Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom
github-actions[bot] edited this page Jul 2, 2026 · 130 revisions

Candela wiki

Current version: v1.8.0 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: v1.8.0 — Jade Warden — The Morning Briefing arrives, and feeds stop failing silently.

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

Pages

What's new in v1.8.0

Jade Warden. The Morning Briefing arrives, and feeds stop failing silently.

  • Morning Briefing — one tap assembles Hacker News, arXiv, your RSS feeds, and GitHub into a single continuous narrated episode with cross-book auto-advance. Settings hub → Podcasts. (#1467, #1483)
  • Bookshare partner API key field in Settings — discovery lights up the moment a key is entered (dormant until the Benetech partnership; downloads stay gated). (#1471, #1485)
  • Browse chips and search hints now come from each source's own plugin descriptor. (#1482, #1487)
  • RSS feeds no longer fail silently. A freshly-added feed could sit on an empty chapter list forever (a refresh guard skipped fetching, and every error was swallowed). The chapter list now shows loading / a clear error with Retry / an honest empty state — and Retry forces a real fetch. (#1489, #1490)
  • Chapter taps on RSS feeds are instant after the list loads — the feed is cached instead of re-downloaded on every tap. (#1490)
  • Rate-limited feed servers (reddit's instant 429s) surface as "try again later" instead of hanging; Cloudflare blocks are reported honestly. (#1490)
  • Adding a site's homepage now auto-discovers its RSS/Atom feed. (#1490)
  • New-chapter notification taps load the chapter before opening the reader. (#1455, #1477)
  • Wear: transient volume arc on bezel turns; Teleprompter/Sleep touch targets meet 48dp. (#1401, #1402, #1479)
  • New sources need only a @SourcePlugin annotation — KSP generates all routing; 27 modules of hand-written DI deleted. (#1400, #1481)
  • Wear app rebranded to org.techempower.candela.wear. (#1403, #1475)
  • Tagged releases attach a Play-ready release-signed AAB, with a CI guard that withholds any debug-signed bundle. (#1476, #1484)
  • Reader intent extras consolidated into one compiler-enforced contract. (#1478, #1486)

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