Just in time for the Desktop Summit 2011, I’ve released the 0.7.6 version of OCRFeeder.

The new interesting stuff in this version is that OCRFeeder can now export to PDF. When exporting the pages to PDF, users will have two choices: “a PDF from scratch” or “a searchable PDF”. The PDF from scratch means that the text part of what will be exported will be written in the PDF using ReportLab whereas the searchable PDF means that the PDF will present the whole original picture but with invisible text overlaid in order to make it searchable.
The PDF exportation still needs some polishing but I wanted to get it out there as soon as possible for the people who need it.
Check out these examples:

(page loaded in OCRFeeder and recognized automatically)

(exported PDF from scratch)

(exported searchable PDF with selected text)

This version also fixes issues when recognizing grayscale pictures as well as the mouse cursor that was being changed when it was over a page’s right margin.

I’ve also added separators to divide the Document’s submenus so they are grouped correctly and I’ve made ODT the first choice in the list of exportation formats, which had been mistakenly changed.

As usual, the incredible team of translators is doing a great job and apart from the updated translations, OCRFeeder now comes in Catalan (with the Valencian option as well) and in Greek.

DesktopSummit

No, once again, OCRFeeder’s talk wasn’t approved by the Desktop Summit’s organization. If you think that I’ve presented it some well known conferences (LinuxTag, GUADEC ES and twice in FOSDEM), it makes me a bit sad that I couldn’t yet present this unique project in the conference of the desktop it targets, but let’s hope it makes it next year.

Still, Igalia is sponsoring me again to attend the DesktopSummit, so, if you’re interested in OCRFeeder or other projects I’m involved, let me know!

See you in Berlin!

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

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

Since last night, SeriesFinale version 0.6.6 should be available for those who have the extras-devel catalog.

This version’s highlights are:

* Live search of shows. Finally it includes a way to quickly filter shows, this is especially useful for those who have a large number of shows in the list.

* Quick access to the next/previous episodes. This was another request from a user, when viewing an episode, add a way to quickly go to the previous or next episode. I have added this by panning/dragging horizontally in the episode view, dragging left or right will bring the next or the previous episode, respectively.

* Switched episodes’ “watched” check-boxes to the right. After adding the portrait mode, it was clear that having the episodes’ check-boxes on the right made more sense for right-handed people. This is now the default position, nevertheless, a new option was included in the settings dialog so users can choose to either have on the right or left.

* Last but not least, Juan has made SF more reliable and fast by saving the database and settings only if they have been changed.

We will keep the list of bugs and feature requests in mind for the SF development (for both Maemo and GNOME) so, you are welcome to submit more.

If you use the extras-testing catalog, be sure to try this new version of SF and vote for it when it appears here.