Saturday, July 24, 2021

Improving the Tellsis language translator: Update 2

I am still working (slowly) on the Tellsis language translator app in Flutter. After trying to train tesseract in the previous post, I thought I would get ready for the UI to allow a file/image picker.

Bumped into a bigger problem. The dependencies (and their dependencies) are very tied to each other, and with the introduction of null safety, some dependencies on pub.dev are just broken until they get updated by their authors. For example, flutter_form_builder is now under major revamp and it is going to be very difficult to compile a working version of the app older versions of flutter_form_builder no longer work as the dependencies are broken. Trying to migrate to the alpha versions was a no-go too since those have broken dependencies too.

Still, it is good to know that there are file and image pickers that used to work with flutter_form_builder, and I am hoping that they eventually get updated to work (aka get out of alpha) so that I can use them.

Anyway, I have released v0.1.2 which added an "About" button and a placeholder button for the one that will eventually be used to load an image. v0.1.3 is the one with the updated packages but it cannot be built on Linux and Windows currently; I managed to compile a working APK for Android, though.

Update July 25, 2021: Small but important update... tesseract packages (like tesseract_ocr) on Flutter currently does not support desktop platforms. Only Android (which I have) and iOS (which I don't have). Testing OCR will take a bit of time. It also means that until someone comes up with a tesseract package that can work on desktop platforms, this feature won't be available for Linux and Windows users.

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