OCRFeeder is now a product on GNOME Bugzilla and it should now be used for filing new issues. OCRFeeder Google Project’s bugtracker should be abandoned then.

So if you have been using OCRFeeder and found some issues or think it’s missing a great feature, go to the following URL and file a new bug:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=ocrfeeder

Thank you for helping the GNOME’s OCR application.

As has become usual every couple of weeks or so, I released a new version of OCRFeeder!

This is version 0.6.1 and the main changes this time are:

* Now you can increase or decrease the zoom using Ctrl+Mouse wheel. This kind of shortcut is well known in many GNOME applications and even I was missing it;
* Warning dialogs are now shown when something went wrong while opening an image;
* Fixed encoding problem when reading non-ASCII characters;
* Fixed error when configuring a new engine;
* Improved Debian package’s files (thanks to Alberto Garcia)
* Fixed zoom issues (sometimes the allowed zoom would not be consistent among tries);

It was a good week on OCRFeeder’s bug tracker, specially thanks to user Hank who reported important problems.

I am really glad about how OCRFeeder is turning out and I expect to make it even better with the help of its users, either by sending suggestions, reporting bugs or simply by using it you will be helping the project.

You can download OCRFeeder 0.6.1 tarball from GNOME FTP or optionally download a Debian package directly.

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!