an ordinary blog — andr3.net

Last post on the subject of Codebits, I promise.

I'll dive right in. Here's a basic overview of what I did over there.

First, I'll leave you a quick index, to help you navigate through the post: Mobitags — GeoTourism — Estante.
(be careful when using inside an RSS reader, it will take you to my website)

As soon as I sat down in front of my trusty laptop (soon to be replaced, sorry dude) I went through my notes to see what idea I would pick up first. I had scribbled down on my moleskine a couple of ideas I had had through the previous week. First up? A very simple script that grabbed a feed from a user of SAPO Tags (sort of del.icio.us or ma.gnolia, the latter being my favorite) and display it using QR codes. Thus came to be...

Mobitags!

I'm not very imaginative when it comes to names, I know.

You can see it working here: http://codebits.andr3.net/mobitags/.

Here's a screenshot:

Click for a bigger version. Use it with a Phone + Kawya Reader to see it action.

As I mentioned on my 90 sec. presentation, this was a pretty quick hack (under an hour, including walking around the venue thinking and talking to Pedro) which I thought would be the tone of the competition. I didn't think so many people would go up there and show entire products, polished and all. No biggie. I don't take myself that seriously to be worried about presenting a less-than-useful hack on stage.

I did however, learned a valuable lesson. No matter what, always prepare your presentation. Not until 15 minutes before the start of the presentations did I realize I wouldn't have a webcam on-stage. I would want people to see the mobile phone converting the code to a valid URL and opening it. I took quick snapshots on my webcam but they were too lousy to use.

On top of all that, I forgot to plug the ethernet cable to the laptop! Since I presented on Pedro's laptop and he didn't have built-in wifi, I was Internet-less on stage, presenting a demo which required to fetch a live feed (the cache I used had a ttl of only 1 minute.) Great! When it failed, I pulled a printed paper out of my pocket and proceeded to make a fool out of myself.

I (think I) mentioned it would be cool to have, at a conference, a screen giving out links to mobile websites regarding each speaker/presentation. It works great on screens. Papers? Only if well lit. However, I did forget to mention this can be easier to explain than teaching people to open up browser, look for an address input option and navigate to some long URL.

Like so: "1. Click this icon here (Kaywa Reader). 2. Point at the mark and click. 3. Bang! You're in!".

This basically grabs a feed and spits the images corresponding to each item's link. If you wish to have the code or if you want me to allow specifying a specific feed instead of leaving this attached to SAPO Tags, let me know. :)

GeoTourism

Apart from that, I teamed up with Nuno Loureiro and Carlos Pires to try and leverage the information spit out by the GIS SAPO webservice. Powerful resource! Expect great things to be built on top of it.

Our idea was... group all the GIS categories (through a quick card-sorting at high hours) and allow users to "search" all Points of Interest by District. We would then show some information gathered from Wikipedia and on top of that fetch pictures of said location through the Geographic search on Flickr.

It would answer the questions: What's to see? What is it? Where is it? And what does it look like?

After some hard work on behalf of Carlos to extract information from Wikipedia and some feed re-hashing (XML from GIS into GeoRSS), we managed to plot POIs in a Yahoo Maps, since SAPO Mapas doesn't support GeoRSS.

We hit a wall – or should I say, I did – on Flickr. The bastards wouldn't return any hit when I provided geo coordinates from pictures on Flickr World Map. No matter what the precision, it would never return a single photo!

Carlos ended up presenting it as it was, albeit incomplete. Kudos to him.

(sorry, no screenshots of this. Maybe later)

Estante

Meanwhile, while talking to Pedro we ended up choosing our project. We would take advantage of Amazon Web Services (the catalogue part) and SAPO Webmail for Login and Address Book contacts.

In a nutshell, it's a service that allows you to build up your stock/portfolio/collection/whatever of CDs, DVDs and Books. It searches Amazon and presents you the covers.

After adding to your collection, you can then lend items to friends on your SAPO Webmail Address Book. Both of you should receive notification and you could schedule a deadline for returning the item. You and him/her would then be notified.

On top of that, we allowed you to search SAPO Fotos with automatically generated tags, based on your collection. For instance, search photos of Cure or Pearl Jam and you could find people who are into the same music as you are. As Pedro put it quite well on stage, a sort of manual social network, sort of. hehe

The 90 second elevator-pitch went well, not without some glitches. Pedro's laptop was stubborn and would not show any video. They skipped him a couple of times until lo and behold! there it was, Estante in all its glory! Our idea was to keep the input as simple as possible and as Paulo Trezentos – who I confused for someone from Outsystems! So sorry about that – told us right after Pedro sat down, it would be awesome if we could send messages via email to lend an item to someone. We told him that was our plan. To allow different gateways for the service. (We received some more positive feedback.)

Well, if you watched the 90 sec pitch and thought "hey, I could use that", be glad. Pedro and I decided even before the presentation that we would continue to develop Estante after Codebits, no matter what.

Mário Valente has given us some tips and for the next couple of months I should talk about this again. We'll try to build a good way of creating a catalogue and record the lending of your own items to friends. We don't want to hear about people losing their CDs or DVDs just because they forgot who has them. (It happens to everyone)

Disclaimer: we know about the desktop app for the Mac, Delicious Library. I love it, it's a great piece of software. But it's hermetic. It's closed down on each other's desktop. We want to open it up! Allow people to interact with their collection of items from everywhere! Exhibit your last purchases... etc. We are open to suggestions, so let us have it! Good or bad.

Anyway, here's a screenshot of the service.

And that's it. Now I'd like to share some lessons I learned during this great amazing outstanding awesome event. The Eddie Izzard kind of 'awesome'.

Lessons learned

• Get some sleep! I decided to stay the whole night, only laying down for 1-2 hours of sleep. Big mistake. The following day I saw pretty much every one live and fresh. I was more zombie-like. It felt totally uncomfortable and I wasn't up to par when my time came up to present my project in 90 seconds. I was everything but focused.
• Choose ONE project and focus! I thought there would be more small hacks. That's why I did mobitags. I then enrolled on two other teams. Which, when the time was coming up, I was like a madman running here and there, merging and deploying stuff. Stressful times on a non-stressed event? No thanks. I also felt I didn't give my best to any of the teams. Sorry guys.
• Leave some time to Network. Yes, don't spend all your time at the PC. The only networking I did was with guys I already knew. I talked to Fred, Pedro Mendes, André Ribeirinho, Bruno Pedro and all the guys from work. Not many *new* connections. Bummer.

That's all folks!

I'm scouring the web for projects that came out of SAPO Codebits, so if you have one, let us know about it.