Google has launched a developer’s preview of its Chrome Web Store — the company’s directory where users can browse and install Chrome extensions, web apps and downloadable apps that run in the browser.

There are no listings available yet in Thursday’s preview, but you can start creating apps and uploading them to the store so they’ll be available as soon as it opens later this year. All the tools you’ll need to publish apps are available there, as well as instructions on how to use the Licensing API so you can charge for your apps if you wish.

Interestingly, Google is recommending developers pursue a freemium model for paid apps. “A freshly installed app should always provide something useful or interesting, even if the user hasn’t paid yet,” the documentation says. “If the first page the user sees is useless — nothing but a payment wall, for example — the user is likely to uninstall your app, and you might get some scathing reviews.”

According to a report on TechCrunch, Google will take a five percent cut of sales revenue.

What’s up with installable web apps, you ask? Don’t web apps get served to a client from a web server? Well, yes, there’s that kind, and then there’s the kind you download and install. Google describes an installable web app as “a normal website with a bit of extra metadata.” The app is packaged, then downloaded and installed by the user, where it runs in the browser (online or off) and can access local storage.

Here’s a video that covers the details of Thursday’s developer preview:

See Also:

• Chrome 6 Beta Boasts New Look, Better Sync
• Gmail Adds More Drag and Drop Features, But Only in Chrome
• Is Your Browser Ready for HTML5?

View full post on Webmonkey

The nascent Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is getting a boost this week thanks to some new initiatives being kicked off by the W3C, the web’s governing body.

The W3C recently created a working group to build a WOFF into a web standard, and that group will be holding its first face-to-face meeting at the TypeCon 2010 conference taking place this week in Los Angeles.

Representatives from the major browser vendors, several font foundries and web services providers will be in attendance. Also, a dozen or so select individuals will be participating in a series of presentations and panel discussions about WOFF throughout the conference. All the design industry folks in attendance will get a peek at the future of high-quality typography on the web. There are scores of topics on the program, but this year, WOFF is getting top billing.

Things are looking up for web fonts in general. Monday, Webkit announced a partnership with Adobe to include the company’s fonts as part of its licensing service. Last month, Google launched a new tool (tied to its Font API) that makes it dead easy to include any of its open source fonts in website designs.

The Web Fonts working group was formed earlier this year at the W3C, and the group has already released the first working draft of the specification that will eventually lead to WOFF becoming a recommended web standard.

WOFF works just like OpenType and TrueType — you use the @font-face CSS property to drop the fonts in — but the font data is compressed, so the files download faster, and you can include more fonts in your designs without worrying as much about payload bloat.

The W3C adds this bit: “The WOFF format is not expected to replace other formats such as TrueType/OpenType/Open Font Format or SVG fonts, but provides an alternative solution for use cases where these formats may be less performant, or where licensing considerations make their use less acceptable.”

Support for WOFF is already strong — Google, Mozilla, Apple, Opera and Microsoft browsers either ship with or are building support, and the fast-moving foundries are releasing WOFF fonts — so why is the W3C’s involvement a big deal when the open source format is enjoying such success?

Standardization by the W3C is the best path to true interoperability. It will keep all the parties on the same page when it comes to things like accessibility, cross-browser compatibility, internationalization and search engine indexing. How much metadata to include and how it is handled are also big issues. Plus, fonts have taken an astonishingly long time to arrive on the web because of red tape around licensing, and a collaborative process for developing licensing infrastructures will go a long way toward convincing some of the more conservative type designers to make web-friendly versions of their creations.

The standard will take years to complete (the process is very slow — we’re guessing 2012 or so), and until then, we’ll see designers, developers and innovative service providers like Typekit and Google continue to feed the interest in fancy web fonts. Those not on the bleeding edge may be stuck in the boring world of “web safe” fonts for a while, but at least the future is bright.

TypeCon 2010 runs from August 17 through 20.

