It’s a great day when Internet giant Google open sources the programs it uses to build well-known favourites such as GMail, Docs and Google Maps. It announced on its blog that it will be making a lot of it’s own development software available to developers all over the world. This release comes as Google are undoubtedly upgrading their own tools especially with the upcoming launch of Google Wave.
The first of the three tools they released is called Closure Compiler which helps developers trim down code and optimize it for better performance. There is also a plug-in for Firefox released alongside this so they can view heir Java Script code in the browser.
The second one is called Library which is a tool to help build Java Script Apps. Here is what Google said on their official blog about the program:
The Closure Library is a JavaScript library that provides many features that are useful for building web applications across browsers. It helps to abstract browser differences and provides clean class and function interfaces for common tasks. Besides DOM interaction and UI tools, the library includes tools for arrays, objects, string manipulation and much more. The library also implements a name spacing and import standard, which helps keep scripts small and load fast when used with the Closure Compiler.
The third and final release until further notice was Templates. This is an app that is for creating HTML elements that can be used within Java Script.
Closure Templates simplify the task of dynamically creating HTML and have an easy-to-read syntax. They allow you to write templates for reusable HTML and UI elements that can be used within JavaScript or on the server side in Java. They also have excellent run-time performance because they are never parsed on the client side.
Over the next month or so there is undoubtedly going to be a big rush of new Java apps and programs onto the market thanks to the Google outsourcing. Be sure to stay in touch with Crenk to stay informed!
Picok stands for Personal Information Cockpit. It’s an open source software package, aimed at enabling users to build their personal information dashboards. The interface is very similar to Netvibes and Pageflakes, in which allows users to loaded their own content into small draggable boxes.
There are a quite few standard portlets shipped with Picok, but since it is an open system, maintainers of picok installations can easily create portlets of their own.
Picok is written in PHP 5, uses the Yahoo User Interface Library and Zend Framework Components and supports MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Lotus Notes and is ready to be integrated into your corporate intranet, website or community platform as well.
If you want to see a screenshot of Picok you can check it out here.
There is something true about open-source developing projects, it’s really hard to find some developer platforms that are user friendly, that could actually motivate young developers to start working with these environments. But there’s always an exception: SUSE Studio was launched recently, bringing dev guys a fresh new interface where they can build their open source applications.
Of course that the building platform will be mainly for SUSE Linux Enterprise or openSUSE, but has several features and possibilities available:
- Includes applications templates, including: JeOS, minimal X11, KDE and GNOME (the last one is the preferred for SUSE platforms).
- You don’t need to install anything in particular, you just need a web browser to start working with SUSE Studio.
- You can generate ISO CDs for you appliances or even LiveCDs.
- You can add third party repositories that you can include to your applications.
- Written in Ruby on Rails. Never heard of it? Here’s a list of the most common web apps built in this platform: Ruby in Rails applications.
You can find more resources about this platform, like reviews or even screencasts.
At this point I think that saying that Google released a new and very ambitious project as open source should not surprise anyone. Google officially announced that one of their recent projects, Google Wave, and the protocol involved, will be open source and they expect a lot of contribution from the entire community (I’m sure they will get it).
Google Wave will be oriented to concurrent messaging in a collaborative environment, multiple users can be manipulating the same content at the same time and user activity is immediately visible to other participants. As any collaborative environment and architecture, most of the operations will converge when the server receives the concurrent requests; but the real challenge appears making all that an “invisible transparency” to the user without resigning the usability, functionality and performance.
Will be something like this:
Google says: “To kickoff Federation Day, we open sourced two components: 1) the Operational Transform (OT) code and the underlying wave model, and 2) a basic client/server prototype that uses the wave protocol. The OT code is the heart and soul of the collaborative experience in Google Wave and we plan that code will evolve into the production-quality reference implementation”.
You can even take a peak to the source code of this protocol. And you can check also a nice overview.
Besides the Firefox Add-On official site, where anyone can download/upload the add-ons and share it with the community; you can also find Mozdev.org where there are over 250 projects related to Mozilla that are actively in motion by several developers in the mission to “establish Mozilla as a viable application development platform”.
Within the site, you will find several very interesting add-ons and plug-ins to use with Mozilla Firefox. Including the Top-50 most viewed and downloaded projects.
