Three things for OpenMoko Device 1973 II

Taking a step back from my current death march project to list the wishlist features of the next generation OpenMoko. As I learned from Steve Job's iPhone presentation Allan Kay once said if you take software development serious create your own hardware and now to the feature set.

• A gyroscope. We have played with such things in the late 90s of the last century. And with Rock 'n Scroll we have seen a nice usage of this feature. We have used auto-rotation in Opie already and we have played games using this device. I don't know what Apple patented but I'm pretty sure we have prior art. We are doing this stuff for almost a decade.


• Light Sensor, we have used that in Opie for a long time...


• All sort of network connectivity. We use X, we all have seen teleportation of applications. A couple of years ago I have started automatically adapting look and feel of widgets/applications dynamically depending on host operating system, screen resolution and available input devices. I think for any patents to come this is pretty good prior art! So let us combine these two technologies. Connect your OpenMoko device to a TV, pair with a bluetooth keyboard and a mice and export your applications to the big screen and they will adapt look and feel automatically! Go to a public terminal and export your applications. It is secure! Your private data will not leave your device, you will not use network infrastructure not operated by you. You will just use the peripheral and your application will adjust, automatically!

Right I can't count!

presents, presents, presents

So yesterday was my birthday and I received plenty of presents. Well I did not ask for any but got a lot of them. I'm the proud owner of the Probot Music CD, various Design and Implementation of the XXXBSD Operating System (4.3,4.4,FreeBSD), finally I'm a owner of "Peopleware" and some old Monty Python tapes/DVDs.
My comrades in the office gave a pair of slippers, so my socks don't get as dirty, and a pair of gloves. Also I got the ingreidents to create a Hurricane cocktail *delicious*.
I was a bit bored so I wanted to read/scan this perl book we have in our shelf, I did not get past the foreward by Larry Wall. This made me once again aware of why I do these weird things under the name of Free Software. It is obvious that one enjoys working with the elite and other highly skilled people but there is more to it. As Larry said in his foreword I want to give something back to society and I believe technology can change society so I try to create longlasting free and public technology that can help the society to progress.
Well I need to reevaluate this statement in twenty years and see if we have achieved any progress.

z.

The Future is Open (again/still)

The Future is OpenMoko. Sean sent a rather nice announcement to the list. And once again they just get it (in contrast to Trolltech and their Greenphone campaign)! Their decisions in itself and the way they do it and transport them is just the right way. And everyone within the Free Software Developer Community should be very familiar with. So OpenMoko is compatible with the Free Software Community and we can make a huge leap ahead in progressing Free Software and Free Infrastructure. The selected software is just about right for the consumer and business. Evlution Data Server solves so many problems. Problems we are facing within KDE, we have faced in Opie and Qtopia is still facing. Evolution Data Server is easy to synchronize, and even stuff like direct exchange access seems possible. Together with the planned email push access and the open Linux platform this just seems to be right for companies caring about security and sanity in their IT Infrastructure. No more punching holes and installing unknown server software at the heart of your infrastructure.

For the launch in september we will likely face some tough decisions, specially when directly working with Mobile Operators. Themes like DRM, Flash Over The Air, Branding will be on the agenda but that is OpenMoko's and FIC's job and I trust them to handle these topics carefully.

I'm really looking forward to hold one of these devices in my hands. Finishing another fast init system, implementing an Gtk+ backend for the JavaME, or just working on WebKit/Gtk+ looks like fun and challenging projects, or just plainly meassuring and comparing performance sounds like fun as well. So fun is ahead!

Hmm I should order a greenphone just to let OpenMoko run on it :}


PS: Trolltech sadly failed to respond to my questions about how they want to handle a community and to gurantee that future Qtopia releases will be Free. What a waste of resosurces, seriously I doubt many people within Trolltech, even within the Qtopia team, have the insight and knowledge of the Qtopia platform that I have...

Busy hacking, rocking hard in berlin

As most of us I'm really busy this month. We are preparing things for an upcoming fair in february and these things include a lot of hacking. This is probably the reason you don't see me doing much in public. I have been playing with WebKit lately, specially the SVG support and I'm really impressed by the support of animate and animation through JavaScript. Specially the nightly build of webkit is awesome. You have a nice toolbox you can use to browse the dom tree. If you select a node in the dom tree the rendering of this element is surrounded with a nice red rect. This is really awesome and WebKit will rock hard, specially as it is used on low profile devices as the Series 60 and the iPhone already. This reminds me that I should make some more rumor about WebKit for the OLPC.

On a private note we are currently conquering Berlin. The office where I'm doing my research moved to a new location and the location really rocks. Some people live almost next to the office and we spend most of our time either swimming, hanging out in a pub/lounge, in the office, cooking or crawling through the huge DVD collection. Sadly no relationship is insight and I'm stick with collecting fortune cookies to increase my share of luck. This probably won't work out *sigh*

And here a picture of our new racks. Sadly these are from Compaq and not from DIGITAL.

Digital impressions

Walking across the streets in berlin. We suddenly saw a car parking very close to the one in front. I mean very close, close as in physical contact. I felt reminded of France and the parking habbit. I went around the car and took a look at the license plate and to my suprise the origin of the car is France.