Screenshot of Bookr for PSP

I have never seen any homebrew application that was more straightforward than Bookr. It’s an application for reading pdf-files with the PSP on the go. To get things running just copy the application files into the root of your application folder via USB, copy the pdf files too, and you’re done!

Bookr supports pdf files and plain text files. You can zoom the contents, flip the pages and browse embedded pictures – everything is rendered very accurate – and it saves bookmarks. Reading eBooks on the PSP was never easier. The app itself has a very nice and functional eye-candy interface, where you can tweak and customize to the most important and usable features. Easy, robust, comfortable and stable. Nothing more, nothing less. Very balaced work. Unfortunatelly they have no website yet. The download is located at Sourceforge.

The application was made by written by Carlos Carrasco Martinez and Edward Choh, they used for the implementation a thing called mupdf.

This is the kickoff of our new series 5 Minutes. We will feature here spotlights on people with current topics. The first one is Frank Westphal, Agile Software Technologist from Hamburg, who works as freelancer and consultant. His approach is about Web 2.0, Lean Management, Extreme Programming and test-driven Software Development. He did consulting on qype.com, makes an German podcast called Tonabnehmer and his latest project Rivva is a “Meme Tracker”, that searches weblogs in context of Web 2.0 for top-stories and zeitgeist topics.

Hello Frank. Why do you follow the “Agile Software / Extreme Programming” approach? And why do you think this strategies work on software development?

I’ve been a proponent of Agile Development and especially Extreme Programming (XP) because I think that their approach to developing software is true to the nature of software. For the first time in computing history, we see software as what it truely is: soft, malleable, flexible and extremely easy to change. Software has this funny characteristic that its very existence changes its own requirements. How often have you demo’d some stuff to some people and got dozens of new ideas along the way? It’s due to the fact that software is so intangible that directions keep changing during the course of a typical software project. Some people think that setting everything in stone (the plan, the requirements, everything) is the right answer, but we think that’s just stupid. Change is inevitable. In fact, that’s why we do software, not hardware, in the first place.

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This is a patch to enables the sending of MIDI-controller data from the Korg Electribe ES-1 to maxMSP.

Some technical details:

The ES-1 only sends MIDI note values on the MIDI-out port. The controllers are only sent by so called NPRN-Data. Usual audio-applications can’t handle this kind of data hidden in the MIDI-stream. MaxMSP allows to handle every kind of incoming data, so I figured out to convert the controller values into the max format. The single sample-channels 1 till 7B changes the controller values of the knobs. All in all you can control over 68 controller values in addition to the ordinary MIDI note data with that patch! Using the patch is pure fun, because the Electribe ES-1 it is still one of the best hardware controller interfaces available.

To use it, simply copy the content of the .txt-file into the copy-buffer and select in maxMSP “open from clipboard”. Done, that’s all. Download here.

If you port this patch to pure data or vvvv, leave a comment and we will link to your place or host your patch at this place. Use this patch for a performance? (It doesn’t have to be necessarily a music performance…) Then please feedback and post a comment here.

Via media-ocean comes the recommendation to the wonderful webcomics from dot-cube. Get the daily dose at the dot cube blog.

What is Open Frameworks? It’s a c++ library designed to assist the creative process by providing a simple and intuitive framework for experimentation developed by Zach Lieberman and Theo Watson. Now OpenFrameworks is released in pre-alpha version. The pre-release comes uncompiled it is planned to put the first released public version under the LGPL licence. If you develop things, then help the people from OpenFrameworks!

“We have a desperate need for help with documentation of the API, examples, and general explanation of the code. While there are tools like Doxygen, etc that can automatically produce API documentation, we would much rather not fill the library code with ‘java-doc’ style comments. We also need help supporting different compilers, for example, eclipse, and other platforms, like linux. We are happy to help with suggestions about how to do this.”

At the excellent weblog Lost Garden I found an article considering handcrafted game elements vs. procedural game design. The topic is about the re-use of content to minimize redundant work and to maximize the meaning of the game elements and therefore the gamers experience. One basic thought is that you have too keep the re-use of game elements as high as possible to reduce unnecessary development steps and to keep the whole process agile. My latest experience of intensive re-use of game elements like maps was the game Metroid Zero Mission on the Game Boy Advanced. It’s absolutely a good illustration of the re-use of elements, in this case the game maps.

“The more handcrafted, throwaway content that you have, the less agile your development process will be. This dramatically increases the chance that you will fail to converge upon enjoyable gameplay. It also dramatically increases the chance that you’ll fall back on conservative game mechanics because the act of trying something new is too bloody expensive.”

Please have a read of the whole article. It’s is definately worth the time. It also delivers links to literature and tipps to ask yourself if your content creation is at a meaningful level.

There is something new coming up, called “Vision Factory”. Referring to the website, it’s a new complex tool for the convergence of various formats and standards aimed at grafical programming. The website says:

Vision Factory is a multiplatform software (MacOSX / Windows) written in C++. It is aimed at creating real-time interactive visual animations by the programming of reusable and sharable plugins. Through its modular architecture, one can quickly build complex scenes by using data resources (images, webcam feed, sounds, osc/midi messages, web services, …) through the use of dedicated built-in libraries.

Check this page for more, to leave your mailaddress for the latestest news and to have a sneak on the technical features. Vision Factory should be released on May 2007.