Photo by Leo Reynolds/Flickr/CC

See Also:

• Typekit Teams Up With Adobe to Offer More Web Fonts
• Dealing With the Dreaded ‘Flash of Unstyled Text’
• Test Drive Your Type With Google Font Preview

View full post on Webmonkey

**** VOTE NOW!!!! ****

It’s time folks! Over the last two weeks you’ve witnessed ten in-depth BlackBerry accessory reviews from our ten Round 2 competitors in CrackBerry Idol. The judges gave their feedback on each review and now it is in YOUR HANDS to decide which FIVE competitors will continue on to the FINAL round. Below you will find the links to each of the accessory reviews, as well as the CrackBerry Idol voting poll where you can vote for which competitors (up to a max of five) you want to see advance. We’ll leave the poll running on this post right up until midnight PST, this Sunday August 15th. Voting is below. Think hard before you vote. Now go vote!

read more

CrackBerry.com‘s feed sponsored by ShopCrackBerry.com. CrackBerry Idol Round 2 Voting Now Open – Vote Now!!

View full post on CrackBerry.com blogs

The Open Geospatial Consortium and the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing have agreed to develop and use open geospatial standards.

Under the agreement the two organizations will work cooperatively to raise the awareness, acceptance, and implementation of open standards and to promote educational programs and best practices. This will involve Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS) demonstrations and workshops, sensor network standardization events, and events on topics such as multi-source data fusion and multi-spectral image processing.

The ISPRS is a non-governmental organization devoted to the development of international cooperation for the advancement of photogrammetry, remote sensing and their applications. The Open Geospatial Consortium is an international consortium of more than 395 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities developing publicly available geospatial standards.

Community sponsors of the OpenStack Cloud include 25 companies like Dell and Intel.

NASA contributed a hardware approach that powers its Nebula Cloud Platform. Nebula uses containerized data centers, lowering cost by centralizing hardware. Nebula is used for Mars images, seen in Microsoft’s WorldWide telescope. Microsoft recently unveiled the largest and clearest image of the night sky ever assembled. The “TeraPixel” sky map was generated with Microsoft’s latest HPC and parallel software assets.

OpenStack’s mission is to “produce the ubiquitous OpenSource Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable.”

The $400 million Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), funded by the National Science Foundation and now being built along the West Coast of the United States, will use Amazon Web Services with two 10 Gbps connections to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Underwater sensors, powered by 10 KiloVolt cables carrying 10 Gbps data from a Shore Station on the coast of Oregon. OOI will “bug” the ocean, forming an undersea network stretching from Canada to California.

Meanwhile, DARPA will develop an exascale supercomputer, using Intel and Nvidia processors. One exaflop is a thousand times faster than a petaflop, the speed of today’s fastest supercomputers, including the IBM Roadrunner, the Chinese Nebulae and the Cray Jaguar.

It would support massive streaming sensor data (pdf). Prototype UHPC systems are expected to be complete by 2018.

View full post on dailywireless.org

According to an insider source at Boy Genius Report, reports are coming in that the Samsung Epic 4G will be heading to the public on August 11th. Other reports from their insider source are stating that this information is in Sprint’s playbook, and that some Sprint stores will be opening at 8 AM on that date to accommodate. This puts the possible launch date just one day before the Motorola Droid 2 on Verizon.

For more information on Android and the current Android mobile phones, check out our Android Guides

Rumor: Samsung Epic 4G coming August 11th, Sprint stores will open early

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

Have you ever been checking out a really cool website on your phone and then realized some cool feature would just be way better on a computer? If you have then you probably also realized how much of a pain it is to try and get to that same page from your computer. Sure you can email yourself the link, or something similar, but really there is no excuse for such clunky functionality. Well worry no longer. Android2cloud is an app that fixes this problem quickly and elegantly; once you install the app and the Google Chrome extension and verify both clients, you can simply ’share’ the page from your phone to the app and it opens the tab on your computer! Pretty slick huh? Let us know what you think in the comments!

[via Lifehacker]

For more information on Android and the current Android mobile phones, check out our Android Guides

Instantly Open URL’s From Your Phone in Chrome

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

Developers anxious for the full open source coding of the Samsung Captivate were joyous today as they received the following message in their inboxes:

Dear _____________,

You can download the source code of SGH-I897 on this site in Mobile Category, SGH-I897 model.

Thank you.

Short, sweet, and to the point. This is excellent news for those intrepid ROM developers already hard at work at opening the system and trying to add and/or fix functionality in the device. One little quirk in particular seems to be on many developers’ minds in the “mimocan external SD card lag” issue. Solving this problem (where the internal Samsung memory does not properly handle application data) would boost the already fairly impressive Quadrant scores of the device to an awesome 1750. With Android 2.2 installed with a mimocan fix, you could probably expect somewhere between 2000 to 3000, an impressive feat.

