I sat down with GeoClue maintainer (and my former SoC student) Jussi Kukkonen to discuss how the project has been moving forward, and the situation is looking quite good. To those unfamiliar with GeoClue, here is a quick intro:

GeoClue is a modular geoinformation service built on top of the D-Bus messaging system. The goal of the GeoClue project is to make creating location-aware applications for mobile Linux devices as simple as possible.

Last summer with the Summer of Code we were able to make a first full implementation of GeoClue and release it for the maemo platform. There were also GeoClue sessions held in the State of the Map and GUADEC conferences.

However, as that implementation did not provide a master provider to abstract away the different position sources, it was still a bit cumbersome to develop GeoClue-powered applications. So when Jussi got hired by OpenedHand, a decision was made to change the API.

Now finally the API change work starts to be complete, and a new release of GeoClue should appear pretty soon. There are lots of ideas for location-aware applications floating around, and at least Mauku and Telepathy developers have expressed interest in using GeoClue in their apps.

If you're developing a mobile Linux application, GeoClue might be a good thing to take a look at. Location is a powerful piece of contextual information that can make your application more usable.