Text labels in Trello

In the last years, for all my projects, personal and non-personal ones, I relied on Trello, the famous dashboard tool based on cards and boards.

What I really like about Trello is how it lets you see the state of a project, from various (all) its point of views, from all its contexts, in a glimpse, in a visual way. It is beautifully designed to let you do so.

One of the habits I started to adopt is the use of text labels in my cards.

I don’t use them as a substitute of the labelling system of Trello but I find them useful as a starting point to order the cards across the lists.

Trello test board

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Andersen Festival for Muzei – Source Code

As I wrote in the previous post, I made a plugin for the Muzei Live Wallpaper of Roman Nurik, containing the portraits of Hans Christian Andersen, made by illustrators who will held an exhibition at the Andersen Festival.

You can find the plugin in the Play Store; it is an open source project (licensed under Apache v2) and you can find the source code in my github repository.

Please note that I don’t own the portraits, so you won’t find the assets (the images) with those illustrations in the repository: it won’t compile at first but I wrote a readme in the assets folder with a list of the missing files.

Hans Christian Andersen by Matilde Martinelli

In this post I will explain some aspects about writing a plugin for Muzei.

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Andersen Festival for Muzei

For the Andersen Festival, 14 illustrators will held an exhibit where they will show their drawings depicting 14 fables of Hans Christian Andersen.

In these days preceding the festival, they have drawn portraits of Andersen himself, to delight us during the waiting.

I liked them so much that, with the artists’ blessing, I have gathered all these portraits in a plugin for Muzei, you can find it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.luongbui.andersenfestival.muzei

Please remember that you have to install Muzei first: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.nurik.roman.muzei

This is an initial release and not all the artists are present, yet.

I will release the source code under an open source license: if interested, check this blog for updates.

Update: read the next post for the source code!

Pure Data for libGDX

In the last months I dwelled a bit in the game development world, playing around with libGDX and Spine 2D.

I think that they are really good for 2D games (especially if you want to support Android and iOS) and that they perform very well in renderings and animations.

However I think that libGDX support for audio can be improved a bit.

Don’t get me wrong: libGDX has a good support for audio but I miss the days when I played around with Pure Data.

So I decided to write a small libGDX backend for libpd, the famous library that turns Pure Data into an embeddable audio synthesis library.

The repository is called pd-for-libgdx and you can find it in my github: https://github.com/manhluong/pd-for-libgdx.

It’s open source, Apache v 2.0.

Technically I just wrote a thin layer that let you call pd-for-andoid and pd-for-ios, through bindings of RoboVM‘s Bro, from your platform-specific libGDX projects.

The backend is still a work in progress (actually it supports only Android and iOS) but it already let you play sounds, like in the pianotest project:

This backend is designed to be used from source, cloning the repository and adding the projects and dependencies to your Eclipse workspace.

Also, keep in mind that I am still using the old way how libGDX handle the projects. That means no Gradle, for now.

Please read futher if you want to know how to use the backend and for some technical details about libGDX.

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We need an “OpenStack for the Internet of Things”

Monday morning thought: we need some sort of OpenStack for the Internet of Things.

While at hardware level we’ve got the Arduino Yun, I think that we have to stay open all the way to the API providers.

I think that Temboo is very powerful and useful but I already have doubts when I have to rely on other APIs for my web projects.

Adding a layer to the APIs, while is technically an advantage, can lead to additional lock-in problems.

MusicInk: I am no longer in the team

Public service announcement.

Starting from today, I am no longer in the team of MusicInk, as I am beginning other projects.

So, please, don’t foward me any questions regarding that project, as I can’t answer anymore.

The site has been updated accordingly (temporarly).

Circuit stamping: a follow up

Alessandro Contini made it!

After Rome Maker Faire, he continued to play with the stamps:


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Making sense

Update: thank you everyone for your comments in the Hack a Day post!

In these days I am in Rome, for the european edition of the Maker Faire, because a project I contributed to (MusicInk), got selected.

Now is the night of the first day of the faire, reserved only to schools, and although I am exhausted, I got a very nice moment at the faire so I am writing this post in an attempt to crystalize it and share it.
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Peng! With flashlight support

One way to easily find your phone in the dark is to turn on the flashlight, if your device has one. So now Peng let you turn it on and off with a dedicated menu item.
Peng
Not all devices has the flashlight and the Pebble watchapp most take account of that. So the relative menu item displays three statuses: turned on, turned off and not available.
When not available, the user can still press SELECT to manually send a check to the phone, in case the flashlight is not detected for some reason.
Peng Flashlight
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