Albaplata Project first screenshots

As some readers of this blog may know , my company ArSol Software was hired by Igo Software to develop several multimedial units about culture and historic sites of Extremadura state on Spain.

To develop this project, I hired three squeakers from here, Argentina, and I'm really very happy with the results. The team is geographically disperse and I coordinated the work only by Internet, using mostly mail and some chat. Thanks you guys Alejandro, Javier and Francisco by your fantastic work!.

IGO Software provided the graphical, video and audio resources and we built the units (one Squeak application by unit) using the framework FMA, originally developed by Diego Gómez Deck.

Each unit will be available on 3 languages (Spanish, English and Portuguese) and will run on touch screens on different places of the Extremadura state. The target users are the tourists that want to have a quick trip by the historical sites, before doing the real trip.

All this project is yet in development phase, but we want to share thiese first screens of some of the units, until the moment that the Consejería de Cultura de la Junta de Extremadura release the complete applications.

The topics covered by the project are (with the names on spanish, to avoid translations errors):

• Centro de Interpretación del Ferrocarril en Extremadura
• Centro de Interpretación de la Ciudad Medieval de Plasencia
• Centro de Interpretación del Campamento Romano de Cáceres el Viejo
• Centro de Interpretación de la minería en Extremadura
• Centro de Interpretación del Circo Romano
• Centro de Interpretación de los Conjuntos Históricos en Extremadura
• Centro de Interpretación del Pintor Zurbarán

These units show different sort of games, as trivia and puzzles, that the user must follow, learning lot of details of each topic. A voice help is available on any topic, to help responding.

As usual on the Extremadura projects, all the software is open sourced and is available to download from Squeaksource, under the name Albaplata project.

How to change the Aida/Web banner

I'm in the way of use and learn Aida/Web and Scribo and I'm starting using Scribo as wiki.

In this way I need to learn a lot of things, and I will post here some small "how to's" of things that may be useful to other people in the same way as me.

After install all the needed packages in a Squeak image, and having Scribo running, the first thing may be desirable may be to change the Aida banner for an own one.

Then, you need to "save as" such banner and generate a new image of the same size that which you saved, decorate it with your own graphics and then do the following:

1. Evaluate in a workspace on your Aida image:

WebStyle new importImage: 'aidabannergif' from: 'aidabannergif.gif'.

were aidabanner.gif is the name of the graphics file on your image directory and #aidabannergif the name of the method to be created on the WebStyle class under the category imgs.

2. Replace the content of the method #aidaBannerGif of class DefaultWebStyle with the content of the recent created in the step 1 and it's all.

To end, you should delete the method #aidabannergif on class WebStyle to maintain your image as clean as possible.

Of course, this is the quick and dirty method to have things as fast as possible, but the correct way should be create your own webstyle. Surely I will talk about this topic sooner or later.

Smalltalk/X site revamped

Yesterday, after a comment from Janko Mivšek (the author of Aida/Web), about a new port of his product, this time to Smalltalk/X I felt the need of visit the Exept Software AG site, that don't visited from a long time.

Was great to check that the site was completely revamped and a new version of Smalltalk/X is available.

I downloaded and installed the Linux version (see the attached pic) and it runs ok on my Xubuntu box.

After the installaton, I checked the documentation, in parts I knew from the past were incompletes and another great new! They are now completed and extended!. (At least those docs I knew from previous versions).

I already invested some time in the past in Smalltalk/X, were we used to have a wiki on the now defunct swiki.net and even a mail list, were Claus Gittinger posted sometimes.

Again, I want to give a try to ST/X, hope I will have time soon.

11 entre 20, no está mal!

ESUG 2008 finalizó y ClavesPC calificó 11 entre 20 trabajos presentados en el Innovation Technology Awards.

Esto es muy importante para nosotros, (el team de ClavesPC somos solamente dos personas, quien esto escribe como desarrollador y Daniel como el ideólogo del producto) y queremos agradecer a todos quienes nos votaron y a quienes se tomaron el trabajo de revisar el producto, pero muy especialmente va nuestro agradecimiento para una amiga, Natalia Esteban, quien desinteresadamente presentó el software y trabajó armando dicha presentación y fue la mayor artífice para esos votos que conseguimos. Natalia, mil gracias por la ayuda.

Por otra parte, también queremos agradecer a Hernán, quién nos contactó con Natalia, sabiendo que ella viajaba a Amsterdam, ante un pedido mío por ayuda para esta presentación ya que para nosotros es imposible un viaje de esa naturaleza.

Finalmente queremos felicitar a los productos que integraron el podio del concurso, ya que son productos realmente excelentes, así como el resto de trabajos que participaron y para nosotros es un honor y un orgullo haber podido estar ahi.

En este enlace podrán ver algunas fotos de Natalia presentando ClavesPC el 25 de Agosto en Amsterdam. Muchas Gracias también a Andrés Valloud que tomó las fotos.