BlackBerry - The story of a big mistake

If you build your business first because you want to make money, then you may suffer the BlackBerry symptom.

You need to build your business because you want to do good things for people. You have to start a business because you want to make a better World. If you have this in mind, then you will never fail.

BlackBerry did build something in the past and then they thought that the glory will never end. But the World is not like that any more.

Other companies like BlackBerry are BlockBuster, Microsoft (they are now offering Office for Android for free) and in a near future: Apple.

A new report has arrived to BlackBerry and their situation is not getting better. They are in big troubles... Learn to be updated. This is the future and there is no intention of stopping.

WinJS - Javascipt Framework for a Windows 8 look and feel

The WinJS documentation.

WinJS (GitHub: winjs / winjs, License: Apache 2.0) is a new UI-oriented library from Microsoft for developing cross-platform applications with JavaScript.

Microsoft have been pushing WinJS applications for a while as Windows 8 apps that are written with JavaScript instead of what we typically think of as .NET programming languages. This library is a set of UI controls that support desktop and mobile devices, and also some modern JavaScript APIs for things we’ve come to expect: promises, networking, data binding, and templates.

The UI style fits in with Windows 8, and although WinJS applications should run in modern browsers, there’s talk of specific support for Windows Phone 8 and other Microsoft platforms in the future.

There’s an announcement post on the Microsoft News Center:

Today we’re also announcing that Microsoft Open Technologies has brought the Windows Library for JavaScript (WinJS) cross-platform apps and is open sourcing it under the Apache 2.0 license. Find the source code on GitHub. Use this powerful Windows development framework to build high-quality web apps across a variety of browsers and devices beyond Windows, including Chrome, Firefox, Android, and iOS.

Some corners of the UI widgets still need aesthetic attention – the date and time pickers don’t look particularly great on Chrome on my Mac. But the APIs seem consistent and similar to other popular open source projects.

If you’re looking to make Windows 8-style applications and love JavaScript, then this is definitely worth following. The added benefit is you can run these web apps in non-Microsoft browsers as well.

Framework7 - Develop iOS Apps for the Web

http://www.idangero.us/framework7/

Make responsive auto-sized grids in your HTML projects

GridList is a drag and drop library for a two-dimensional resizable and responsive list of items. An agnostic GridList class that manages the two-dimensional positions from a list of items within a virtual matrix. A jQuery plugin built on top of the GridList class that translates the generic items positions into responsive DOM elements with drag and drop capabilities.

https://github.com/uberVU/grid

Please note that the current implementation is for a horizontal grid. This means that the number of rows is configurable, whereas columns extend dynamically, based on the number, size and position of items placed inside the grid.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://ubervu.github.io/grid/
License: Apache 2.0 License

Cool CSS Effects for image transition

Really cool. A must-see work.

Item Transition Inspiration | Demo 1: Small Component   Item Transition Inspiration | Demo 1: Small Component   http://tympanus.net/Development/ItemTransitions/   View Now

CSS only cool animated menu

Slide And Push Menus With CSS3 Transitions   Slide and push menus that are initially hidden off screen, and transition into view with CSS transitions.   http://callmenick.com/tutorial-demos/slide-push-men…   View Now

Android Simlator on Windows

I just found a new Android simulator which can run on Windows:

Run Android on Windows -- Windroy, Android with Windows kernel   Windroy is Android running with Windows kernel!   http://www.socketeq.com/   View Now

It''s much better than the previous one I have:

http://www.bluestacks.com/   View Now

The OCR World

I didn't know that OCR was in so many troubles...

I'm doing some research on OCR technology because I have to use it in a project right now.
But all the Open Sources alternatives are really crappy. They show on videos and make promises about something is not real.

I understand, of course. After all it's Open Source... Payed apps work much better.. As usual.

I'll post now this Javascript API (Open Source) which does not work excellent but it's a good start and a very valuable work.

http://kdzwinel.github.io/JS-OCR-demo/

Check a video on how the developer came to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzXcBBC1J8
And this other video introducing his final work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttn437BlEbo

I'll update this blog as soon as I find something interesting on any platform (Android or Javascript)

** UPDATE **

Well, after fighting a bit with ALL the important and most professional OCR APIs out there (I was looking for something good for Android and/or Javascript), I finally will keep this one:

https://github.com/rmtheis/android-ocr

Which is based on Tesseract...

You can also download an APK form Google Play and test it.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.sfsu.cs.orange.ocr

For my project, I just need to recognize numbers. So I had to do a small tweak to get it done:

1) Download and build the project.
2) Go to the OCRTest Android project and open the following clas:

edu.sfsu.cs.orange.ocr.OcrCharacterHelper

3) Move down to the line number 217 (approx) you will see the whitelisted chars defined for recognition (and for the English language). Something like:

else if (languageCode.equals("eng")) { return "!?@#$%&*()<>_-+=/.,:;'\"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789"; } // English

You should comment that part and replace it for this one:

else if (languageCode.equals("eng")) { return "0123456789"; } // English

And that's it! The process will handle only numbers.