Here’s the Think Orange homepage for April 1st which reflected a drastic change of business direction:

Think Orange was invited to create an iPad version which would be truthful to the original content and adapted to this new medium.

The opening ceremony went very well, the book is very well made and the drawings are imaginative and creative, so we were very happy to be able to create an app for the book.

We decided to not go with the current over-the-top crazy animations pattern that some apps feature and in some cases just distract you from the original writing and magic of the book.

We had 2 computers on the book launch running the iPad app on the simulator (no iPads for sale in Portugal yet, ouch!) and people could interact freely and play with the book.

It was also a good opportunity to observe some behaviours from grownups and children when dealing with the interactive elements on the app.

A very good experience overall, the app should be available very soon. In the meantime I’ve created a Flickr image gallery with preview screens of the application and some photos of the event. Enjoy!

Thankfully, Survs also has a powerful analysis tool, so we read all your suggestions, looked at the statistics and ordered the following cards. Don’t forget to ask me one when you see me on the next conference/geek event/pub/whatever.

We’ve put together 10 diferent designs for the cards we’re going to order from MOO and we want you to be part of the decision process. Take the survey and help us decide which designs are cool or just plain ugly.

To make it more interesting we’re giving away 20 Survs licenses (6 month on the Basic Plan) to the first 20 people who submit the survey.

Don’t know what Survs is?

Survs is a collaborative tool that allows you to build, deploy and analyze online surveys. We’ve used it to build our survey in just 5 minutes and it’s a great product.

So, help us choose the best designs for the cards and we’ll post the results and winners soon. Who knows, if we meet in the next conference or social event, you can say “hey, I chose that card!”.

Update: all licences gone. But you can still vote if you like.

More intense and bigger than last year, the event had areas where you could play with machinery, RFID technology, OpenMoko’s, make videos or just invent something for the web and so there was something out there to please anyone.

My project for last year was Bookworms, a small web app where you could add books from Amazon to your personal collection and share them with your peers which appeared on the map (you could give your address which was geocoded) .

One year later and with the support of SAPO, Bookworms was presented live (scary!) at the event as a social book discovering website and now available as a beta version. The presentation went very well I think, complete with nonsense slides and chinese proverbs.

I was overwhelmed by the people’s reception and fantastic feedback received in the last days, I didn’t have the chance to include everything I wanted in the launch version but in the next weeks there’s going to be new improvements.

This was also a opportunity to unveil Think Orange – my very own startup (weee!) – which will be focusing on creating web products that drive social interaction and make you smile. I’ll be sure to give you more news on this soon.

Finally, the project for this year’s Codebits was a web application for portuguese freelancers to calculate and help with taxes (Recibos Verdes), you could log individual receipts, calculate how much you expect to pay by the end of the year and to complement there was also a small statistics area, all in about 14 hours I think. Done with Ruby on Rails and MySQL.

We didn’t win but we expect to launch it “soon” as an online service. (we need suggestions for the name!)

And that was it, a great experience once again. I ended the week feeling very very tired but optimistic for the future.

Once again, amazing illustrations by Bauke Schildt.