Alcides Fonseca

Apple did had a great vision buying Coverflow from SteelSkies. It is impressive and very user-friendly for managing images. Now imagine this for Flickr Images! Here you go… “Wooow…” you say.

Well I had this idea a while ago and I tried to do it with Javascript. I used my favorite JS library Prototype and as I don’t have much free time, I used Reflex.js for the coverflow effect.

I then wrote a simple Python cgi file to fetch the images from you flickr account and a javascript file to go through them. Nothing special. You might want to check out the final result.

Well, I believe this can be improvable, maybe making it easy to access other photos than yours (if you know the API is pretty simple) and add more than 3 photos (reflex.js limitation) so we can experience full effect (this might be a little more complex). I am also using the thumbnails from flickr because I want them to be fixe-size square, but using Python ou PHP+GD, we could make it work using larger images.

If you feel like working on this, talk to me and feel free to use the source code for any purpose.

In a world where GTD matters to everyone, Sérgio came up with an idea: Why wouldn’t we use twitter to record some notes? Since you have twitter in almost every platform (mobile phone, PDA, desktop (windows,mac,linux), web, you name it!) it is a good way of posting messages from anywhere and use the API to organize them.

That’s what he did the last week. Started a Rails project, added Twitter4r and a bunch of pluggins and coded a bit lot. As for me, I just made the design and artwork. The layout was based on twitter’s since twitternotes users are used to it.

So, go ahead to http://www.twitternotes.com and login. Then use your favorite twitter client and post something like + i have to tell everyone about twitternotes and that’s it! And you will even tag that message with “twitternotes”. Simpler is impossible!

Microblogging is becoming more and more used by people in this new Social Web. Twitter arrived and made millions of fans. It was such a success they had problems escalating. Taking advantage of that downtimes, Jaiku got many users to switch over to them, giving them more features. IMO, jaiku is my personal aggregator, not a microblogging service. I sticked to twitter, but had its feed in my jaiku webpage. Only if the feed was updated more frequently…

Some time ago Kevin Rose, the kid from Digg, and his team (including my dream girl) came up with this microblogging system with Messages, Files, Links and Events that I find very interesting. Only one disadvantage: It only works from the web or the AIR app that cannot be minimized to tray. Thankfully they are getting a public API avaiable soon. In the meanwhile, some guys managed to hack the API used by the desktop app and made a python module.

Well, using this and Python-Twitter, I made a small script that updates both your Twitter and Pownce status at the same time. And a plus: if you enter a url in the message, it will add it as a link in Pownce ;)

Give it a try and comment with feedback please. If it has some success, I’ll probably do some graphical interface, a jabber/msn bot and in the future add the combined list from both your Twitter and Pownce friends.

In the between of my paid projects, I managed to get a time to work on my Pungi ultramicrowebframework. Thanks to Nuno Mariz and his dispatcher I managed to get it working on a MVC way that is so hype right now.

I like to develop my frameworks while doing some project that uses it, so I can evaluate it’s strengths and weaknesses better. So I started on an idea that haven’t left my head until then: How much hype does a word have?

With services like Del.icio.us, Technorati, Flickr and so many others, information is being tagged and available for everyone. Well, BUZZwords just gets the results from that word in all of those services, and applies my special formula (not quite just summing them all :P) and returns the hype value for that word.

I later made the page more pretty and added the bars that can make the information more readable at first sight. However there is still a todo: Make a page for each word with it’s evolution through time and the top results from the services used. Oh, and I’m thinking of adding another services, but for example Digg doesn’t uses tags, but I can still perform a search for a word. Would that be a reliable value to consider?

I’ve been skipping posting in the last days because I’ve been working on a few projects. One of them is now working online and you can see it at http://pythonlovers.com. It’s an python-related aggregator (handcoded) and there already some writers I have invited. If you care about python, you should subscribe this feed in which you’ll learn something useful for sure.

If you have a blog and you post about python (not necessarily python-only), please mail me ;)

According to Sérgio, I’m addicted to twitter. I think it’s no big deal, but thanks to that, I made my first Windows Mobile application.

It is not a fully twitter client, because it uses the m.twitter.com inside the browser, but has notifications and I think it has all the basic needs to twit in your Pocket PC devide.

You can give it a try but remember is only a alpha version. Feedback is appreciated.

Soon I will make a less webby version of Mobile Twitter.

Feedbox is a project of my partner at ideias3, Sérgio Santos. It is a kind of RSS aggregator with rating, but can also be avaiable in a box to use at your own website (future feature).

Check it out at http://feedbox.ideias3.com.


In the meanwhile, I'm am working on Ideias3's main website. News coming up soon.