Yesterday I released a small web app; it was my first using the Sinatra microframework for Ruby: http://qwerty.robertcarlsen.net

The app arranges illustrations of animals wearing lettered t-shirts to create user-supplied messages. Kara Schlindwein created the illustrations as part of her project for the 6th Annual Fun-a-Day project in Philadelphia, and I wrote the first draft of the app while sitting in a chair at the show a couple of weeks ago, still nursing my broken ankle. (more…)

Update: Source code for demo project released.

i finally got around to building a proof of concept implementation of tesseract-ocr for the iPhone. months ago, i documented the steps which helped to get the library cross-compiled for the iPhone’s ARM processor, and how to build a fat library for use with the simulator as well. several folks have helped immensely in noting how to actually run the engine in obj-c++. thanks to everyone who has commented so far.

anyway, below is a short video of the POC in action. the basic workflow is: select image from photo library or camera, crop tightly on the box of text you’d like to convert, wait while it processes, select / copy or email text. (more…)

The BeachBall app has been submitted to the iPhone App Store. I’m pretty sure that I’ve crossed all the t’s and dotted the i’s throughout the application and am holding out hope for a smooth process. If all goes well it will be a great surprise just before the next semester kicks off.

Thanks to everyone who has been beta testing the (codename) Pinwheel app. I’ll be sure to give you all a copy of the final app when (if?) it’s approved.

In the meantime there are several other projects which need my attention. I’m committed to getting the in-progress work finished before moving on to new stuff…which is a strong motivator since I have a few things I’m really excited about working on. Onward…!