On this list you’ll find very, very useful tools that you can install to improve your browsing experience: Integration with Thunderbird, FTP client, autocopy highlighted text, proxy configurations, RSS reader, etc etc.
Again, another open source project that shows a lot of maturity, adding value and constant improvement. Cheers to that
There aren’t very many social media applications yet on the iPhones that are based around social news or social bookmarking. Digg has a an unofficial app which is much improved than the last unofficial app that was in the iTunes App Store which is no longer available. Delicious has quite a few apps that are decent but lack a few important features. Disappointingly, StumbleUpon doesn’t have any applications and neither does Mixx or Yahoo! Buzz.
Reddit is currently leading with three apps to make the mobile experience much more enjoyable. One of theirs is an official app from the Reddit creators themselves. Will Digg be releasing an official app soon?
I’ve taken the liberty to do a review of the three Reddit apps and Digg app that are in the iTune App Store. I am in no way associated with any of these apps, know any of the owners, or am promoting any of them in any fashion. This is merely a review from an avid Reddit and Digg user with a love for social news and social media.
Shovel – Digg App
Author: Scott Fitzhugh
Price: Free
Ratings: 147 Reviews – 
(at the time of writing)
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/d5yqhu
iTunes Description:
Shovel is an app that provides top stories from the social news website Digg.com in a native application. Browse the front page stories, or delve deeper into an array of topics and subtopics of interest.
Personal Review:
Shovel is a great application for viewing Digg.com content easily on the iPhone. Overall, the design and interface is pretty clean and simple. It gives you a variety of topics and listings to select to view so you can access all of the content on Digg.com. You can view:
- Popular Stories
- Top Stories
- Movers & Shakers
- Brand New Stories
All listings are applicable to any category or sub-category in Digg.com. If you select a Digg story you can then scroll down the commentary to see what people are saying, who’s replied, how many votes each comment has received, etc. After that, you can click further to view the story live on the Web. Which is nice about it is that it doesn’t load Safari as a separate app to view the content so there’s no back-and-forth between the apps.
Unfortunately, what you cannot participate in digging, burying, or commenting through this application. The developer disclaims, “Now we’ve gotten the message loud and clear that the one thing that would turn this 3.5 star app (currently 3 stars) into a 5 star one is the interactivity of the original Digg site. You guys (and gals) want to be able to Digg, comment, and bury, and who can blame you? Right now, however, there is no way to do this using the legitimate Digg APIs, and quite frankly, it makes us sad. I’ve been trying to court the help of Digg in making this app all that it can be, and if you want to help that along, you should drop them a line yourselves requesting the same!”
Another drawback is that you cannot personalize this application because there is no way to login. Therefore you can’t weed out content you don’t want to see, view your account profile, see your friend’s submissions, etc.
In doing some research the Shovel app used to be named “Diggerific”. Apparently, they have changed the name of it and redid the UI just a bit as you can tell from the video review of Diggerific below:
Overview
Pros
- Easy to use
- Clean interface
- Ability to access all Digg content
Cons
- Free of charge
- Can’t Digg, comment, or bury content
- No Digg account profile/community features or functionality
iReddit
Author: CondeNet
Price: $1.99
Ratings: 41 Reviews 
(at the time of writing)
Feedback Contact: http://getsatisfaction.com/reddit/products/reddit_ireddit
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/ce6tt2
iTunes Description:
The official Reddit iPhone app. Never be bored again. With this app, you’ll only be a tap (or shake) away from the most interesting stuff on the web.
All of your favorite Reddit functionality is here: view the hottest, newest, top, and most controversial stories of the moment, explore, individual subreddits, vote, comment, share, and save links for later. The entire commenting system has been optimized for the iPhone app so you won’t have any trouble contributing to an epic pun thread.
Save time by never having to reload the Reddit homepage. You can even use handy next/previous navigation to move between websites without going back to the main list. And those sites work in portrait and widescreen modes too.
It’s never been easier to be entertained. Just shake your iPhone to enter “serendipity mode” where you’ll be served a random, interesting site. Pro-tip: Turn on “play sound on shake” for a special treat with every jostle — the iPhone is an elegant phone for a more sophisticated age.
And if you’re feeling the economic downturn (what are you doing with an iPhone?) there’s a tree, ad-supported version to come.
