For those who didn’t notice, last week SeriesFinale finally got promoted to Extras which are very good news and now SeriesFinale 0.5 has been just released!

Why is this edition so special? Because it will from now on retrieve images for the shows and its seasons.
This morning I finally took the time to check how to retrieve those and I really like the way SeriesFinale looks like now. Of course, this means that the next shows update you do will start retrieving all the images for your shows and seasons which might take, let’s say, a while. Still, don’t worry because once it gets the images, next time you update, only the general information will be retrieved.

I’ve also fixed the slowness when panning the different content views. Panning should now be much more fluid.

Another good thing in this edition is that the tiny episodes’ checkbox still looks tiny but it’s in fact larger and this means you can much more easily tap on it to mark episodes.

Juan, the maintainer of the Diablo version and a colleague of mine at Igalia, sent patches for including the season number together with the episode number, so it shows like “2×05″ which is more useful than just the episode’s number.
He also pointed a bug when adding a show  manually, which got fixed for this release as well.

Here are a couple of screenshots showing what you’ll see soon (I just finished sending the packages to the server) in your favorite mobile phone:

SeriesFinale with shows' art

SeriesFinale with seasons' art

(I didn’t have time to update or integrate any translations in this version but I’m planning to have it done for the next one so I apologize for any inconvenience.)

I have just release a new version of SeriesFinale.

For this 0.4 version there is a very useful and requested feature: Update All!
Now you will be able to update all the TV shows by just clicking a button instead of having to go show by show and waiting for each one to be updated. As you see on the screenshots below, the shows view now also displays the next episode to watch plus, when updating the shows, feedback on the shows that are finished updating is given by a banner.

You’ll also notice that initializing and quitting the application is now much faster. This happens because as for the shows’ updates, the loading and saving of the database is now run on a different thread.

There was also a bug when manually editing an episode, which is now fixed.
Another bug you might have experienced was duplicated episode entries. It usually happened when there were placeholder episodes named “TBD”, since SF was using the episodes’ names to compare them, when the “TBD” episode was updated with the correct but different name, a new episode would be added instead… I removed the name checking from the comparison and now two episodes are the same if they have the same number and same season number.

Also, you might have noticed that the TV shows view scrolls really slowly. Today I found why such happens and will try to have it fixed for the next release.

As usual, you can find SeriesFinale code on its Gitorious project and expect this new version to appear soon on an AppManager next to you.

I hope you like this version as much as I do!

I was disappointed with the text completion provided by the N900 (eZiText) that, on top of that, is closed and I wondered if it was possible to have an Open Source solution to provide text prediction and completion.

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:

FOSDEM was really nice this year. Still too many interesting presentations to attend than our physical condition allows but that’s life.

Like I announced on my last post, I gave two presentations there and I am glad with both of them. People seemed really interested in OCRFeeder and I hope they try it out, send me feedback and spread the word about it.
I could personally meet P. Christeas, who had send me a patch for it, and listen to the questions and suggestions of people about how OCRFeeder works.

I must say the most impressive presentation I attended was by  Professor Andrew Tanenbaum himself, about MINIX 3, what a beautiful piece of software it seems.
If you have not attended it, maybe you can watch the video recording once it is available.
Later on I had a nice chat with him regarding web browsers on MINIX and the real portability of applications that are said to be multi-platform.

Here are the slides for the presentations I gave:

Looking forward for FOSDEM 2011!

… and also, this year I giving two presentations there.

I’m presenting OCRFeeder in the GNOME DevRoom and SeriesFinale in the Embedded/Mobile DevRoom!

I just love FOSDEM, the spirit of it, the number of important Open Source projects in there and the city of Brussels!

If you wanna have a chat about OCRFeeder, SeriesFinale, Hildon Input Methods, Rancho (for Django folks), Igalia or other important Open Source projects, while drinking a nice Belgian beer, let me know!

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!

Yesterday I finally uploaded the changes I had locally committed in my git clone of SeriesFinale and send them also for building in the extras repository of Maemo.

The 0.3 version has the following changes:

Added extra information to tree views

While you can enter the list of episodes and check what’s the next you need to watch, it is boring to need to navigate so much just to check this, so I added some extra information to the shows and seasons views. Basically now you’ll readily know how many seasons you have in a show, how many episodes you are left to watch, what’s the next one to go and which seasons/shows are completely watched.

SeriesFinale 0.3 seasons view

Added configuration file handling and episodes order recall

Paco Zafra, a SeriesFinale user, asked for the app to remember his episodes’ sorting preferences and with this version it will start doing so. Hope you like it Paco.
This also means it now stores an XML file with these preferences and will do it for other future preferences added to the program.

i18n:

With this release I also added support for internationalization and included the Portuguese translation already.
You can contribute to SeriesFinale by sending me a .po file translated in your language.

SeriesFinale 0.3 in Portuguese

Apart from the changes above, several code improvements were made.

The update should be arriving at you N900 any time soon.

Hope you like it!

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!

Last weekend was a long weekend in Spain with two holidays and I took the chance to go south to Portugal with my girlfriend and meet my family and friends who I was missing.