Archive for August, 2009
Apple is not the dominant computing platform.
It’s true that Apple is just as proprietary a company as Microsoft. Some might say more so. But there is a big difference between competing with proprietary products and holding a monopoly with them which you use to keep open source down.
There is a reason that history records a case called U.S. vs. Microsoft. Microsoft has both a monopoly and a proven record of using its power to keep open source from gaining a foothold.
Apple, meanwhile, has just a 10% share of the operating system market. Sure, if they had more they might be dangerous, just like if I looked like Antonio Banderas I might be a movie star.
Microsoft did not really change its tune after the court case wound down.
- Microsoft subsidizes the channel so every PC in the store runs Windows, even netbooks where that’s more trouble than it’s worth.
- Sharepoint is designed specifically to extend its monopoly.
- Remember the OOXML standards battle, where Microsoft corrupted the standards process itself to maintain control of the applications market?
- The Novell deal, in which Linux vendors admit that 2+2=5 so Microsoft won’t assert non-existent patent claims against them, still gets me mad every time I think about it.
Now it’s true that Apple supports Digital Rights Management (DRM), and limits what users can do. The Free Software Foundation is dead set against DRM. But this was the industry’s price for even letting Apple offer a product like the iPod.
The music industry’s reaction led to Apple offering to forego DRM and may be the biggest victory open source won in this decade.
Or take the iPhone. Sure it’s designed to enforce AT&T’s control of bits, and in so doing enforce Apple’s control of what you do with the device. But it’s the Apple-AT&T relationship that is objectionable. The handset market is increasingly competitive.
The whole idea that the Free Software Foundation should go against Apple rather than Microsoft, then, is a straw man. Apple may want the control over users and markets that Microsoft has enjoyed this decade, but it doesn’t have that control, nor is it likely to achieve it.
Filed under: Business, iPhone, Microblogging
People have been talking about the market on Twitter almost as long as there’s been a Twitter. Some Twitter clients even automatically turn stock symbols into links. That’s a good start, but if you’re a Twitter user and market junkie, TweetyStock is a must-have iPhone app. It’s like a stock-specific Twitter client that lets you follow tweets about stocks in your portfolio, view detailed charts from Yahoo Finance, and a lot more. Maybe this is a niche product, but it’s got its niche pretty well handled.
TweetyStock’s extensive features all work within the app; there’s no need to open links in MobileSafari. For your 2 dollars, you get Twitter feeds and regular news feeds for your whole portfolio, or just a single stock. You also get two kinds of charts, and a basic table that shows at a glance whether your stocks are up or down. TweetyStock makes Apple’s built-in stock app look a little shabby, especially if you’re a serious trader.
TweetyStock iPhone app: follow your stock portfolio on Twitter originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Go to Source
When Google announced its Maps Data API it provided programmatic access to the features available in the Google My Maps product (more at our Google Maps API profile). With it, developers can create, organize and update maps. Could it also replace a database for holding geographic points?
Platial, a mapping platform to share stories, thinks so. It was an alpha tester for the API, rewriting its backend to use Google to store its points. The API provides access to lines, shapes and the most common placemarks, which are created by latitude/longitude coordinates. Just as Google’s My Maps is useful for creating maps without JavaScript programming, the Maps Data API can be used for those who don’t want to run their own database.
However, this first version of the Maps Data API can’t perform advanced queries, though many casual mapping users will find the service sufficient for maintaining a simple list of places. Most of Google’s products start simply and become more powerful once the initial concept has been proven.
Recently Google created a microsite that segments their Maps users into two groups. Some need advanced features, while others want to simply copy and paste. There is a large middle ground of users who would like a more powerful map than what My Maps has, but don’t want to go to the work to figure out spatial database queries.
Hopefully Google is dipping its toe into being a geo database. Look for more advanced queries in the future, such as finding places near a point. With a few more features, the potential is there for the Google Maps Data API to be as popular as Google Maps itself.
