João Moreno .com

Google has started accepting student applications for this year’s Summer Of Code.

Here’s the deal: you (students only) commit yourself into developing in a Free / Open source project, and Google will sponsor it and pay you $4.500, and $500 for the correspondent mentoring organization. Isn’t it great? I myself am applying to a couple of projects and hope for one of them to be selected.

Just click the thumbnail for more info.

March is officially the Boycott the RIAA Month. So says Gizmodo in their Anti-RIAA Manifesto.

It’s really good to see that we’re not still being guided by the major companies, but on the other hand the whole Web 2.0 brought the power to the masses. Stop RIAA and DRM!

Favourite links:

• Gizmodo - all posts related with the boycott.
• DefectiveByDesign - the anti-DRM campaign from the Free Software Foundation (of which I’m a member, and if you’re interested, please take a look their website over here).
• Steve Jobs’ Thoughs on Music - over at Apple’s website.

Console2, or simply Console, is an improvement to the Windows’ cmd.exe. On a more technical side, it’s merely a proxy to the cmd.exe process. It opens up the process, hides it, and redirects all the input and output to the app itself, so we have full control of a normal command prompt, but with additional features. But don’t let the hackish look of Console2 scare you, it’s done seamlessly and it’s really good.

Tabs are fun, tabs are easy and tabs are production-friendly. And Console2 handles tabs pretty well, and even allows you to create tab classes that open up with the CTRL+F# key combinations. It comes with a default tab class which uses cmd.exe (opens up with CTRL+F1). Let’s say you want to use the Python shell itself as I did. After proper configuration, Hitting CTRL+F2 opens a new tab containing the Python interactive interpreter (see screenshot above). You can even customize the cursor, background, window title of each tab class. Of course, you can open many tabs for each tab class.

It’s got the transparent background feature most *NIX terminals have. You can hide the menu bar, the tabs bar and the scroll bar. And all of this provides full customizing control on a already good looking interface.

Overall, it’s a great app considering the difficulties imposed by making an improved version of Microsoft’s own, closed source, Command.

These are sad news for me, though good news for all of us. Remember my Notepad++ plug-in Quicktext? Well, I declare it dead. Many requests made me consider releasing Quicktext 1.0, since it’s already half-way. Lifehacker’s Adam Pash has come up with Texter, a sort of universal Quicktext. You can use it anywhere. Browser windows, instant messaging software, Notepad++, etc. Well, everywhere where’s a text box. It’s still very low featured, but I’m sure it will grow big pretty soon.

There’s another piece of productivity software, i’d like to refer: Launchy. It allows you to launch pretty much any application on your PC, using only the keyboard, and features little configuration and a nice, clean interface. Say goodbye to your Start Menu bar.

I love you, Lifehacker.

Just another great article by my friend and designer, Nuno Coelho.

This is the first of, possibly, a series of articles about typo, my favourite designing field. I just love good lettering, that’s all.

More, after the jump.