If you’re a developer, hop to it! We’re all anxious to see what beautiful creations you guys can cook up for these powerful devices.

[via briefmobile.com]

For more information on Android and the current Android mobile phones, check out our Android Guides

Samsung Captivate Code Goes Open Source

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

Developers anxious for the full open source coding of the Samsung Captivate were joyous today as they received the following message in their inboxes:

Dear _____________,

You can download the source code of SGH-I897 on this site in Mobile Category, SGH-I897 model.

Thank you.

Short, sweet, and to the point. This is excellent news for those intrepid ROM developers already hard at work at opening the system and trying to add and/or fix functionality in the device. One little quirk in particular seems to be on many developers’ minds in the “mimocan external SD card lag” issue. Solving this problem (where the internal Samsung memory does not properly handle application data) would boost the already fairly impressive Quadrant scores of the device to an awesome 1750. With Android 2.2 installed with a mimocan fix, you could probably expect somewhere between 2000 to 3000, an impressive feat.

If you’re a developer, hop to it! We’re all anxious to see what beautiful creations you guys can cook up for these powerful devices.

[via briefmobile.com]

For more information on Android and the current Android mobile phones, check out our Android Guides

Samsung Captivate Code Goes Open Source

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

Developers anxious for the full open source coding of the Samsung Captivate were joyous today as they received the following message in their inboxes:

Dear _____________,

You can download the source code of SGH-I897 on this site in Mobile Category, SGH-I897 model.

Thank you.

Short, sweet, and to the point. This is excellent news for those intrepid ROM developers already hard at work at opening the system and trying to add and/or fix functionality in the device. One little quirk in particular seems to be on many developers’ minds in the “mimocan external SD card lag” issue. Solving this problem (where the internal Samsung memory does not properly handle application data) would boost the already fairly impressive Quadrant scores of the device to an awesome 1750. With Android 2.2 installed with a mimocan fix, you could probably expect somewhere between 2000 to 3000, an impressive feat.

If you’re a developer, hop to it! We’re all anxious to see what beautiful creations you guys can cook up for these powerful devices.

[via briefmobile.com]

For more information on Android and the current Android mobile phones, check out our Android Guides

Samsung Captivate Code Goes Open Source

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

Developers anxious for the full open source coding of the Samsung Captivate were joyous today as they received the following message in their inboxes:

Dear _____________,

You can download the source code of SGH-I897 on this site in Mobile Category, SGH-I897 model.

Thank you.

Short, sweet, and to the point. This is excellent news for those intrepid ROM developers already hard at work at opening the system and trying to add and/or fix functionality in the device. One little quirk in particular seems to be on many developers’ minds in the “mimocan external SD card lag” issue. Solving this problem (where the internal Samsung memory does not properly handle application data) would boost the already fairly impressive Quadrant scores of the device to an awesome 1750. With Android 2.2 installed with a mimocan fix, you could probably expect somewhere between 2000 to 3000, an impressive feat.

If you’re a developer, hop to it! We’re all anxious to see what beautiful creations you guys can cook up for these powerful devices.

[via briefmobile.com]

For more information on Android and the current Android mobile phones, check out our Android Guides

Samsung Captivate Code Goes Open Source

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

The Open Geospatial Consortium today announced the formation of an Open GeoSMS Standards Working Group (SWG) today. It will advance the Candidate Standard as an adopted standard and define a short messaging service (SMS) between different mobile devices or applications.

The standard is expected to provide plug and play compatibility among different devices and be incorporated into RSS feeds and a variety of devices.

Currently devices or applications are often unable to share location information with each other because of technical incompatibilities. GeoSMS encoding for location will be compatible with other OGC standards, such as those for sensor webs and earth imaging. There are some 30 Open Geospatial standards.

Open GeoSMS will also be compatible with standards such as the OASIS Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standard and the IETF RFC Presence Information Data Format Location Object (PIDF-LO).

The Open Geospatial Consortium is an international consortium of more than 395 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities, developing a publicly available geospatial standard. They support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services for any application that needs to be geospatially enabled.

