It has been a pretty busy week following the release of the new version of EcPc and although I hadn’t much time to play the “marketing guy”, it has been appreciated not only by the lucky owners of high-end VGA devices, but also by the users of the QVGA version, as you can read from the nice comment Jim Bruce posted on Handango.
On Tuesday the local daily newspaper La Provincia published the letter I wrote to reply to a couple ones discussing about multimedia piracy. It’s a very delicate matter and I tried to describe my position both as a consumer and as a software developer. I’ll dedicate a separate space on the site about this soon, in the meantime you can read the reply to my letter written by one of the two original readers.
Then on Thursday they published my full page article about the presentation of Windows Mobile 5.0, codename Magneto, and the smaller one about the big growth of the PDA market in the first quarter of the year.
Window Mobile 5.0 is really big news for me as a mobile developer. I just got Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and I’m having a good look at the new SDKs and to the stand-alone emulator in particular, then I’ll write more about this. The logo of the Beta Experience program is really curious: it’s a bug!
I’m now using Dada Mail, a excellent free software for mailing list management, to send my newsletters both in Italian and in English, so I’d like to invite you to subscribe to the one of your interest if you’d like to be updated about the most important announcements from Albegor Entertainment such as the release of new software or even what I wrote here on the blog.
Just note that the Italian version of the Newsletter presents a generally richer content.

With the presentation by Bruno Bozzetto, the father of the Italian animated cartoons, concluded the first edition of AnimatiComo, a series of three seminars about computer animation organized by the researchers of the Polytechnic of Como.
I can safely say all the attendees have been fascinated by the words of the “father”, although he actually preferred to be called grandfather.
What impressed me the most, apart from his extreme clarity of exposition, was the firm belief which lead all of his career that you can do great things even with few resources. It all starts from creativity, then you use the tools at your disposal to express it, tools that don’t have to be necessarily the most technologically advanced and expensive. Just take a look at what he produced by using Flash and a lot of irony about the worst attitudes of Italian people in Europa&Italia, a short animation he made in 1999.
The seminar concluded with the projection of the cartoon Vip Mio Fratello Superuomo, one of his three full length movies, made in 1968.
Here you can read a brief interview with Bozzetto published by the local daily newspaper La Provincia.
All this contrasts al lot with the final results obtained by the Spanish big budget, for European standards at least, animation team who produced the 3D animation El Guerrero Sin Nombre, presented for the first time after its completion by Nacho Martin last week during the second of the three seminars. The cartoon rendering technique granted a unique and impressive look to the movie, but the empathy generated by the characters was light years distant from that stirred up into the spectators by Bozzetto’s Vip Brothers in my opinion.
I had the chance to talk a bit with the kind Nacho and he told me a phrase I only share only at half: the important is getting to the end…
AnimatiComo has been a really pleasant experience, made even more interesting by the fact I’m reading the book Animazione 3D wrote by Nicolò Ceccarelli and Daniele Bigi, the two main minds behind the event. Can’t wait for the next edition then!

After the usual final rush I just released version 1.5 of  Euro Coins Pocket Collector, both in VGA and QVGA!
The VGA version looks so nice that it’s one of the things which makes the purchase of a new VGA Pocket PC fully worth it in my opinion and I hope not only Euro coins collectors will think this way, but also anyone eager to exploit the real capabilities of a high resolution display.
However don’t be dazzled only by the VGA graphics and have a look at the new features such as the complete translation into Dutch and the exclusive interface mode for all the left handers out there like me.
Of the main European languages only Spanish is left, so I invite you to read here if you’d like to take care of the translation.
Upgrading for existing users is free as always, but please have a look at the FAQ for the details.
Download the shareware version, which actually acts as a viewer, enjoy and show it to your friends, ok?
I’m one day late with the release, but for a good reason: yesterday morning I’ve been in Milan to get the Voucher needed to start the doability study in collaboration with the Volta Center for the project I already mentioned. They told me they issued more than 150 vouchers until now in our Region.
The doability study will produce the most costly piece of paper I ever seen, but that’s a very good beginning for this kind of software project because the Volta Center is one of the few research centers of excellence we have in Italy I and there are great people working there.
What’s next then? Well, for what concerns EcPc I could dare to say: the PC desktop version!
Yes, the release of the VGA version speeded up the eagerly waited PC desktop one much more than I expected!

Today I attended the first of the three presentations of AnimatiComo, an event organized by the Polytechnic of Como and some people interested in computer animation. Among them Nicolò Ceccarelli and Daniele Bigi, authors of the book Animazione 3D which I’m reading these days with interest.
The guest of today was the Japanese artist Fusako Yusaki, a brilliant mind who expresses her creativity by using plastiline to produce stunning animations with the stop motion technique. She briefly talked about her long career and his love for Italy where she lives since many years. His relation with computer graphics technology, the basic theme of the event, is very limited, but the purpose of Ceccarelli was to show his students this very peculiar side of animation and in my opinion he did it right since it has been a great pleasure to hear Mrs. Fusako talking about his art and his passion with the enthusiasm and the vitality of kid.
Next week the main guest will be David Iglesias, while the following week will be present the great Bruno Bozzetto.
A curious detail: the green ball in the logo of AnimatiComo is supposed to be made of plastiline as a homage to the kind Mrs. Fusako.
Back to my business, which doesn’t involve plastiline at all as a mean of expression, but rather bits and pieces of code, although I must say they can contain the same level of imperfections , everything is getting ready for the release of version 1.5 of EcPc, both in VGA and QVGA.
As I wrote here in the forum I set the release date to the 16th of May. See you on Monday then!