It’s been a while now since I released the last version of SeriesFinale.
The truth is that I’ve been busier than usual these days and of course, this is reflected on pet projects.

As some of you may have experienced, there was a kind of a nasty bug in SeriesFinale’s last version: it wouldn’t update certain shows (when they had been added long ago)… and the good news is that this is one of the things that got fixed in this new version.

One of the good things Juan introduced for this version is how the next episodes to be watched are shown. Before, the episodes were shown according to their “first aired” date and in case of the same date for two or more episodes, the highest index one would be marked as the one to be watched. In this 0.6.1 version, the episodes are shown according to their number and season, so, if episode #3 has the same air date as episode #4, #3 will always be shown as the next one to be watched.

It is now using a priority queue to download the series’ covers and info that gives priority to the info. This means you won’t have to wait for the info AND covers to download when you hit the Update All menu but instead wait only for the info; the covers will then be downloaded in the background while you use the app normally.

I’m now introducing the new Russian translation, which Misha Ketslah had kindly sent to me a while ago but that I hadn’t had the time to integrate.

Here’s the list of major changes for this new version:

* Add Russian translation (thanks to Misha Ketslah)
* Fix updating of shows
* Use a priority queue to differentiate the downloads of covers or series’ info
* Use only one AsyncWorker at most to deal with the series
* Prevent the download and usage of images to generate problems
* Fix showing next episode
* Add TheTVDB credits
* Add THANKS file

So… what about that GNOME version, you ask? I’ve already started to port it to GNOME but couldn’t dedicate much time to it and taking into account that I’ll be on vacation very soon, it’s likely it will take a little longer. But I’m looking forward to use SeriesFinale on GNOME!

As for the N900 owners, I’ve just promoted the package to Extras-Testing so either use the Extras-Devel repo as usual or wait ~10 days for it to appear in Extras.

It’s been a while since last SeriesFinale’s version and I have been a bit busy meanwhile but still got time, together with Juan, to pull up some nice new features. In the end, we had so many changes and the app felt so smooth that we nicknamed it “Xmas Comes Earlier”!

So what can you find in this new version?

* The covers are now downloaded in the background which allows users to keep using the application and improves idle times when adding/updating shows.
* No more database deletions. Many people complained that sometimes it would suddenly delete all the database. We have now introduced a few verifications that make it harder for the database to be deleted unless you do it yourself.
* The format of the JSON of the database and the way the serialization is done is now faster which allows faster load and save times.
* The impossibility to delete shows is also fixed.
* No more problems with characters like & on the episodes and shows’ names.
* Already added shows are now marked with color when searching for shows.
* The highlight of episodes is now fixed, when marking them.
* A new logo that works in a black background has been added.
* Images are now downloaded to temporary files which allows a safer assignment to the shows/seasons.
* The images are now deleted if it’s not being used anymore (when shows are deleted), and are not downloaded more than once (when a show is added twice).
* The removal of the application now deletes the images folder.
* AUTHORS, README and THANKS files were added to the package.
* Translations were updated.
* The search dialog now allows you to search shows in a chosen language.
* The About dialog was added. Here are a few screenshots:

Shows when no cover has been added

Temporary image when downloading cover

Search dialog with Language choices

About dialog

Two other things that are new are the creation of two mailing lists for SeriesFinale:
seriesfinale-general for general discussion, help and feature requests
seriesfinale-development for discussions related to features development and bug tracking

You should be able to upgrade SeriesFinale from the extras-devel repository. I’ll promote it extras later.

Enjoy!

For those who didn’t notice, last week SeriesFinale finally got promoted to Extras which are very good news and now SeriesFinale 0.5 has been just released!

Why is this edition so special? Because it will from now on retrieve images for the shows and its seasons.
This morning I finally took the time to check how to retrieve those and I really like the way SeriesFinale looks like now. Of course, this means that the next shows update you do will start retrieving all the images for your shows and seasons which might take, let’s say, a while. Still, don’t worry because once it gets the images, next time you update, only the general information will be retrieved.

I’ve also fixed the slowness when panning the different content views. Panning should now be much more fluid.

Another good thing in this edition is that the tiny episodes’ checkbox still looks tiny but it’s in fact larger and this means you can much more easily tap on it to mark episodes.

Juan, the maintainer of the Diablo version and a colleague of mine at Igalia, sent patches for including the season number together with the episode number, so it shows like “2×05″ which is more useful than just the episode’s number.
He also pointed a bug when adding a show  manually, which got fixed for this release as well.

