Jorge Cardoso's Blog

Reactable and Kinect installations at Qualifica 2013

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:35:33 GMT

The School of Arts was asked to develop some multimedia installations for the Catholic University, Porto stands for the Qualifica 2013 fair. We developed two installations: one was a typical Kinect body interaction installation and the other was an information kiosk that used the Reactable Live hardware.

CloudHQ was good, got better - Review

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 23:51:00 GMT

A while back I decided to move all my files from Dropbox to Google Drive. Basically, because Google Drive was much cheaper. I still use Dropbox though, mainly because everybody else still does too and I need to share files with them. However, I didn’t want to have two sync clients running on my machine.

Designing Gestural Interfaces - Review

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 23:50:57 GMT

A good book, but not a great book. The main contribution of the book, I think, is the library of gestural patterns for touchscreens and free form gestures. There are also other interesting chapters such as the one about documenting gestures, and on communicating interactivity for gestural interfaces.

Making Things See - Review

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 23:50:54 GMT

“Making Things See: 3D vision with Kinect, Processing, Arduino, and MakerBot” by Greg Borenstein is about the Kinect. The book covers a lot of what has been done with Kinect’s depth sensor, and shows you how you can do it also. It’s a very complete book that covers topics such working with the depth map, with the point cloud, skeleton, but also things such as generating models for 3d printing.

Scalable Ajax Loading Indicator in SVG

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 23:50:46 GMT

There are plenty of sites to generate animated GIFs to use in AJAX loading processes, for example ajaxload.info, or preloaders.net. These sites allow you generate a plethora of different loading graphics with different color and sizes. However, they generated graphics with a very limited maximum size, which makes the useless if you want a preloader graphic for use in a large public display application.

Cron like digital signage scheduling

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 23:50:43 GMT

My first attempt to create a digital signage player in Google Chrome used a very simple scheduling strategy: define a list of content items to be played, along with the duration for each item, and play each item sequentially. However, this solution is not very flexible as it does not allow different programs during a day. Using a Cron-based scheduler is much more flexible.

Byword

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 23:50:34 GMT

Just found out that Byword “A writing app that gives you just the tools you need to write Markdown and rich text with as little friction as possible.” – Byword website, is now available for iOS. I have been using it for Mac OS X, and it is a very nice app (made by a team of Portuguese guys). I definitely have to check the iOS version out, as I have elected Byword as my new main editor for blog posts (I’m rolling out my semi-automatic html+shell scripting blog system).

Listing a user directory with javascript in a Chrome extension

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 23:50:31 GMT

I have been struggling with a way to get my Google Chrome extension to be able to list a user’s directory in order to automatically load and display files from that directory. It turns out, there is no easy way to list the files in an arbitrary directory in a user’s filesystem using Javascript, even in a Chrome extension. The File API in HTML 5 allows web apps to have their own filesystem, but it is an isolated filesystem so that’s no good. You can actually read the contens of a file using XMLRequest (for example this code from Read local file with XmlHttpRequest - JavaScript - Snipplr Social Snippet Repository does just that):