O’Reilly Media’s Open Source Developers Conference is taking place in Portland, Ore., this week with hundreds of speakers and lots to see and do.

Here is the OSCON Blog, the OSCON 2010 Schedule, Keynotes, Events, Health Information Technology, BOF Sessions, and a Cloud Summit. Some OSCON tutorials will be live-streamed, although they require a registration fee.

OSCON’s Mobile sessions explain how to target all major mobile platforms with open source.

OpenHeatMap is an open-source tool to embed visualizations of data with a location element and changes over time. It works in Flash or HTML5.

View full post on dailywireless.org

The Open Geospatial Consortium today announced the formation of an Open GeoSMS Standards Working Group (SWG) today. It will advance the Candidate Standard as an adopted standard and define a short messaging service (SMS) between different mobile devices or applications.

The standard is expected to provide plug and play compatibility among different devices and be incorporated into RSS feeds and a variety of devices.

Currently devices or applications are often unable to share location information with each other because of technical incompatibilities. GeoSMS encoding for location will be compatible with other OGC standards, such as those for sensor webs and earth imaging. There are some 30 Open Geospatial standards.

Open GeoSMS will also be compatible with standards such as the OASIS Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standard and the IETF RFC Presence Information Data Format Location Object (PIDF-LO).

The Open Geospatial Consortium is an international consortium of more than 395 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities, developing a publicly available geospatial standard. They support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services for any application that needs to be geospatially enabled.

O’Reilly Media’s Open Source Developers Conference is taking place in Portland, Ore., this week with hundreds of speakers and lots to see and do.

Here is the OSCON Blog, the OSCON 2010 Schedule, Keynotes, Events, Health Information Technology, BOF Sessions, and a Cloud Summit. Some OSCON tutorials will be live-streamed, although they require a registration fee.

OSCON’s Mobile sessions explain how to target all major mobile platforms with open source.

OpenHeatMap is an open-source tool to embed visualizations of data with a location element and changes over time. It works in Flash or HTML5.

View full post on dailywireless.org

The Open Geospatial Consortium today announced the formation of an Open GeoSMS Standards Working Group (SWG) today. It will advance the Candidate Standard as an adopted standard and define a short messaging service (SMS) between different mobile devices or applications.

The standard is expected to provide plug and play compatibility among different devices and be incorporated into RSS feeds and a variety of devices.

Currently devices or applications are often unable to share location information with each other because of technical incompatibilities. GeoSMS encoding for location will be compatible with other OGC standards, such as those for sensor webs and earth imaging. There are some 30 Open Geospatial standards.

Open GeoSMS will also be compatible with standards such as the OASIS Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standard and the IETF RFC Presence Information Data Format Location Object (PIDF-LO).

The Open Geospatial Consortium is an international consortium of more than 395 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities, developing a publicly available geospatial standard. They support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services for any application that needs to be geospatially enabled.

O’Reilly Media’s Open Source Developers Conference is taking place in Portland, Ore., this week with hundreds of speakers and lots to see and do.

Here is the OSCON Blog, the OSCON 2010 Schedule, Keynotes, Events, Health Information Technology, BOF Sessions, and a Cloud Summit. Some OSCON tutorials will be live-streamed, although they require a registration fee.

OSCON’s Mobile sessions explain how to target all major mobile platforms with open source.

OpenHeatMap is an open-source tool to embed visualizations of data with a location element and changes over time. It works in Flash or HTML5.

View full post on dailywireless.org

The Open Geospatial Consortium today announced the formation of an Open GeoSMS Standards Working Group (SWG) today. It will advance the Candidate Standard as an adopted standard and define a short messaging service (SMS) between different mobile devices or applications.

The standard is expected to provide plug and play compatibility among different devices and be incorporated into RSS feeds and a variety of devices.

Currently devices or applications are often unable to share location information with each other because of technical incompatibilities. GeoSMS encoding for location will be compatible with other OGC standards, such as those for sensor webs and earth imaging. There are some 30 Open Geospatial standards.

Open GeoSMS will also be compatible with standards such as the OASIS Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standard and the IETF RFC Presence Information Data Format Location Object (PIDF-LO).

The Open Geospatial Consortium is an international consortium of more than 395 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities, developing a publicly available geospatial standard. They support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services for any application that needs to be geospatially enabled.

