Last month we mentioned that we were working on making audio handling better in Super Speller and we think we made some great progress in that area in latest release of Super Speller.

The first thing you’ll notice is that you no longer have to record an audio prompt for each of your spelling words. If no prompt is recorded, Super Speller will speak the word for you. While we believe it’s most helpful to hear each word used in a sentence, we also understand that people are busy and sometimes there isn’t time to record a prompt for each word right away.

If you do record a prompt you’ll notice we’ve added a little meter below the record button to make it easier to see how loudly you’re speaking. We’ve also added a message below the play button to let you know when your volume might be too low.

Another audio related change we made has to do with background audio. We struggled with this a bit but realize that some prefer to study while listening to music on their iPad or iPhone. Super Speller will no longer prevent background audio from playing. It will automatically lower the volume or momentarily pause then resume background audio as needed, but the decision to play background audio is up to each user.

In addition to the audio related changes, we’ve made lots of other little tweaks and fixes including a new word search layout that makes much better use of space.

Super Speller 5.2.0 is available now on the App Store and we hope you love it. As always we would appreciate any feedback by way of a review on the App Store or contact us on Facebook or Twitter.

It seems like one of the more commonly asked questions is about the audio in Super Speller. It’s sometimes not obvious when audio hasn’t been recorded for all of the words in a test which can lead to some confusion when attempting to play a game or take a test. We want to focus on improving this part of Super Speller in the coming releases and we’ve taken one small step towards that with the latest release.

We had planned on making several changes before making a new release but, to be perfectly honest, we overlooked a small problem with our app description which required an update before we could change it. Oops. But that means you get this improvement that much quicker, so it all works out.

As always, your feedback is welcome. Also if you could take a moment to rate Super Speller on the App Store that would be great. It really helps!

We released a minor update to Super Speller today which adds support for previewing shared tests using Quick Look. Pretty handy if you’re looking through a bunch of tests and would like to see what’s in them without copying them all into Super Speller first. The new version also includes a bug fix or two, as well as some performance enhancements. You can grab the latest release on the App Store.

By the way, have you seen the newest game in Super Speller? It’s an augmented reality (AR) game called Block Hunt and we think it’s…

We’ve wanted to add a new game to Super Speller for quite some time, but none of ideas felt quite right. Until now. Apple’s relatively new augmented reality technology, also known as ARKit, has matured to the point that we decided to see how we might use it in Super Speller.  This technology allows you to project objects into the real world and we wondered if we could build a game using alphabet blocks which fall all around you. You’d then look for the blocks you need to spell each of your words. The result is our new Block Hunt game.

As you look around, the game recognizes surfaces like floors, tables, desks, and even walls, which allows the blocks to land or bounce off of these surfaces. When you tap a block, it zooms towards you and turns green or red depending on whether or not the letter is needed to spell your word. It’s a lot of fun to play and we’re so excited to finally make it available to you today.

Block Hunt is available in Super Speller version 5.1 for all devices which support Apple’s ARKit.

It’s been a quite a journey to get here but we’re proud to announce the release of Super Speller 5 this morning!

As promised, Super Speller 5 is a complete rewrite of the app using the latests technologies available from Apple. We believe Super Speller is improved in almost every category: iCloud support and 3rd party sharing, user interface consistency, stability, and of course, 100% more confetti in the balloons. We’ve also added two new themes: Comic Book and a Plain theme for maximum contrast and clarity.

For a bit more on the technical side of this update, keep reading. Or if you’d rather you can skip all that and start exploring the update on the App Store. We’re anxious to learn what people think of it!

Now, excuse us while we nerd out for a moment.

Our primary goals with Super Speller 5 were to lay the groundwork for new features and allow Super Speller to be run seamlessly on all the varied screen sizes and orientations that Apple devices now support. This was quite a challenge! For example supporting each of the currently shipping Apple devices could require as many as seven different backgrounds for every theme. When you add Split View into the mix that number jumps to over twenty! Using the old approach was increasingly impractical.

We began working on a solution to this problem over two years ago and after many false starts and challenges we finally created a solution that we’re happy with. In Super Speller 5 most of the user interface is created by the app which means we no longer have to worry about making backgrounds for all the various screen sizes. And we no longer have to create variations for all of our buttons every time a new theme is added. The app automatically determines the best layout for any size screen. The benefit to us is a big decrease in the effort it takes to support new devices from Apple. The benefit to users is a support for any orientation, multitasking, and a big reduction in the size of the app. Super Speller is nearly half the size of previous versions!

We’re very excited about all the changes in Super Speller 5 and we hope you are too!