November 2008
In order to support a growing number of partnerships between SAPO and Portuguese Universities, which resulted in the wide deployment of several lab.sapo Platforms, there was a need to develop a central platform that would aggregate all the content produced on the different platforms.
(…) more after the jump ›
September 2008 – October 2008
The recently established labs.sapo/ua is Portuguese Internet Giant SAPO‘s latest attempt at gaining a foothold in the Higher Education space. The lab is a physical space in the Universidade de Aveiro campus where SAPO supports the development of innovative projects in the Web and Technology fields in tight collaboration with the University itself. In order to promote the initiative building a solid Web presence was top priority. The platform to be developed needed to promote communication with the outside world and shine a light on the various ongoing projects at the lab. With this in mind, me and the rest of the team decided to develop a platform based on WordPress MU that would support an indefinite number of personal and project blogs. This platform would need to be flexible enough to be deployed nearly as-is in a number of situations, such as other Universities or other SAPO sponsored events (as is the case of labs.sapo/codebits and labs.sapo/summerbits).
Desktoptopia is what I can only define as a “desktop background manager”. Confusing? Keep reading. It’s a little application, available for both the Mac and PC platforms (sorry Linux), that changes your desktop’s background in a set time interval of your choosing.
What makes it different from most other existing solutions (Mac OS X has had desktop picture automated changing as an option since at least Tiger) is that Desktoptopia gets you desktop pictures directly from the web, downloading them from the cloud once it’s time for a new image. The quality of most backgrounds is stunning too, and there are a lot of themes covered: 3D, Illustration, Typography, Photography, etc. The software includes a rating system, so you can grade backgrounds as they come and go, or even reject a picture such that it’s never showed to you again.
That said, the application consumes fairly little resources, the download times are almost instantaneous and everything past the first configuration screen is seamless to the user. The only gripe I have with it is I can’t seem to download full versions of the backgrounds to keep locally. Oh well :P.
December 2007 – January 2007
Caixa d’Óculos was the final project for a Dynamic Internet Technologies course, taken on the first year of my Masters in Multimedia Communication at the University of Aveiro.
This web application would allow for students in all degrees of teaching to manage their school related tasks, calendars and learning content in a shared, community space accessible from anywhere. It would differ from regular e-learning solutions in that it was strongly student oriented, and focused on those same students to publish and share educational content (videos, images, even their own notes) with others, while allowing everyone to view and rate those contents. (…) more after the jump ›
February 2008 – April 2008
cetac.media, an organization dedicated to the study of Communication Technologies, needed a website redesign, but more important, an overall shift in the direction of their web strategy. They wanted a more open platform, where every member could share resources, communicate and divulge their published works. The site needed to be fresh and current, while still making usability and functionality a top priority. (…) more after the jump ›
