aKademy 2010 was hosted in the sunny city of Tampere by the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions, an organization that I'm a steering group member of. In addition to helping a bit with the arrangements and organizing the Midgard Gathering there, I also gave a talk about GeoClue, the positioning framework for Linux desktops.
We initially started the push for location-aware desktops around 2006, and now the efforts are finally starting to bear fruit. Both Zeitgeist and Nepomuk are looking at indexing documents based on where you accessed them, Telepathy can share your location with your friends, and hopefully soon also your desktop clock will switch timezones when you travel.
It is very cool that this development seems to be happening on both GNOME and KDE at a reasonably similar pace. GeoClue is also a service in MeeGo and I've been told another major mobile phone manufacturer uses it. Maybe soon Mac OS X will not be the only platform with location APIs built in?
Photo by Alexey Zakhlestin.
Tom Arnold on 07/28/10 14:37:44
I really hope Guadec videos will online as fast as the Akademy videos :P