As promised, I’ve added the original air dates of the episodes to SeriesFinale.

This feature had been requested since people first knew of SeriesFinale and it is quite useful. It will tell you, by the color and actual date information, when a show’s episode was first aired in its network. Of course if you happen to watch a show on another network (usually this happens if you’re not from the same country as the TV show itself), then you won’t need this date to warn you to go sit and watch it but at least you see which episodes were already aired on their original country.

This release has not many changes apart from the date thing plus a couple of bug fixed and the Spanish translation (thanks to Juan A. Suárez Romero).

(By the way, as I write this, TheTVDB seems to be down so you are likely to have some trouble updating your shows and getting the air dates on it but I hope it will be up again soon)

Here are a few screenshots:

I have been working for the past months in Hildon Input Methods (HIM) and many things have changed in it (and many will) with only a target in mind: make the experience of typing in N900, physically or virtually, a great experience.
Still, one thing I dislike in HIM is the fact that it is semi-closed source. Now what’s this semi-closed source thingy? It means that some modules are open, others are closed (HIM is a complex project).

(this is not the project logo)

For the open ones, and have you failed noticing it, the sad truth was that they were updated from time to time. No open development was done… but this has changed!
Since last week, HIM’s open source modules are now developed “in the open”, using Gitorious (thanks to Kimmo)!
The modules are hildon-input-method and hildon-input-method-framework.

This constitutes another step of freedom inside Fremantle and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

I’ve just released OCRFeeder 0.6.

This new version introduces the following changes:

* Hide import pdf and unpaper menus if the respective commands are not available
* Several code improvements
* Removed Studio from the application name
* Removed unneeded engines folder
* Lowered the package name font case
* Updated copyright notice on the about dialog
* Swedish translation (thanks to Daniel Nylander)

Another very important change is that I moved the development of OCRFeeder to the GNOME infrastructure.
This means I’m using GNOME’s git server and will soon use GNOME Bugzilla to track bugs.
I always thought of OCRFeeder as a unique Free Software application (in the way that there isn’t anyone similar to it) and that it would be great to get it more involved with our favorite desktop environment.

I’d like to thank Claudio for supporting me on this move.

You can get the latest source from GNOME FTP.

What’s up folks!? I hope everybody is enjoying some good holidays or getting prepared to do so soon.

As for me, I am currently in Portugal to spend Christmas with my family and I have just released a new version of OCRFeeder, its 0.5 version. This will be the last version released in 2009.

So, what’s new in version 0.5?

Hongde Liu (刘洪德), a Chinese user, was kind enough to provide me with the Simplified Chinese translation of OCRFeeder.
This will hopefully allow more GNOME users from China to use what is the most complete Open Source OCR application for GNOME.

The engines Tesseract, Ocrad and GOCR are now automatically detected from the system when no engines are configured.
Regarding the OCR engines, some verifications were also introduced to prevent errors when no engines are used.

The bounding boxes are now restricted to be dragged inside the image’s limits, that is, it will no longer allow a box to be dragged beyond the image’s borders.

For users interested in the development, the Makefile now features the generatepot and compilemessages commands which generate the application’s pot file and compile a po file given its language code, respectively.
I plan to replace all minidom code by ElementTree, so, since this version, the feeder module is uses ElementTree.

As usual, get OCRFeeder’s source from Gitorious or download a Debian package.

SeriesFinale seems to have had a good reception by the community. I didn’t imagine that such a simple app could please to so many people, or more particularly, that so many people would have issues with keeping up with TV series’ episodes. I’m happy for having written it.

(SeriesFinale together with some of the community apps I use)

So, in the middle of last week I uploaded the version 0.1 to extras devel repository after solving the Debian package generation within the Scratchbox (Lizardo, from PyMaemo, helped me on this and wrote a helpful FAQ entry to the PyMaemo website). Still, the repository builder kept using Python 2.3 to build the package just like the problem I had on Scratchbox… tried again to push some changes and build it and still: fail! In the end I just gave up using CDBS for the package generation and edited the template of dh_make directly. Luckily, having a working Python setup script cuts part of the work (I like writing software, not packaging it!) and about the failed attempts, that’s what extras devel are for anyway…

Now version 0.2.1 is the one you can install and not call me ugly names afterwards
This version should have been available since last week but apparently there was some kind of problem in the Extras Devel repository and some apps weren’t made available until yesterday.

What does version 0.2.1 brings apart from working out of the Application Manager?

* Added mark all/none menus to the episode list view (suggested by Paco Zafra on the comments to my last post)
* The configurations folder is now stored under /home/user/.osso . My co-worker Calvaris suggested this to me since it will include the folder when you backup the device. And don’t worry with the current configurations you have now because I added a script to move the old folder automatically to the new location after this package is installed.
* Code improvements, among them, corrected local paths inclusion in sys path (for developing and running)

For the next version I plan to enhance the visual of things a bit (how or what lies in my brain currently) and to introduce translation files.

Add your suggestions as comments to this post or sent them by email to me.

Have a nice weekend!