GUADEC and aKademy will possibly be arranged together in 2009. As the events are looking for a venue, we at COSS (Centre for Open Source Solutions Finland) decided to apply to have the events in Tampere, Finland.

Tampere is an old industrial city situated between two lakes. It has quite good flight connections (including Ryanair) to Europe, and fast rail link to nearby Helsinki which is the big hub for Finnair. COSS is a seasoned conference organizer with good connections to local and country-level instances, and as venue we can have the University of Tampere campus.

See the proposal PDF.

GPS manufacturer Garmin has recently released the modified sources of their nüvi 880 and 5000 in-car navigators. Looking at the packages reveals that these devices are powered by GNOME Mobile and GeoClue, the toolkit for making mobile Linux applications location-aware:

On downloading and Inspecting the large (and nicely organized) 8xx source tarball (list of files here) its very apparent the device built upon a GNOME Mobile based stack (with X, Matchbox and GTK+ etc). Also interestingly it also contains GeoClue, PulseAudio and seemingly both Ogg Vorbis and Flac support.

Great to see GeoClue finally hitting devices!

Via ButterFeet and Jussi Kukkonen.

Lifehacker has an interesting story on how location-aware iPhone will change things:

There's a lot of speculation as to what we can expect from next week's iPhone announcements, but there's one thing you can be sure of: The iPhone's location-aware features will change your life. Whether that means pinpointing your location on a Google Map (which iPhones already do), tracking your friends when you go out, or giving you a heads-up on the best place to eat within a three-block radius, the location-aware future is bright.

The scenarios described in the story are very similar to what we've been discussing regarding GeoClue, the framework for making mobile Linux devices location-aware.

With iPhone pushing innovation it is very important that mobile Linux environments like GNOME Mobile, maemo and QTopia pick up the ball and start making location-aware solutions powered by more than just GPS. GeoClue can help there.

Technorati Tags: geoclue, iphone, maemo, qtopia

I'm currently in Porto Alegre, Brazil attending the 9th International Free Software Forum (FISL) - a huge conference with some seven thousand participants. My talk in the event will be about GeoClue, the geo-information framework designed for Linux-based mobile devices.

For those unable to be there or missing the 9am talk because of the parties tonight, the slides are now available online:

GeoClue is now nearing release, and so we will probably be present also in the GUADEC and Akademy conferences this summer.

Technorati Tags: geoclue, fisl

I've been using my N810 as sort of an universal communicator for a while now, and for this it has generally served well. The only thing I really miss is Skype video calls.

But other than that, I haven't been using the tablet too much. In real-world usage I've found the browser way too unresponsive, and the RSS reader too limited. But now, thanks to two very promising projects the tablet is becoming fun again:

Fennec is the mobile version of the Firefox browser with heavy performance optimizations (install):

Numpty Physics is a maemo port of the awesome Crayon Physics puzzle game where you draw objects and play laws of physics to get a ball moving to the end of a track (download):

Good stuff!

Technorati Tags: maemo, n810, fennec

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.

MIT Technology Review's 10 Emerging Technologies of 2008 report includes offline web applications as a rising trend. When developing Ajatus, our new P2P personal CRM the offline issue was often in our minds. We even wrote in the manifesto:

Ideas may come to you when you're sitting in a bus, boarding an airplane or visiting a hospital. For a CRM to work the data must be available and editable in any situation.

Having now dogfooded Ajatus for almost two months, I have to say this has been an important aspect. It is powerful to have all your customer and project data with you at all times, and still be able to use it via the familiar web UI.

Offline is useful. You can write your notes in every meeting, update them in train, report expenses as they incur. And most importantly, as long as your computer is running, the application is never down. And still, though replication your data will be safe with your peers or the corporate server.

This is aspect even more important when you start running the app on ultra-portable devices, or go outside the industrialized world.

Technorati Tags: ajatus, offline, web, replication

We're in Linköping, Sweden for the Midgard developer meeting, and I suddenly realised the Midgard community really likes Nokia's internet tablets. Not only does maemo.org run on Midgard (earlier this week "sideported" to MidCOM 2.8), but many Midgardians are also active Tableteers.

So no wonder over the course of the meeting we saw the maemo application manager display an interesting message: libmidgard2.0 successfully installed.

Expect some announcement about that soon. And about some other things, like MidCOM 3 as well. Initially it looks very promising.

Technorati Tags: maemo, midgard

This is a guest blog by Outi and Jyrki Wahlstedt. I loaned my N800 to them in late December and here they write about their experiences with the device.

Our Internet tablet is present almost imperceptibly in our life from dawn till dusk. It wakes us up in the morning, and tells news in the evening. It is small and stylish, and it mixes well with the environment.

Its utilities include e.g. a browser for surfing the net, Skype for phone calls, and several radios. Its smallness allows it to be enjoyed together, not separately as often happens with our personal computers. Several times a day we look at weather information, and TV programme guides. Also we use it in looking for dogs in need of home, this being the most important project at the moment.

Though its screen is small, the tablet can be used professionally e.g. to monitor large systems with nagios, as the problem components are discernible due to alert colors. This can be handy for remote control.

Skype phone is very easy to use, and we can use it as a speakerphone or with Bluetooth headset. Speakerphone is quite pleasant, as there is no audio feedback from speakers to microphone. Screen quality is good, which enables showing photos as slideshow.

The tablet is easy to use, though there are some difficulties that might be improved in its successor, N810. Screen lock is not very intuitive, the procedure is implemented like in cellphones. In using the screen keyboard it is extremely easy to press <ENTER> and so it is easy to write e.g. an erroneous URL.

Technorati Tags: maemo, n800

A BBC article is reporting how cell phones have become ubiquitous in the developing world, and how they instead of "regular" computers will be the communications, learning and business platform in many of those regions.

If I had told you ten years ago that by the end of 2007 there would be an international network of wirelessly-connected computers throughout the developing world, you might well have said it wasn't possible.

...

But regardless of where the developer is located, I think it's time that we recognised that for the majority of the world's population, and for the foreseeable future, the cell phone is the computer, and it will be the portal to the internet, and the communications tool, and the schoolbook, and the vaccination record, and the family album, and many other things, just as soon as someone, somewhere, sits down and writes the software that allows these functions to be performed.

To make software in this space, simple, mobile technologies are the ones that matter. This means SMS-based information retrieval, mobile (or multi-platform using detectors like WURFL to morph the UI) web applications, inter-application communication techniques like XMPP, P2P architectures, and hopefully open platforms like GNOME Mobile and Android will be where the action is.

It is also important to get rid of the "you're never offline" mindset. We're talking about a world where network or power outages are frequent and data transfer fees can be high. So good offline access to data is mandatory, although constrained by the potentially small (but growing!) storage space of cell phones.

See my "Solving the logistics of Mamona" and "The World's Internet Tablet?" posts, and the Midgard positioning related to this.

Via Boing Boing Gadgets.

Technorati Tags: android, future, p2p, maemo, sms, xmpp