O’Reilly Media’s Open Source Developers Conference is taking place in Portland, Ore., this week with hundreds of speakers and lots to see and do.

Here is the OSCON Blog, the OSCON 2010 Schedule, Keynotes, Events, Health Information Technology, BOF Sessions, and a Cloud Summit. Some OSCON tutorials will be live-streamed, although they require a registration fee.

OSCON’s Mobile sessions explain how to target all major mobile platforms with open source.

OpenHeatMap is an open-source tool to embed visualizations of data with a location element and changes over time. It works in Flash or HTML5.

View full post on dailywireless.org

The Open Geospatial Consortium today announced the formation of an Open GeoSMS Standards Working Group (SWG) today. It will advance the Candidate Standard as an adopted standard and define a short messaging service (SMS) between different mobile devices or applications.

The standard is expected to provide plug and play compatibility among different devices and be incorporated into RSS feeds and a variety of devices.

Currently devices or applications are often unable to share location information with each other because of technical incompatibilities. GeoSMS encoding for location will be compatible with other OGC standards, such as those for sensor webs and earth imaging. There are some 30 Open Geospatial standards.

Open GeoSMS will also be compatible with standards such as the OASIS Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standard and the IETF RFC Presence Information Data Format Location Object (PIDF-LO).

The Open Geospatial Consortium is an international consortium of more than 395 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities, developing a publicly available geospatial standard. They support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services for any application that needs to be geospatially enabled.

O’Reilly Media’s Open Source Developers Conference is taking place in Portland, Ore., this week with hundreds of speakers and lots to see and do.

Here is the OSCON Blog, the OSCON 2010 Schedule, Keynotes, Events, Health Information Technology, BOF Sessions, and a Cloud Summit. Some OSCON tutorials will be live-streamed, although they require a registration fee.

OSCON’s Mobile sessions explain how to target all major mobile platforms with open source.

OpenHeatMap is an open-source tool to embed visualizations of data with a location element and changes over time. It works in Flash or HTML5.

View full post on dailywireless.org

The Open Geospatial Consortium today announced the formation of an Open GeoSMS Standards Working Group (SWG) today. It will advance the Candidate Standard as an adopted standard and define a short messaging service (SMS) between different mobile devices or applications.

The standard is expected to provide plug and play compatibility among different devices and be incorporated into RSS feeds and a variety of devices.

Currently devices or applications are often unable to share location information with each other because of technical incompatibilities. GeoSMS encoding for location will be compatible with other OGC standards, such as those for sensor webs and earth imaging. There are some 30 Open Geospatial standards.

Open GeoSMS will also be compatible with standards such as the OASIS Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standard and the IETF RFC Presence Information Data Format Location Object (PIDF-LO).

The Open Geospatial Consortium is an international consortium of more than 395 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities, developing a publicly available geospatial standard. They support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services for any application that needs to be geospatially enabled.

O’Reilly Media’s Open Source Developers Conference is taking place in Portland, Ore., this week with hundreds of speakers and lots to see and do.

Here is the OSCON Blog, the OSCON 2010 Schedule, Keynotes, Events, Health Information Technology, BOF Sessions, and a Cloud Summit. Some OSCON tutorials will be live-streamed, although they require a registration fee.

OSCON’s Mobile sessions explain how to target all major mobile platforms with open source.

OpenHeatMap is an open-source tool to embed visualizations of data with a location element and changes over time. It works in Flash or HTML5.

View full post on dailywireless.org

It’s happened to us all: you double-click on a file and are dismayed to see it opening with the wrong application. Here’s how you can control which application opens a file—or an entire file type—temporarily or permanently.

View full post on Macworld

In a move to provide developers the ability to create rich applications, Qualcomm has released an open source driver for their Snapdragon processors. Specifically this driver is for the GPU core of the processor which controls the 2D and 3D applications. The kernel level code give the developers more control buy opening the code that runs the Adreno GPU. With this new utility in developers tool boxes we can hope to see new things coming out of Snapdragon based Android phones such as the Nexus One, HTC Evo and Incredible.

If you are a developer or kernel modifier the driver is available over at Code Aurora.