Personal Review:
The Official Reddit application is pretty cool. You can input your username and password so that you can vote and comment on stories. Initially, you come to the Reddit homepage. Along the top you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Top”, and “Controversial” stories. When selecting a story, there is an overlay on the footer that allows you to upvote/downvote the story, go to the comments section of the story, save the story, and email the link.
Three subreddits will fit on the bottom bar overlay that you can quickly navigate to. You can edit the subreddits with the ones you want to use the most, but you only have a small selection of subreddit’s to swap out with. Those subreddits are:
- Programming
- Funny
- Science
- Tech
- World News
- Entertainment
- Business
- Comics
- Gaming
- Best Of
- Economics
- Cappuccino
It is the most expensive application but I feel it’s the cleanest and easiest to use. Unfortunately, you can’t browse all subreddits and there’s no search function. Nor is there a function to view your account’s saves, karma points, submissions, comments, etc.
I would recommend this app to anyone looking to quickly and easily view Reddit news, vote, and participate in the more popular subreddits. The free Reddit app doesn’t allow for this.
Overview
Pros
- Easily vote on stories from the actual story page
- Save links to view/read later
- Comment participation
- Customization of footer subreddits
Cons
- Most expensive Reddit app
- Not a wide-range of subreddits to customize on your footer
- Can’t browse all subreddits
- No search functionality
- No personal account status functionality
Open Source Reddit
Author: Joseph Pintozzi
Price: Free
Ratings: 10 Reviews (at the time of writing)
Feedback Contact: reddit@pintozzi.com
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/cpjzvj
iTunes Description:
The Reddit application allows users to view the stories from www.reddit.com without having to deal with loading massive webpages. It displays the stories in a nice table view, providing details about each submission, and allows the user to easily view the submitted content. The ability to vote on a submission is currently being added.
Personal Review:
This app is very bare bones with very limited functionality. If you’re looking to vote on stories or participate in the comments this app isn’t for you. If you’re just looking to read “Hot” news from a select few subreddits then this is a good app for the cost of nothing. The included subreddits to choose from are:
- reddit.com
- bacon
- politics
- pics
- WTF
- funny
- technology
- programming
The nice thing about it is that it’s open source and the developer leaves it open for people to add on what they want to it. Hopefully, in the future, this will be a great application for Reddit.
Overview
Pros
Cons
- No commenting
- No voting
- Can’t browse all subreddits
- No search functionality
- No personal account status functionality
Satellite Reddit
Author: 3Cube Technologies
Price: $0.99
Ratings: 8 Reviews – (at the time of writing)
Feedback Contact: satellite@3cubetechnologies.com or http://twitter.com/3cube
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/cx8eec
iTunes Description:
Satellite 2.0 is now available and brings a host of improvement to the mobile Reddit experience.
Change in this version includes:
- Greatly improved performance
- New, Controversial, and Top views are available for all subreddits
- An overlay displaying the full article title and comments count shows while loading an article
- The subreddit list is reorderable
- A beautiful new icon and splash screen have been added
- New lower pricing.
Satellite is a full-featured client for Reddit.com, a social link aggregation site. With Satellite, you can browse links appearing on the front page or drill down into the Subreddits you are subscribed to. When viewing an article you can vote the link up or down, save it to your Reddit account, or share the link with others. With the click of a button, you can shift into commenting mode to browse comments or post your own back to the Reddit page about the link. The interface provides a substantially more streamlined experience over the mobile Reddit site and incorprates the unique capabilities of the iPhone to make your day to day Reddit’ing much more fun.
Additional Satellite features include:
- Shake the app at any time to explore random content from Reddit
- Next/previous buttons are available at the screen edges to move through content without returning to list view
- Full portrait/landscape modes, including upside down. Great for handing the phone across the dinner table to share your discoveries!
- Returns to the content you were browsing at start-up. Pick up right where you left off when that call came in.
- Highly addictive content discovery available anywhere, at any time!
Personal Review:
This app is definitely worth the 99 cents. After entering in your login information you can view ALL of your subscribed subreddits. It also gives you an option to edit your subreddits for your account. After selecting a subreddit you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Controversial”, and “Top” categories in the footer bar. Once selecting a story, it takes you to the story and overlays the story title, submitter, and point count. At the bottom footer you can choose to vote, go to comments, save the link, or email the link. Again though, there’s no search feature with this app either.