Here are a couple of screenshots showing what you’ll see soon (I just finished sending the packages to the server) in your favorite mobile phone:

SeriesFinale with shows' art

SeriesFinale with seasons' art

(I didn’t have time to update or integrate any translations in this version but I’m planning to have it done for the next one so I apologize for any inconvenience.)

I have just release a new version of SeriesFinale.

For this 0.4 version there is a very useful and requested feature: Update All!
Now you will be able to update all the TV shows by just clicking a button instead of having to go show by show and waiting for each one to be updated. As you see on the screenshots below, the shows view now also displays the next episode to watch plus, when updating the shows, feedback on the shows that are finished updating is given by a banner.

You’ll also notice that initializing and quitting the application is now much faster. This happens because as for the shows’ updates, the loading and saving of the database is now run on a different thread.

There was also a bug when manually editing an episode, which is now fixed.
Another bug you might have experienced was duplicated episode entries. It usually happened when there were placeholder episodes named “TBD”, since SF was using the episodes’ names to compare them, when the “TBD” episode was updated with the correct but different name, a new episode would be added instead… I removed the name checking from the comparison and now two episodes are the same if they have the same number and same season number.

Also, you might have noticed that the TV shows view scrolls really slowly. Today I found why such happens and will try to have it fixed for the next release.

As usual, you can find SeriesFinale code on its Gitorious project and expect this new version to appear soon on an AppManager next to you.

I hope you like this version as much as I do!

I was disappointed with the text completion provided by the N900 (eZiText) that, on top of that, is closed and I wondered if it was possible to have an Open Source solution to provide text prediction and completion.

I searched a bit and besides my original intentions of developing a library to search Free and Open Source dictionaries’ words from a prefix, I found Presage.
Presage is better than most text prediction systems I have seen out there because it really is text prediction, not text completion. This C++ library, retrieves words taking into account the surrounding text, not only the prefix or frequency of words. It uses a database representing N-grams that can be trained with more text; the more you train it, the more accurate it can be.

This means that is you type something like:
“I m”
instead of suggesting nonsense things like:
“I mouse” “I mother” “I market” or “I more“
it suggests something more like:
“I must” “I met” “I mean” or “I might“
The difference is obvious!

So I developed a little wrapper around Presage in C that provides a yet very basic API to get text completion. Then I created a GTK+ Input Method context to control the user’s input in regular GTK+ text widgets and used the wrapper to process the inputted text. I called it: Predictor Input Method (not very original I know…).
The result is that Predictor suggests you words, even if you type a prefix or not, and lets you accept the candidate word or scroll through a list of suggestions as you can see in the video below:

Text prediction in GNOME from Joaquim Rocha on Vimeo.

How to use it

The current key bindings are:

Ctrl+Enter -> Selects the current candidate
Ctrl+Up/Down -> Scrolls through the list of candidates
Backspace -> Deletes the character previous to the cursor and suggests again
Directional arrows -> Move cursor and discard suggestions

Who should use it

This kind of assistance technology can have many applications but the main ones are: the usage in small/mobile devices and the assistance of users with disabilities. Both have the same reasons behind: speeding the input and reducing failed characters, because the input required gets minimized;
Of course, you can as well use it in your GNOME desktop regularly for faster typing your emails, etc.

In the case of users with disabilities, a popup menu could be added to show a complete list of candidates and the bound fast-access keys.

Why is Free Software important in this

This is the kind of technology that everybody should have an interest in using a FOSS solution because of the obvious advantage that is developers from all over the world being able to modify it.
Suppose you’re creating a mobile phone and you choose a closed solution to provide text prediction for your phone. And then you find out you’re disappointing all your users from country X because that library you’re paying for does not support their language and the library owner is not interested that much in adding it. Now if you’re using an open solution, local communities from many places in the world can add support for their languages and your phone can have a better acceptance in places you hadn’t even imagined.

Software that reaches an international audience with different languages is software you want to have open.

How to get Predictor Input Method

You can find the Predictor Input Method’s source its Gitorious page: http://gitorious.org/text-predictor-input-method
Of course, you should also install Presage for it to work.

If you are not using GTK+ Input Methods then you can use the wrapper text-predictor.cpp which is not tight to the Input Method code itself. And of course, you can copy the little tricks used on the Input Method code and apply it to your source (like delaying the retrieval of the candidates some fractions of a second to not block the input, etc.).

Hope you like it.