IT Wizard

The Avantgarde Battery Meter brings a new artistic experience to battery status reporting: we’ve selected sets of excellent photographs and we automatically linked them to information on how long the battery will last in different usage scenarios (listening to music, watching videos, attending 3D video conferences, using WiFi, etc). If you want an artsy presentation of this information, then the Avantgarde Battery Meter is the application for you.

Themes for the Avantgarde Battery Meter range from sunsets, nature, portraits, to surfing, skydiving, and biking. Delight your eyes with all theses here. Then use your favorite one to add some art to your iPhone or iPod-Touch.

The Avantgarde Battery Meter was developed in collaboration with a limited number of pro-eminent photographers (more to come):

Tom Hoops (website)

Reviewer’s note: “As far as I’m concerned: Tom Hoops is the Quentin Tarantino of photography. Magnificent and stylized to the point of visual nirvana. You are almost unable to look away.”

Mana Photos (website)

Reviewer’s note: “Mana is a professional surf photographer with an exceptional passion for all ocean’s beauty. His love for surfing enables him to seize the moment and capture exciting photographs, in his own unique manner. Mana is fortunate to live in Hawaii, the land of surf, where he has captured some of the most dynamic moments of this fascinating sport.”

Julien Fourniol (website)

I discovered photography by chance … I would like to invent a perfect biography, in which, from the first pages, we learn that the character was born with a film camera in his hands, but not … None of this … I have started to do photography in 2000 during my military service. I was so bored that I frequently escaped by listening to jazz and taking pictures of my friends …
And then one day it got into my head, to keep for myself the most beautiful corners of nature that I encounter during my travels …
I am very attracted by the natural beauty of everything, by the simple shapes and especially by colors. I like my pictures to be full of color, to be warm and for them to be self sufficient.
I love the vision of the painter Matisse who speaks of “an art of purity and serenity … like a good armchair which provides relaxation to the tired body.”
The best compliment I can receive for my photographs is simply: “It’s beautiful”

More about the developer – IT Wizard (website):

We started working together as a team in 2002 as preparation for IEEE’s Computer Society International Design Competition. Following our first place in the world finals, we decided to join our expertise in hardware design and software development.The result was a young, tireless and enthusiastic team, IT Wizard, focused on bringing to live functioning prototypes and production solutions for bright ideas. Our past activity involved extensive consulting on and enhancing of specific parts of existing embedded projects, software defined radios, mobile phone development. During the last period we mainly focused on the mobile phone industry, tackling the emerging markets: iPhone and Android.

Members of Wizard team have been awarded gold medals for participation in past prestigious international competitions, such as the IEEE’s CSIDC and ACM’s ICPC contests. Our skills are reflected in Certificates of Excellence from the Romanian National Association of Software Industry, Romanian Ministry of Youth and Sport, and IEEE. Our results have also been published and presented at international events. Last, but not least, our trainees won top places at prestigious international competitions such as IEEE’s CSIDC and Microsoft’s Windows Embedded Challenge.

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We are happy other people reuse our code. From the groups of people from academia and industry that use Mezzofanti, we are pleased to point to this project – because it is an Apache License 2.0 project, that looks for contributors.

http://code.google.com/p/droidslator/

Droidslator version 1.0 is the first language translation program desiged for android-powered phones, seamlessly combined both online and offline dictionaries databases. Droidslator contains many intelligent features such as gesture commands, online/offine search auto-detection and other interesting features.

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(Android phone – application)

What is Mezzofanti: it is an application for the Android Dev1 phone, that allows reality augmentation (as seen in camera mode) with information about any text in view. The augmentation is done through text-recognition.
After the augmentation, the digital text (or parts of it) may be used in various modes:
- it may be translated in one of the 40 available languages
- it may be searched on Google or Wiki
- it can be checked against a dictionary

Technologies:
- the OCR engine is a modified version of Tesseract 2.03, currently developed by Google under Apache License, ver 2.0. – there are 5 available languages available: English, German, Spanish, Italian and French. Never the less the OCR will work with any other language that uses the Latin alphabet (the results will be a bit less accurate).
- the interface between the OCR engine (C++) and Java is done in JNI
- the main core is programmed in Java
- the translation engine is based on Google-translate

Licenses:
- all code is available for free under the Apache License, ver 2.0 and it is posted at google code. Read the install tutorial.

Dialogue:
- we encourage the dialogue, so please do feedback us. (feedback may include, but it is not limited to: observations and questions about code, wish-list of new technical tutorials, contributions to the project, collaboration opportunities etc.)
- a brief documentation of the Mezzofanti user interface and the System architecture.

Who was the real Mezzofanti:
Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti (19 September 1774 – 15 March 1849) was an Italian cardinal and famed linguist and hyperpolyglot. Mezzofanti was well-known for being a hyperpolyglot who fluently spoke thirty-eight languages and forty dialects, despite never traveling outside of Italy. (more about the cardinal on Wikipedia)

A funny video with the usage of Mezzofanti:

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(Android phone – how-to/example)

There are two methods you need to override:
onKeyDown – that is called when the key is pressed
onKeyUp – that is called when the key is released

This is how your code will look like:

@Override
public boolean onKeyDown(int keyCode, KeyEvent event)
{
switch (keyCode) {
     case KeyEvent.KEYCODE_FOCUS: /* .. code for KEYCODE_FOCUS .. */ break;

…

return super.onKeyDown(keyCode, event);
}

Note1: do not forget to call the super.onKeyDown method, if you want to allow the key to be used in the default mode (example: “back-key” or “power-key” in most of the applications keep the default functionality)

Note2: there is a method you may find useful event.getRepeatCount() that <>

Your code should look the same for onKeyUp.

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(Android phone – how-to/example)

Maybe you’ve noticed the menu that appears when you are in desktop and press “menu-key”, almost all applications implement this feature, and it looks pretty nice. If you want to include it in your code, this is how.
First override the onCreateOptionsMenu.

@Override
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu)
{
super.onCreateOptionsMenu(menu);

menu.add(PREFERENCES_GROUP_ID, SETTINGS_ID, 0, R.string.menu_settings)
.setIcon(android.R.drawable.ic_menu_preferences);
menu.add(PREFERENCES_GROUP_ID, HELP_ID, 0, R.string.menu_help)
.setIcon(android.R.drawable.ic_menu_help);
menu.add(PREFERENCES_GROUP_ID, FEEDBACK_ID, 0, R.string.menu_feedback)
.setIcon(android.R.drawable.ic_menu_send);
menu.add(PREFERENCES_GROUP_ID, ABOUT_ID, 0, R.string.menu_about)
.setIcon(android.R.drawable.ic_menu_info_details);

return true;
}

In this example we just add 4 items to the menu (preferences, help, feedback and about). Each item has a specific icon. There is a default set of icons, you may wish to use as all the other applications. In our example we used ic_menu_preferences for preferences, etc.. Note: that you can use your own icons as well.

Also for each item you have to add a default action.

@Override
public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item)
{
switch (item.getItemId()) {
   case SETTINGS_ID: /* .. start settings activity .. */ break;
   case HELP_ID: /* .. start help activity .. */ break;
   case FEEDBACK_ID: /* .. start feedback activity .. */ break;
   case ABOUT_ID: /* .. start about activity .. */ break;

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