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Normally, I wouldn’t do this. A source deep within Microsoft — who just happened to owe me a favor — passed along a list of new Windows marketing slogans which, for one reason or another, just didn’t make the cut. After careful consideration and soul searching, I’ve decided to release them to the public.
Frankly, I think a few of them deserved more contemplation.
- Really, it’s better this time. We swear.
- Because owning a Mac is just one step away from drinking lattes at a Green Party tweetup.
- Come on! It’s not that complicated.
- We shower, and we don’t wear Birkenstocks.
- We’re still on liver number one.
- 7 is a lucky number, right?
- Still the choice among pimply teenaged gamers.
- More stable and easier to use than your last girlfriend.
- WIndows 7: because the Mayans say none of us will live to see the next version anyway.
- Never gonna give you up. Never gonna let you down.
Alternate marketing slogans for Windows 7 originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 29 Aug 2009 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has begun fulfilling a promise to give every high school student a laptop, offering Lenovo machines with Windows 7 and some open source applications.
Most reporters covering the story down under are focused on the fact that at least 70,000 kids will get Windows 7 before the rest of us. But I would rather focus on those open source applications, which are not what you would call the usual suspects:
- GeoGebra is a package for teaching high school math. It starts with geometry but also branches into algebra and calculus. Created by Marcus Hohenwarter for a master’s thesis at the University of Salzburg, he now runs the project out of Florida State University.
- Audacity is a sound editor also available under Linux. It was launched at Carnegie-Mellon 10 years ago by by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg (Mazzoni is still on the team) and now makes its home on Sourceforge.
- FreeMind is a mind mapping program written in Java. Mind maps are a great way to outline and brainstorm, especially for those of us with ADD. It is not yet at Version 1.0, and it also lives at Sourceforge.
- MuseScore is a music composition and notation program, which has also yet to reach Version 1.0. It recently delivered its first stable release for the Macintosh, and its developers have just begun working on a branding program.
We are often obsessed in technology by control of the operating system, and in the business press by questions of money. But these fine programs are the tip of a very large iceberg, based in academia, that is slowly transforming education and the education process.
The reason you probably don’t hear more of this is because it is subject to what I call Moore’s Law of Training. There is no Moore’s Law of Training. People learn at the rate they learn, and knowledge is spread at a similar rate.
Any teacher interested in any of these Windows programs has to learn to use them, and has to develop coherent lesson plans for them. Both take time. Given how open source eliminates marketing budgets, it also takes time for news of such programs to spread.
But news does spread. News of these programs has spread all the way to Australia, and apparently to the highest realms of the New South Wales government.
With tens of thousands of Australian kids going to class this week carrying these programs they will spread even more quickly. So will curricula based on them. And, unlike 1990s’ multimedia curricula, these will be fairly stable, so long as the programs retain backwards compatibility, as most do.
These may be crumbs from the Microsoft table, but they are important crumbs. Get enough crumbs and you have the whole loaf. That is why I call these golden crumbs.
Almost makes me wish my kids were babies again. Note that I said almost.
Filed under: Fugly Friday
Oh Idaho. We love your delicious baking potatoes, the mouth feel we get when we say “Boise”, and, uh, whatever the third thing to love about Idaho might be. In any event, that third thing to love about Idaho probably isn’t quality web design.
Poor layout, dancing graphics, overuse of capital letters; I’ve learned to forgive quite a bit. What bothers me most about Bannock County Bluegrass Festival is their complete and utter disrespect for the trichromacy of the human eye. Purple, Cyan and Green should never have existed in the same universe, much less a single web page.
In fact, the only single point upon which those three colors should converge is in a low-rent stripper’s eye makeup. As Marge Simpson’s mother once said, “Ladies pinch. Whores use rouge.”
Nevertheless, if you happen to be near Pocatello, Idaho this weekend — and I’m sure you must have your reasons. S’ok, we won’t question your judgment — check out some Bluegrass and beer. But, if you run into this guy, for the sake of everything holy and decent, please offer to buy him a color wheel.
