Foi lançado hoje um novo portal português destinado aos mais novos. É o Sapo Kids! Além de diversos conteúdos lúdicos e didácticos reunidos a partir dos diversos serviços do mundo Sapo, conta com parcerias como a Porto Editora ou até mesmo o MIT.
Realço a integração do Scratch no portal. O Scratch que nasceu no MIT permite aos mais novos criarem animações interactivas de forma simples e divertida enquanto aprendem. O Sapo Kids tem a plataforma Scratch totalmente em Português, tornando-a ainda mais atractiva às crianças portuguesas.
Antes mesmo do projecto criar raízes em Portugal já existia uma escola pioneira a utilizar o sistema do MIT. Espero que outras lhe sigam o exemplo agora com este portal Português.
Mais informações no site http://kids.sapo.pt
In the last day of Shift’08 Conference I attended to a session about a project of investigation that I really liked. The speakers (authors of the project) weren’t good speakers and had difficulties to “sell the product”, but the project itself and their idea really pleased me. What is it?
TODAY is a piece of generative design for mobile phones.
It’s an application that visualizes personal mobile communication. It sits on the periphery of the machine, monitoring our connectivity through the number and type of calls we receive, subtly displaying them back to us, in the form of a generative graphic. Here, the visual result is a figurative and seemingly abstract picture – the story of your day. Some days will be really colorful and wired, others quieter and more reflective, either way the resulting visuals will always be personal, unrepeatable and unique.
They have a set of rules used in the creation of the elements of each drawing. Bellow you can have a taste of the main rules.
When I talked about this project to some people they were like “And what’s the use of it? Seems silly…” As far as I am concerned: NONE!!! But it is art! It is not meant to have an use. It is pretty and meaningful. Your day recorded in an image. Brilliant concept. That’s it. No “features”. This project gets funds from the Portuguese Ministry of Culture!
This software is free and it is available for download. The only drawback is that it targets only Symbian… When someone in the audience asked the authors about porting to other platforms they told that iPhone or Android would be great, but in the iPhone would be difficult to get information about your communications, so Android would be a nice option.
I was really sad that they didn’t even mentioned Windows Mobile, which I consider to be a great platform for development that is growing everyday. I haven’t ever tried something like this, but my feeling is that it wouldn’t be that difficult to get information regarding calls log and SMS’ log on a Windows Mobile powered phone.
Try this software if you can, really. Unfortunatly I won’t be able to… TODAY, Mobile Application.
Probably I haven’t mentioned before, but after my Qtek S200 crashed a few months ago, I’ve bought an HTC Diamond. At first it was a little slow and battery consuming, but 3 days after I bought it, HTC released a new ROM for TMN customers which solved those issues. Great timing I had. 
Yesterday I tried a new version of a tool I didn’t know about. It is called GPS Cycle and it uses your built-in GPS receiver to track your position and draw a graph.
But the feature that I really like, is the ability to save your path into a file which can be read by applications such as Google Earth. This way you can review your tracking, if you go for a walk by foot or bicycle , or something like that.
If you enable the geo-referenced photographs in your phone, you can decorate your path with those pictures (with some additional work).
GPS Cycle is available at the XDA Developers Forum. You can enable the geo-referencing in your photos in HTC Diamond using Diamond Tweak. (Other devices that have builtin GPS have similar tools that change some register keys).
New great service available!
Create a spreadsheet, define some fields in your table and then share this spreadsheet as a form that users can fill out. When they do that, they add a line to your spreadsheet. It is pretty simple to setup.
More information on the Official Google Docs Blog.
Some time ago I’ve found an nice Silverlight 1.0 application which is now part of Silverlight.net Showcase. It is an open source configurable slide show application. The configuration is made by using XML or inline javacript (using JSON - JavaScript Object Notation).
See the live demo in Vertigo’s website. I had some issues while trying it on Firefox. The problem was Silverlight 1.1 September Alpha Refresh. So, in Internet Explorer it runs well with the 1.1 version, but to run it on Firefox you must have the stable 1.0 version.
This project is also hosted in Codeplex.
