The Software Jedi

Dana “Software Jedi” Hanna (http://anappaday.com/) has promised to write a new software application each and every night! He takes suggestions on what to write from an IRC channel (#thesoftwarejedi on freenode), and writes the code where everyone can watch. He broadcasts his screen over WebEx and then the people who get in the limited WebEx spots then rebroadcast it via RealVNC. I was lucky enough last night to get a spot on Fryguy’s VNC server. It was really quite the experience. Last night (starting at around 8:00PM EST) Dana wrote an RSS2Speech application. It takes an RSS feed and reads the titles to you as they come in, using the Microsoft Speech API. You can set it to only speak during certain times, so that it isn’t waking you up at 3:00AM. Very nifty. There are already a bunch of interesting apps on Dana’s site, and I bet there will be a bunch more, so check them out at AnAppADay.com. All of his programs are open source (+cool points), so people have already started improving upon, and combining them. DaemonCollector combined Dana’s Words Per Minute tray application and his “JediConcentrate” application, which dims all windows other than the active one, so it’s easier to concentrate on (hence the name). What this new hybrid does it activates the concentration part of the program when you have a high WPM in an application, so that it hides all the other windows you have open.