[Thanks Peter!]
Fugly Friday : Bannock County Bluegrass Festival originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Tomorrow, the Department of Health and Human Services will host its first “code-a-thon” dedicated to the National Health Information Network and its Connect software.
About 80 programmers, led by Apache developer (and Collabnet employee) Brian Behlendorf, will spend about four hours trying to stamp out bugs in the open source software gateway, which is based on National Health Information Network (NHIN) conventions.
Behlendorf’s presence is not ceremonial, as CollabNet runs the military’s forge.mil open source forge site.
The code-a-thon, and the resulting code, could be a great demonstration of the power of open source in dealing with big problems like health care. The participation of Behlendorf offers hope the open source movement will have a great success.
While open source code has won approval from the Obama Administration, the processes by which such code is developed have not fared as well.
While the Veterans Administration is still working with its open source VistA platform, for instance, it has placed a moratorium on accepting code from local VA facilities. Instead of developing VistA through a network of collaborators, open source IT advocate Fred Trotter writes, “it will be centrally developed by a single, controlling entity.”
The decision may improve security and manageability of the code base, but it’s also going to slow down development, and give one contract holder control of the software.
Whether Behlendorf and his code-a-thon can give U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra a little open source religion may be an open question. As Virginia CTO Chopra outsourced development work to India under a master contract signed with Northrup-Grumman which has since become highly controversial.
Are open source projects that are centrally controlled by single vendors really open source projects, or are they proprietary projects using open source as a feature? That’s a question the Obama Administration needs to answer if it’s to get full value from open source.
Filed under: Social Software, iPhone
Facebook on the iPhone has always been sort of an incomplete experience. The mobile-optimized version of the site looks great, but the iPhone app was frustrating because it lacked so much of the functionality of the full Facebook website. Facebook 3.0 for iPhone changes that, and then some. Not only can you do virtually anything you can do on Facebook.com, you can also upload videos from your iPhone camera.
The main screen is a 3×3 grid of options, including news feeds, your profile, your friends list, photos and chat. Facebook also lets you add bookmarks to your home screen, which gives you quick access to favorite friends or pages. Video is the flashy new feature of Facebook 3.0, but smaller improvements might make more difference to serious users: you can now “like” news feed items and view events from the iPhone app, two things that were (frustratingly) impossible in version 2.5. All in all, the Facebook app now feels more like using the full site than it ever has before, and it’s finally worth checking out if you’ve been avoiding it.
Facebook 3.0 for iPhone: now more like the real Facebook originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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We’ve all seen the news about the waning use of the GPL open source license. It’s also becoming clear that a handful of OSI-approved licenses are going to win out over the 60-plus OSI-approved open source licenses.
Which licenses are winning, why, and which license should you use for your open source project? Great questions. Go ahead and ask them. They’ll get answered by three open source luminaries on Aug. 31.
Making your own map imagery is now much, much easier. Tile Drawer is an Amazon EC2 (our Amazon EC2 API profile) machine image with all the software needed to create your own map tile server.
The solution, created by Stamen Design’s Michal Migurski, uses Mapnik (an open source GIS toolkit) and Open Street Map data. Mapnik, especially, is notoriously difficult to get working correctly. With the Amazon image created by Migurski, everything is ready to go. All you need to do is tell it which Open Street Map file and stylesheet to use–and Tile Drawer makes several examples available.
Mapping on the web has become ubiquitous. The next logical step for developers looking to differentiate their applications is to change the look of the map itself. Once you have a tile server, you can load them into Google Maps, or use a JavaScript library like OpenLayers (our OpenLayers API profile).
If you’d rather not roll your own tile server, you can achieve a similar effect using CloudMade (our CloudMade API profile). The service, also based on Open Street Map data, has an innovative style editor.
The similarity between CloudMade and the new Tile Drawer isn’t accidental. Migurski and his Stamen colleagues designed the six default styles available in the style editor.
Hat tip: Andy Baio
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