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Candela wiki

Current version: v1.6.0 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: twenty-seven 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: v1.6.0 — Library Nocturne — Wear OS companion app — The complete watch experience: control playback, browse chapters, adjust speed, set sleep timers, and read the teleprompter — all from your wrist.

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

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What's new in v1.6.0

Library Nocturne — Wear OS companion app. The complete watch experience: control playback, browse chapters, adjust speed, set sleep timers, and read the teleprompter — all from your wrist.

  • Glanceable "Now Playing" tile with title, progress ring, and one-tap play/pause via Protolayout. (#1419)
  • Watch-face complications: Now Playing (short text + ranged value) and Listening Today (stats). Auto-refresh on DataClient changes. (#1416)
  • Ambient (always-on) low-power display: dimmed monochrome layout with tick-based minute updates, preserving OLED burn-in protection. (#1426)
  • Ongoing Activity media chip: foreground service reflecting phone playback state on the watch face. (#1423)
  • Rotating-bezel / touch-ring volume control with haptic detents on NowPlayingScreen. (#1397)
  • Playback speed control per-fiction on the watch, synced via DataClient. (#1417)
  • Chapter navigation on long-press with elapsed/remaining time readout. (#1411)
  • Sleep timer control from the watch — set, extend, or cancel the phone's active timer. (#1414)
  • Recording controls on NowPlayingScreen — start/stop/pause recording from the wrist. (#1422)
  • Voice-paced teleprompter line display on the wrist, synced with phone playback. (#1399)
  • Haptic feedback for bezel volume adjustments and transport control taps. (#1415)
  • Accessibility: semantic groups with roles, live regions for state changes, content descriptions for all interactive elements. (#1421)
  • Disconnect UX: pulsing retry dot animation and Reconnect chip when phone link drops. (#1425)
  • UI polish: 48dp minimum touch targets, adaptive cover art, teleprompter entry point. (#1398)
  • Smooth scrub arc with play/pause crossfade and proper buffering state rendering. (#1420)
  • Shared StatusTokens.ErrorDark color instead of inlined hex for error states. (#1418)
  • Rebrand storyvox → Candela in all Wear display strings. (#1395)
  • Candela adaptive launcher icon on the watch (replaced stock compass). (#1396)
  • Externalized all hardcoded UI strings for i18n readiness. (#1412)
  • RecordingController seam extracted for Wear record remote integration. (#1410)
  • Teleprompter script stores unified + reader consumer wired for cross-module access. (#1413)
  • Playback position extrapolated between phone beacons for smoother progress display. (#1424)

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).

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