I stopped reading Gizmodo but fortunately others haven’t. A Slovenian company Gorenje that we did a few projects for appeared there. Yey!
Gorenje on Gizmodo
October 28th, 2006Triptracker
October 28th, 2006Spletne urice served its visitors a great talk from one of the founders of a Slovenian company called Klika. It’s primarily a software company that specializes in tracking software with GPS and then mapping the data to support sporting and other events (like the Ljubljana marathon that’s on tomorrow).
But the talk wasn’t about their programming but rather about the first global Slovenian Web2.0 website/service – the TripTracker. In short it’s a website that allows you to upload positional data along with pictures, matches them all up by time, draws a map and more or less creates the whole trip into a nice little presentation that you can use to show at meets or just send to your friends. It’s also a good resource for travelers that want to travel to places they know almost nothing about – you can check other people’s trips and see where they went and what they saw and see any comments they might have made.
The most fascinating thing about all this is that they created all their mapping data themselves – all the JavaScript and html for the mapping was written for this site exclusively and all the images converted from NASA sources (I hear Google has exclusive rights on HQ satellite photos so no other mapping service can use them). As the talk progressed questions were popping to my mind but were soon answered – the API is in progress, the service can use Flickr as the image resource and they might even switch their own mapping tool with Google Maps. One thing that came as a surprise is that they’re not using Microformats even though it clearly supports stuff they present on their site. They do allow export to KML though. As all true Web2.0 sites TripTracker also has a developer blog so check it out to see when they release the API to the public.
The slides will probably online soon.
Web 2.0 Thinking Game
October 19th, 2006Text is not only for content
October 19th, 2006IE7 final but still “broken”
October 19th, 2006I was always a bit sceptic about Microsoft’s products on the day of release (do you remember the media center presentation?). Well since I work in a web agency and Microsoft is scaring us about releasing IE7 to the wild on November 1st I had to install it to see if everything works (no I didn’t install any Betas since I hate Betas and I don’t have another legal version of WinXP to put into a VM).
The install went smoothly, I forgot to turn off my Spybot but I knew I have to allow all the changes to the registry. When I opened the new Explorer I saw something I actually expected – it told me that some of the installed extensions were out of date, that it disabled them and they need to be reinstalled for use. I was redirected to the IEDevToolbar page but unfortunately the download page was down.
The infobar did not go away, so after some time I figured I need to restart Explorer. After starting Explorer in normal mode (I realized later that the first start was obviously “Safe mode” or as Microsoft calls it “(No Add-ons)”) the thing broke imediately. Restarts and restarts and the chrome was disappearing faster and faster.
Fortunately I’m an ‘advanced’ user and ran the IE in safe mode again and disabled all the add-ons that reside in the chrome (toolbars and stuff) and now it seems to work normaly. Pretty annoying though – I have to reinstall them all by hand since I have no idea if it has an auto update feature.
So Microsoft – please change this behaviour or I’ll be getting loads of phonecalls from my relatives after they get IE7 installed and it doesn’t work since they have Yahoo/Google toolbars installed. If I do I’ll be telling them to switch to Firefox. I hear the next version will be out by then.
xinf is not flash
October 18th, 2006“Spletne urice” started today with a talk from the lead developer and inventor of xinf Daniel P. Fischer. He talked about getting rid of flash by using it. The talk concentrated around xinf, an open development tool that shares a lot of goals with Flash but has a community driven open development.
The idea behind xinf is to create a new environment for creating rich media applications and then export them to different ‘platforms’. Currently available are javascript (in Firefox) and native (xinfinity). Export for Flash existed in a previous version and is also planned for this version. Xinf is LGPL and is based on many opensource solutions and libraries. The project is also looking for developers in various areas with the promise that Daniel will take you to his island when xinf is so huge that he’ll be able to afford it. You’ll probably get more insight when the presentation is online.
Related news:
Our local multimedia center Cyberpipe is hosting haip a multimedia festival of open technologies this week.