Things are happening really fast here at VoiZapp as we hit our stride at turning out requested updates to our existing apps and building new ones. Friends Aloud 3.0 was approved in record time by Apple, and has been for sale in the App Store for about a week. Even at the higher price of $2.99, sales have surpassed expectations, and reviews are great as usual. 

We also completed giving Tweets Aloud 3.0 similar Siri-like tweet dictation capabilities, and have now submitted it to the App Store for approval. Hopefully, that will be forthcoming this week, so that you will be able to not only listen to but also dictate your tweets from now on, resulting in a totally hands-free Twitter experience.

Next up will be Read It Aloud, a completely new app that will let you read aloud your saved InstaPaper or Read It Later articles, as well as anything on your Google Reader RSS news feed. We are expecting Read It Aloud to make it out of our development lab before the end of November and into the App Store just in time for you to stay in touch with your personalized news sources during the crush of holiday shopping.

A new version 1.1 of Friends Aloud Pro has just been submitted to the App Store and should become available within the next day or two. It fixes an obscure problem caused by optimization technology within iOS: if an app that plays music (or voices in our case) stops playing for 30 seconds or longer after the screen has auto-locked (gone dark), it will "lost focus" and effectively stop playing from then on, even if it's in the foreground, presumably to further reduce power usage. In our case, when Friends Aloud Pro finishes reading aloud one of its regular posting updates and is quietly awaiting arrival of the next one, it may occasionally and incorrectly be switched off by iOS. Version 1.1 fixes this problem, so that Friends Aloud Pro will now work as intended for as long as you wish, reading incoming posts and comments as they arrive, whether the screen has auto-locked or not. This is, of course, a free update, so please visit the App Store at your convenience to download it.