Fit2Fake
The Times, they are a changin'! And so, you might like to be changin' the Times.
This little project takes some news summaries from a simple server that caches stories from the NY Times API, and other APIs, and lets you select them, and generates new text based on the original stories. It uses a travesty method I've been using for more than 40 years.
Usage
- FORGET: clears the dictionary.
- ALL: selects all the stories and adds them to the dictionary.
- SPEAK: reads the stories after they are generated. A long press on the SPEAK button toggles RADIO mode, which generates a new travesty a half second after the previous one has stopped speaking.
- SHARE:text copies the travesty and calls up the document sharing interface so you can post it or paste it into another app.
- SHARE: png: shares the text as an image, for posting on social services that limit the number of characters.
Should you be stuck without Wi-Fi, and no connection to the Times servers, I throw in a few fake-news related tweets for you to work with as a kind of Easter Egg.
This was a super-fast coded project, and I don't even really know Swift that well - as you can probably tell.
A help file was put in for the Desktop version.
History
I've been writing travesty generators on this algorithm for decades. In fact, whenever I'd get access to a new operating system or computer language, I used to write this or a variant of it as my equivalent of "Hello World". The most interesting and productive variant has been my Amiga app "Sound Bite", which performed travesties on audio.
FitToFake was originally written as the response to a job interview programming test. I didn't get the job.