab and click Profile. The profiler starts and all the javascript actions are "logged" till you click Profile again. Then you get the list of javascript functions that were executed in this interval.
A similar feature is available in most modern browsers' consoles.
Source: See/Log which javascript function is being executed by the browser
The firefox browser could be used in asp .net using the selenium web driver and it also provide the ability to access all details from a web page. see the document and download api code and integrate it in your project its very easy to integrate using its help.
http://docs.seleniumhq.org/projects/webdriver/
As part of a third level project I am going to attempt to build a web based sound synthesiser using HTML5 and JavaScript.
Does anyone know of any APIs that would allow me to deploy it on all or most browsers?
I have so far seen an API that works with Firefox only and another on GitHub that works with Chrome only.
It would be great to be able to use this in Safari, as with the iPad it could become a stand alone instrument.
Is this feasible?
If you go to http://caniuse.com they will tell you if a technology is supported by Safari or not. Go check it out. Then, any API that you use will tell you what support you will get for it.
I think your best bet might be to do it server side. I would have your app use AJAX to call a server-side script to generate the sound file if it doesn't already exist, then return it's URL so you can use it in JS. Eventually, all the different sound files should be created by the server and named properly allowing you to look them up quickly.
http://mohayonao.github.com/timbre.js/ seems pretty powerful. Pity some of the documentation appears to be in Japanese only!
WebPd is a partial Puredata port to JS - https://github.com/sebpiq/WebPd - it works well with Chrome and Firefox. "It is also a standalone DSP library. Every object as you know it in Pure Data exposes a complete API, allowing developers to control everything with JavaScript."
I built a PHP / JavaScript website for a customer. Then they asked me to replicate it except as a standalone Mac application. I did this with an app that combined an embedded web server, PHP, and 'WebView' - a Cocoa-ish version of the WebKit web browser that I can embed in a standard app window. This all worked great - I got to reuse 10,000+ lines of PHP/JS code, which saved months off of re-implementing it all again in 'native' code.
Now they want a Windows equivalent. I'm reasonably confident I can get PHP and the web server to work. And I know embedding basic IE functionality is pretty easy.
However...in my Mac setup, WebView (via the windowScriptObject stuff) gave me the ability to call JavaScript methods from C++. For instance, I might call a JavaScript method from C++ to update the screen. Likewise I could set things up so that a JavaScript call in the browser could trigger a C++ method - I used this, for instance, to let a user click 'BROWSE' and pick a file path using a real, standard file browser.
So my question is, is there a Windows-based embedded browser setup that would let me interact with JavaScript in this same way?
(the JavaScript <--> WebKit interface is described in much better detail here: http://lipidity.com/apple/javascript-cocoa-webkit/)
Maybe try using something like Appcelerator Titanium so you'll be ready when your client says they want it to work on Linux, or iPhone, or Android.
Quoting Wikipedia: "Appcelerator Titanium is a platform
for developing mobile and desktop
applications using web technologies.
[...] Support for standards-based web
technologies: HTML, CSS and Javascript
on all platforms along with PHP,
Python and Ruby for desktop platforms.
Integrated support for popular
JavaScript and AJAX Frameworks
including jQuery, YUI, MooTools,
Scriptaculous and others."
Sounds like a perfect tool for the job.
When you embed the Web Browser Control (IE), your application code can simply call execScript (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536420(v=vs.85).aspx) on the window object. You can have your script call out to the application by using the window.external object from the script, and by using the ObjectForScripting (or C++ equivalent) from the application.
maybe Qt will be good for your case, also you have QtScript and can inject javascript with evaluateJavaScript
I found a great example on the web for invoking JS in my embedded browser from C...basically using COM-ish methods that let you get a DISPID from a script object, and then using the Invoke() method with that. This works great.
But it turns out I need to also call C++ funcs from my JS code. It appears this is possible, and after hours of messing around I think I almost had it - it's like the above in reverse - you create a COM object, then hook it to the browser's script object - but in the end I could not close the deal - I kept getting "library not registered" errors. Honestly I don't know COM well enough to do this right.
So then I, for the heck of it, tried building my first C# app. In about 20 minutes I had an app running with a browser where I could both invoke JS inside of it and have the browser invoke C# methods. Geesh. I'm a believer in .NET after this experience, and a confirmed non-believer in 90's Microsoft technology.
In the interest of completeness, I'd like to mention my Windows port of WebKit, which includes the various cross-layer features of WebKit on the Mac.
I posted some example code showing how to embed WebKit in a native WinAPI application, complete with JavaScript->C++ and C++->JavaScript examples.
The example is a tiny test case for a much larger application using embedded WebViews for major UI components. I can confirm that what you are doing is not only possible, but a great way to build an application.
Are there any libraries or frameworks that provide the functionality of a browser, but do not need to actually render physically onto the screen?
I want to automate navigation on web pages (Mechanize does this, for example), but I want the full browser experience, including Javascript. Thus, I'd like to have a virtual browser of some sort, that I can use to "click on links" programmatically, have DOM elements and JS scripts render within it, and manipulate these elements.
Solution preferably in Python, but I can manage others.
PhantomJS and PyPhantomJS are what I use for tasks like these.
What it is, is a headless WebKit based browser which is fully controllable via JavaScript. There's a C++ implementation (PhantomJS) and a Python one (PyPhantomJS). I prefer the Python one though, because it has a plugin system which allows you to add functionality to the core without actually modifying any code, unlike the C++ one. :)
There is an absolute ton of free software technology now available: take your pick at http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebBrowserProgramming but if you have specific questions join pyjamas-dev on google groups and i'll be happy to give further details, there. brief answer: you can run pywebkitgtk "headless", or you can use xulrunner (via python-hulahop) again using pygtk without actually doing "browserwidget.show()", and there's also pykhtml. also you could use python COM to connect to MSHTML.DLL.
these are all "cheat" methods: using python bindings to a graphical web browser engine without actually firing up the graphical bit. if you really wanted to put some serious hard-core programming in, you could create a "port" of webkit which was not connected to a GUI toolkit: as an experienced webkit programmer i'd put it as around... 2 weeks of full-time effort to make such a "headless" version of webkit.
l.
Looks like http://watin.sourceforge.net/ might be a good way to go.
If you don't have to go pure Python, you could do IronPython since it's a C# project.
take a look at this little doosy on ajaxian
http://ajaxian.com/archives/server-side-rendering-with-yui-on-node-js
It also talks about Aptana Jaxer which I think runs on a headless firefox so is basically the Mozilla browser engine in all it's glory.
There is Kapow. Its pure Java and costs money:
http://kapowtech.com/
And there is Lixto: Its Eclipse based and uses Mozilla Gecko as rendering engine (unless they already changed it to WebKit, as they said they'll do years ago). Its very nice and also costs money:
http://www.lixto.com/?page_id=50
They are both graphical tools where you define the site navigation and what should be extracted by point and click. But you can also write xpath and regular expressions and even JavaScript that runs in the sites context.
I used them both in the lectures web data extraction and applied web data extraction at the technical university Vienna (Lixto is written by the Professor who held the lecture).
HTMLUnit in Java is very good. I think it's only the Java implementations of headless browsers that manage to provide Javascript support.
MaxQ, I read about here, sounds like it might be interesting: "written in Java, generates Jython scripts"
Try HtmlUnit !!!