This app is a lot like the official iReddit app except it’s more personalized. You can also view your saved Reddits on your account to follow up on how your saves and submissions are doing.
Overview
Pros
- Personalized
- Nice User-Interface
- Good functionality for voting and commenting
- All Reddit content accessible through this app
Cons
- Isn’t free
- Can’t see your karma points
- No search functionality
HAPPY BROWSING WITH THESE SOCIAL MEDIA APPS!
Several hundred thousand palates can’t be wrong. With this, Tsavo Media announced that it has acquired Open Source Food (OSF) from Egg & Co., a venture of Tokyo-based web producer Jon Anthony Yongfook Cockle.
With the acquisition, OSF has been renamed NibbleDish and will join Tsavo’s new network of content sites for consumers, currently in development.
Yongfook will remain with the company. A serial web-app builder, Yongfook is also responsible for the popular lifestreaming software Sweetcron and analytics tool Gumtrail. From his base in Tokyo, he works with various Japanese companies as an outside consultant, building web apps and overseeing production.
Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Apple iTunes has always been so popular and with the launch of the iPhone iTunes has gone to the next level. Every single day Apple sells millions of dollars in the iTunes store just for iPhone applications. With so many applications being launched everyday how do you keep up? Additionally, I have always wondering how much money these applications are making developers and which applications are actually popular.
Today I stumbled across a great new site called AppShopper. AppShopper is a huge directory of all iPhone and iPod Touch applications and allows users to search through apps, find out how much they cost, and find out which applications are actually selling.
Additionally on the AppShopper blog they have great insights into applications within the app store and also all kinda of application related news there is. So if you are looking to easily find applications within the App Store, dont head over to iTunes itself, head to AppShopper.
Blender.org is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. I dont really know too much about this sector, but the quality of images made using this software is simply amazing. Im a really big fan of open source software and companies trying to offer a great tool to users for free, and Blender is no exception.
I have attached a sample of what has been made using the Blender tool. If you are in graphic or animation design, it would be great to hear your views on this tool.
Google to launch a web browser today to 100 countries, and it will be named Google Chrome. There is a lot of buzz already about this new product and Im sure you have probably already read about it on Techcrunch, AllthingsD, Sizlopedia and more.All of this was just a rumour until it was confirmed by the Official Google Blog.
For a long time now there have only really been 3 key players in the online browser market, IE, Firefox and Safari (MACs). I’m very interested to use this product today and see how it compares to all these other browsers.
For a long time also Google has been funding Mozilla by paying to have their search engine as default in the browser, so if Google Chrome becomes popular and out grows Firefox, will they still pay top dollar to be the default search in Firefox?
EyeOS has been developed with the multi-computer user in mind. If you find yourself using computers at home, at the library, at the office, at a cybercafe, or a friends house, EyeOS is the desktop web application for you.
While I feel the desktop web application market is a bit watered down, EyeOS is not without its definitive features. EyeOS is literally an entire operating system built inside a web application and more. Through this web application you have access to sophisticated file management protocols, an entire office suite with compatibility across any computer you are using, a fully featured PIM application system as fully functional as having MS Outlook, and finally your own internal neworking services to include email, bulletin board services, and RSS Reader.
Like other desktop applications you have the ability to configure the web app to your liking. The tools are fully customizable and easy to use. Being an open source platform, users are encouraged to participate in making EyeOS better, if not more functional for yourself. The ability to link to your mobile devices is also a feature that few will want to pass up.
The EyeOs team states they want to center work and entertainment all in once place to avoid OS compatibility issues across the varous computers we use. What puzzles me is how this is actually functional in a world full of laptops and key chain drives. I welcome the EyeOS team to comment because I fail to see the relevancy of this web application.
Nevertheless, if you are a frequest user of desktop web apps, and are looking for something bigger and more in depth, experience EyeOS. In the time that I used this web app, it definitely stands out from the rest with its bevy of offerings.
It’s a great day when Internet giant Google open sources the programs it uses to build well-known favourites such as GMail, Docs and Google Maps. It announced on its blog that it will be making a lot of it’s own development software available to developers all over the world. This release comes as Google are undoubtedly upgrading their own tools especially with the upcoming launch of Google Wave.
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