Weblog: Archive

Jos Poortvliet did an interview with me for dot KDE in this summer's aKademy and it has been online for a while now. In it we discuss things like Midgard as a storage engine for desktop applications, and Maemo's open QA process for Downloads applications. Some excepts:

At maemo.org we have an appstore for FOSS applications on the Maemo platform. This appstore is enabled by default on all Nokia N900s so we wanted to have some quality control. We had to create our own appstore approval process, compatible with the FOSS philosophy. Now any developer can submit an app, and anyone can test and vote. The whole process is completely transparent, auditable and visible. And it also provides a feedback channel from testers and users to the developers!

...

Midgard is a data storage service. Whether you write desktop or web applications, instead of coming up with your own file format, you just use Midgard. You can work more easily and object-based. Users have many different devices these days, so Midgard has strong replication features to synchronize between different systems. Midgard is built on top of GObject; we provide bindings to a bunch of different languages so developers can choose the tools they like - PHP, Python, Javascript. Currently (as in now, while we're talking) Qt bindings are being developed here at Akademy.

Read the whole interview.

Opening public data is a hot topic in Finland at the moment. As a small experiment with the data that is available I wrote buscatcher, a simple N900 app that displays Helsinki trams (and some buses) moving on a map in real time. This makes it easy to determine when your next tram is coming to the stop, or where it is stuck.

Updated 2010-09-28: Buscatcher now has a stable release that is available from Maemo Downloads with already more than 10,000 installations.

For other platforms, you can grab and run the application from the GitHub repo. It should run on regular Linux desktops, and there have been reports of working on also platforms like the OpenMoko Freerunner.

There was a pretty interesting snippet in Engadget's coverage of yesterday's Nokia World keynote:

"By 2013 800 million people will be using GPS-enabled devices. Soon, everything on the Internet will have a location coordinate. This is a space we intend to own."

Indeed, this is a quite possible future, and one for which we with Midgard are quite well prepared for. Many smartphone browsers (and even desktops) nowadays can transmit their location to web services, more and more geotagged information is being published via microformats, feeds and RDF. From the humble beginnings with Plazes, social web services like Twitter, Qaiku and Facebook can now store and display location where different status updates were made.

The missing piece for a wider-scale geotagged web however is actual usage of geodata. We need easy tools for tagging content with locations, but also web services that actually serve their users better thanks to location information. This can mean helping the user to catch a bus, or recommending them clothes purchases based on local weather. Anything that goes beyond just showing dots on a map.

For that, Midgard has had the necessary infrastructure in place. What we need is your ideas and use cases for how to improve web services through location.

The MeeGo community is starting to form local networks for developers and enthusiasts:

Local MeeGo Networks organize face to face meetings and other activities on the real ground. They bring what no online social network can provide: real handshakes, real kudos, real applause, real face to face chat. They are free as in beer.

If you are in the Helsinki region and are interested in MeeGo, the first meeting will be held in the Nemein office on September 22nd, starting at 5pm. Welcome!

Updated 2010-09-28: The Helsinki MeeGo Network is now on meetup.com. Join us!