Bossa Conference, an event about mobile development with free software technologies will be held on March 7th-10th in Manaus, Brazil. This year I'm speaking about using Midgard as a replicated storage layer in mobile applications, with examples for multiple programming languages and toolkits. The idea behind the Midgard content repository is that instead of coming up with your own file formats you can...
Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin are merging to form MeeGo, a development environment for a new class of internet-connected devices ranging from smartphones through netbooks to TV sets. This may be finally what provides the free software world with a consistent and modern alternative to the iPhones and iPads that the proprietary world has come up with, the "magical user...
Last week the Finnish outdoor brand Halti launched a pretty interesting web service. While many outdoor brands focus on extreme sports that don't really have much to do with the reality of most of their customers, Halti connects their product lineup to the needs of the site visitor by utilizing both weather and location. This means where ever they are or...
Yet another interesting launch this winter: Google finally published their lifestreaming application, Buzz. These are still clearly early steps for the service as it doesn't provide any APIs yet, and the user interface feels slow in a quite un-Google-like way. However, it still shows strong potential in several ways. First of all, it may help the people raised on Twitter...
Apple iPad is certainly interesting. It seeks to challenge the concept of PCs by providing something that is at the same time more personal, and a lot easier to use. The personal computer of the future. Gone is difficult file organization - instead, applications use their own purpose-build content repositories. Instead of seeking software from many places, all of it...
There certainly is a lot of buzz about Apple's rumored Tablet product. Daring Fireball writes: If you’re thinking The Tablet is just a big iPhone, or just Apple’s take on the e-reader, or just a media player, or just anything, I say you’re thinking too small — the equivalent of thinking that the iPhone was going to be just a...
Google launched a new mobile web service called Near Me Now that can recommend things like restaurants, bars and ATMs near you. This uses browser geolocation to provide only results relevant to where you are. The idea is quite good: to replace business directories like Yelp or eat.fi with something that is easily accessible from Google's homepage and uses Google's...
2009 was a pretty active year for the Midgard content repository project, and so it is good to take a look at some of the highlights: Midgard2 finally became a reality, bringing us a fully legacy-free modern Midgard implementation. There were two releases: 9.03 Vinland and 9.09 Mjolnir. Midgard2 works just fine also in desktop applications and mobile devices like...
Free Software Foundation Europe, has recently expanded by the addition of a Finnish country team. FSFE is a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring software freedom, which is an important building block in an open information society. The current Finnish team includes Otto Kekäläinen of VALO-CD, the distribution of free software applications for Windows as the country coordinator, and Henri Bergius...
Ping.fm is a useful tool if you have friends on many social networks as it allows you to write updates to all of them via a single interface. In addition to the web interface there are many tools that allow posting to ping.fm, including SMS and applications for Android handsets and the iPhone. So far a problem with ping.fm has...