Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom
github-actions[bot] edited this page Jul 6, 2026 · 130 revisions

Candela wiki

Current version: v1.12.5 Candela is TechEmpower's accessible resource app. Browse free tech guides, connect with our peer-support Discord, dial 211 for local help — and listen to any of it through a neural-voice audiobook engine that reads everything aloud.

Under the hood: thirty-three fiction backends (Royal Road, GitHub, RSS / Atom feeds, local EPUB folders, local PDF files, on-device OCR, self-hosted Outline wikis, Memory Palace, Project Gutenberg, LibriVox, Archive of Our Own, Standard Ebooks, Wikipedia, Wikisource, Radio with 30k+ stations, Notion, Hacker News, arXiv, PLOS, Discord, Telegram, Palace Project, Slack, Matrix, Readability web articles); three in-process voice families (Piper, Kokoro, KittenTTS) with optional Azure HD cloud voices; AI chat per fiction across seven LLM providers with cross-fiction memory, function calling, and multi-modal image input; built for Android phones, tablets, and Wear OS.

📦 Latest release: v1.12.5 — Kindled Quartz — The Settings hub gains its remaining gap subscreens — Downloads & Storage, Notifications, Benefits, and Teleprompter recording — and more per-source config moves out of the legacy long-scroll. Every buried setting now has a discoverable home.

📖 Source: github.com/techempower-org/candela · License: GPL-3.0 · Site: candela.techempower.org

Pages

What's new in v1.12.5

Kindled Quartz. The Settings hub gains its remaining gap subscreens — Downloads & Storage, Notifications, Benefits, and Teleprompter recording — and more per-source config moves out of the legacy long-scroll. Every buried setting now has a discoverable home.

  • Downloads & Storage subscreen (#1632) — a global default download mode (Lazy / Eager / Subscribe) applied to newly-added books, plus Wi-Fi-only downloads, update-check interval, and cache controls, gathered in one place. Ships as a no-op until you opt into Eager/Subscribe.
  • Notifications subscreen (#1631) — un-buries the per-source new-chapter inbox toggles (Royal Road / KVMR / Wikipedia) and adds a system-notification permission status with a one-tap deep-link to the OS settings.
  • Benefits hub entry (#1634) — a Settings row to re-discover the Screener / Decoder benefits suite.
  • Persisted teleprompter recording settings (#1633) — the recording-overlay knobs (countdown, opacity, font size, mirror, camera) and scroll speed now survive across sessions, reached via a gear on the Scripts screen.
  • Content Sources (#1630 §B) — Outline and Wikipedia per-source config now live in the shared Content Sources subscreen instead of the legacy long-scroll page.
  • Completes the #1624 settings-IA epic's grouped, searchable hub end-state. New prefs use defaulted interface setters (fakes-safe); the download-mode consumer uses dagger.Lazy to avoid a settings↔repo init cycle; teleprompter knobs seed once from persisted defaults (behavior-neutral until adjusted).

Recent v0.5 highlights

  • Cold launch 6.7 s → 0.8 s on Galaxy Tab A7 Lite (v0.5.46 — R8 + Baseline Profile + isDebuggable=false).
  • Full PCM cache series — streaming-tee, cache-hit playback, background pre-render, Settings UI, status icons (v0.5.47–v0.5.49).
  • Twelve a11y findings closed (v0.5.43) — high-contrast brass-on-near-black theme, reduced-motion fold-in, TalkBack pacing.
  • Nav settled — four-tab dock {Playing · Library · Voices · Settings} (v0.5.50 final, after v0.5.40 restructure).
  • Cross-device InstantDB sync (v0.5.39+) — library, follows, positions, bookmarks, pronunciation, encrypted secrets.
  • KittenTTS lightest-tier voice family (v0.5.36 — #119).

Quick links

Candela

Start here

Using Candela

Developer

Project

Clone this wiki locally