One of the things I like to do the most is to create graphical user interfaces (and I referring more to desktop programming here than web).
Not just the design but the whole stuff. It is the way you have in programming to transform something complex in an easy and pleasant tool to use.

We all know how to do some scratches in a paper to come up with the looks for a new interface. Some time ago I was told about paper prototyping and it is a nice, fast and easy way for testing an interface for usability.

Here are some images and a book about the subject. This article is also pretty good and you can find a number of videos of people demonstrating how it’s done on YouTube.

Give your shot on paper prototyping!

I had the pleasure to meet Jono Bacon in the open source event aLANtejo last year! Quite a cool guy and a metal lover!

He’s created a solo project - Severed Fifth - a while ago to explore the new way of distributing music and I’ve been following his updates on it.

Today, he released his debut album Denied By Reign which I am gonna listen to right away.

Get your copy here and let your hears enjoy free metal!!

Regarding my enrollment in the SAPO Summerbits program, I created a media filter for DSpace called OCR4DSpace.

With this media filter you are able to submit document images (scanned documents) and be able to search for their contents without having to fill them manually at submission time. The image contents are read by the OCR engines you have on your system.

The media filter is really simple to configure and use and hopefully will make some people’s life easier!

The web page is currently only in Portuguese but will be translated to English soon but rest your soul, the README is included in English.

To checkout the code, all you need is to run:

svn co svn://svn.softwarelivre.sapo.pt/ocrd/trunk/OCR4DSpace

Read the README file carefully and enjoy the automation that Optical Character Recognition can do for you!

Portugal needs more events like these, I hope next year more companies will join SAPO and Associação Ensino Livre and bring up the second edition of Summerbits with more projects!

Recently I acquired two incredible games for my beloved PSP - Echochrome and N+.

Echochrome is a game where you control the scenario which is based on M. C. Escher’s puzzles to make the little guys reach some goal.

N+ remembers our sweet days of Elastomania but this time you are a little ninja that uses his acrobatics to dodge from missile and robots from hell and the goal is to open the door and exit the level.

You should try these!

If you are looking forward to buy one of the many available tiny cute netbooks, you should check this article that gives an overview about each analyzed machine.