Finally I could get a little time to finish SF 0.6.8 release.

In this release one thing I wanted to improve was the startup time. With the number of TV shows I have in my SF, it was taking around 25 seconds before showing me the list of shows. Part of this is due to the deserialization from the DB (no, it’s not using SQLite and I have no time to make the switch) which takes its time but also because it was attempting to sort the list of shows every time a show was added and it also took some time loading the shows’ covers from disk.
This fix was basically loading of the covers asynchronously and sorting the shows only after they are added to the tree view. It improved from 25 seconds to 12 seconds more or less.

While the shows’ covers are being loaded on startup or downloaded from the web, it displays something like shown on the following screenshot:

One of the features people like more is the display of the next episode’s air date. To improve this, I’ve added a small tweak to humanize the dates close to today so it displays “Yesterday” instead of “20 Jul”.

The covers retrieval was broken for a while and this is fixed too. What happened was that TheTVDB started redirecting images to a mirror and SF was not following redirected links… It should follow them now, so it is unlikely to happen again.
I’m also including the French translation kindly sent by David Landreau.

Other important improvements and fixes are:
* Fix deleting seasons;
* Add sorting options to the seasons view;
* Fix infinite loop when updating episodes (it happened when there were two shows with the same name);
* Consider next episode to watch only when it has an air date;

There are also some good news from other platforms’ ports. Nacho has created a branch where he is porting the GNOME version to GTK3/PyGI. A user named Micke Prag is porting it to QML which means it will be available on MeeGo one of these days. I wanted to apply for the developer’s N950 program (to port SF) but I was on honey-moon when it was announced and I ended up forgetting about it…

Revenge of the clones

When I first developed SF in 2009, I did it to scratch an itch and I couldn’t find such an app when I googled for it, I even wondered if anyone apart from me would be interested in such an app. Short after, my friend and colleague from the University, Paulo Cabido told me how much he liked the idea and created DroidSeries, a SF’s clone for Android. After a while I also found SeriesWatcher, a clone in Qt that also ran on the Linux desktop, Windows and Mac OSX.
What surprised me was that last week I was browsing the Android Market (out of curiosity, I don’t own an Android phone) and found out that there are:
* Series Droid (notice the name? If my friend Paulo was M$ or Apple, he would sue their asses )
* TV Show Favs
* TV Start
* Episode Calendar (this seems to be the only Open Source one in the list)

Although only DroidSeries and SeriesWatcher say they are based in SF, I like to think the others do as well (maybe indirectly like being based on another clone ). Or maybe those were developed before SF and I didn’t notice… What I’m trying to say is that not only from mainstream platforms come nice end user apps. In the Maemo world, even though we have problems of other nature, we also have good ideas and good applications for end user.

Get SeriesFinale 0.6.8 soon from your N900′s updates or here.

Last week, after a delayed flight that shortened my trip in one day I finally arrived in the fascinating city of Berlin to attend LinuxTag.
This was my first time in this event and I really liked it. The event’s program was very interesting, too bad my German isn’t still good enough to be able to fully understand the presentations in German (which was about half of the program or more). There were also booths with interesting stuff going on, from companies to the most well known Open Source projects and also some alternative things like a lockpicking hands-on.

It was a great place to talk to people and get more aware of what’s going on in Germany, and a lot seems to be going on.

On Wednesday afternoon, I presented OCRFeeder and couldn’t be happier after all the feedback I got in the questions session and afterwards. Probably a couple of bugs that were filed after the event have to do with that

You can find the slides here.

(me, presenting OCRFeeder at LinuxTag 2011)

OCRFeeder’s new release

Yesterday I finally finished the latest OCRFeeder version, 0.7.5.

Here are the highlights:

* It is possible to edit the content boxes’ bounds by dragging their edges or corners;
* When selecting a content box using the menu or keyboard shortcuts it will automatically focus their text area. This was suggested by Joanmarie for improving the usability of visually impaired users.
* Added the missing dependency of the “sane” module
* Changed some mnemonics in the menu to avoid clashes (thanks to Łukasz Jernaś)
* Prevent problems when adding image paths that do not exist (from the command line)
* Reset the OCR engine when it doesn’t exist. This bug happened when the settings pointed to an engine that no longer exists (if you passed the conf folder to another machine without the engines, for example) and would prevent the automatic recognition from doing the OCR step.

For other news, like the always amazing translation work, check out the NEWS file.

Source tarball
Git
Bugzilla

In the last release of SeriesFinale some nice new features were introduced like live search of TV shows but there was a problem: I messed it up. Basically, you could live search but once you pressed on a show, a different would be selected… good job, I know…

Anyway, the live search is fixed in this new version.

It also has some new cool changes by Juan:
* Covers are now kept back when the application is upgraded
* The database is now saved automatically every 5 minutes
* To prevent database corruption, the database is saved in a temporary file and if everything when well it is then moved to the right file name
* It now checks if other instances of SF are running and hangs newer instances until the old ones are finished
* Buttons whose actions depend on the connection are now only visible when the device is online

Since last version, it is possible to navigate to the next and previous episodes when viewing an episode details but one thing that was a real pain was to have to go back to the full list of episodes in order to mark them as watched so I’ve added a menu that lets users check the episode as watched.

The episodes’ titles are now also stroked when they are watched:

If you use the extras-testing repository, be sure to give it a try and vote to promote it.

I have added OCRFeeder to the list of GNOME ideas for this year’s Google Summer of Code.

I wrote some of the ideas that came to my mind at that moment but suggestions are welcome:
* Support for undo/redo
* Support for a defined language for documents that also configures the used OCR engine
* Implement reading order support
* Improve the generation of ODT files (currently the text is put as text boxes in the generated docs, maybe an option to set it as actual paragraphs would be better)
* Create a plugins system to process the results
* Improve the contents detection algorithm
* Create an assistant-like user mode (like 3 steps to scan and generate a document)

I don’t know if the apps for GNOME’s GSoC should be official modules, something that OCRFeeder is not yet but I think it is an interesting project for GSoC nonetheless.
As for mentoring it, I’m taking some weeks off in June and August but maybe I could still do it.

Let’s see how it turns out…

After more than two months since the last OCRFeeder release (I’ve been busy with other projects in Igalia), I have just released the version 0.7.4.

The highlights for this new version are:

Add plain text exportation

Sometimes users just want to get the plain text from a scanned document and this is especially useful for visually impaired users that will be able to read the text files with Orca afterwards.
This feature was developed by Andrew McGrath, a student from New Hampshire, who is contributing to OCRFeeder as part of his involvement in the Software for Humanity project. It would be great to have more colleges involved in this kind of initiatives.

Recognize the current page or the whole document

Now it is possible to automatically recognize the current page (as it did before) or the complete document. I’ve also added a confirmation dialog before the recognition is performed when there are changes in the project.

Thanks also to Joanmarie for all the great suggestions like this one and to Juanje Ojeda for the patches he sent me.

These were just the two main features I’ve picked from the list of changes, to view them all check the NEWS file.

Stay tuned for more improvements in the future.

Source tarball
Git
Bugzilla