For more information on Android and the current Android mobile phones, check out our Android Guides

Open source 3D driver for Snapdragon released by Qualcomm.

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

Google Voice… perhaps you’ve heard of it? Well, if you’ve been refreshing your inbox for your invite or even searching around on ebay for one, your wait is over. Google has taken it’s voice service out of invite-only beta, and released it to the general public.

For those of you not familiar with the service, it allows you to choose a phone number from almost any area code, and then route that number to any of your phones… cell phones, home lines, businesses, wherever. You can set time conditions for when to ring which phones, have different voicemail greetings depending on who calls, get messages transcribed and sent via SMS or email, and even send and receive free text messages… just to name a few features.

While the service – which was once GrandCentral, but got scooped up by Google in 2007 for just over $50 million, just one year after release – may have had it’s ups and downs during the beta test period (to include being the stumbling block that caused the now-infamous rift between Google and Apple), the service is now easy to use and intuitive. It is also a free, centralized service on Android phones, with seamless OS integration. According to Google, their voice service is over 1 million users strong, but you can believe that number will start to go up exponentially, now that it is available to the public. Full announcement via Google Voice Blog can be read here.

[via TechCrunch]

For more information on Android and the current Android mobile phones, check out our Android Guides

Google Voice now out of Beta and open to the public

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

An FCC task force laid out preliminary ideas on Friday for allowing conventional mobile broadband in satellite frequencies.

View full post on Macworld

With all the news surrounding the FIFA World cup, news from the U.S. Open 2010 Golf Championship has kind of been a little left behind. For Golf fans out there, this is one of the premiere events. With that in mind, it’s only fair of us to point out that the U.S. Open does offer up a mobile version of their website to fulfill the needs of golf fans everywhere. Sure, it’s not a dedicated application but it works quite well and the layout looks great on BlackBerry devices. If golf is your thing keep it in mind. The U.S Open runs from June 14th till the 20thin Pebble Beach, California.

• Check Out The U.S Open Mobile Website Today >>

CrackBerry.com‘s feed sponsored by ShopCrackBerry.com. U.S. Open 2010 Golf Championship – Catch all the updates from your BlackBerry

View full post on CrackBerry.com blogs

There are a lot of free, online books on open source topics available, says OStatic.

Sam Dean rounded up seven online books that introduce essential concepts for getting started with Linux, Firefox, Blender (3D graphics and animation), GIMP (graphics), OpenOffice and more.

• Introduction to Firefox. The Firefox browser is beloved for its extensibility, facility with tabbed browsing, and much more. FLOSS Manuals offers this free book that starts with absolute basics such as how to bookmark sites, and moves on to working skillfully with extensions.
• Blender Basics: Third Edition. This free, online book presents an introduction and a set of step-by-step lessons for working with Blender, a widely used open source 3D graphics and animation application. We discussed the book’s second edition here.
• Grokking the GIMP. GIMP is perennially one of the most popular open source graphics applications, and this is a comprehensive book on it filled with visual lessons. The book takes you through layers, filters, resizing tips, masks, blending colors, case studies and way more than that.
• Introduction to OpenOffice. This miniature manual from FLOSS Manuals packs more of a punch than is apparent at first glance. It goes through all the productivity applications in the popular OpenOffice suite of applications, and provides screenshots with annotations showing how most of the important features work.
• Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. This is an excellent guide to the culture and practices of open source developers. Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, has an illuminating chapter, as do many other open source notables.
• Asterisk: The Future of Telephony. Asterisk is recognized as one of the most powerful of all open source telephony platforms. It can transform any computer into a powerful voice server, and even function as a PBX-replacement for many types of businesses.

For many more free manuals and guides to open source applications, and platforms, see FLOSS Manuals’ other offerings.

At OSCON 2010, July 19-23 in Portland, Oregon, there will be hundreds of sessions covering open source languages and platforms, practical tutorials that go deep into technical skill and best practices, keynote presentations, and an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products.

View full post on dailywireless.org

Some 113 transit agencies provide open data that developers can use to create mobile applications.

This week, a report on Transparent Metro Data Sets was announced, which included a handy chart with side-by-side comparisons of data types for several transit agencies, relating to both bus and rail.

Numerous governmental institutions, including transit agencies, have jumped on the bandwagon to open up their data collections to the public so that information can be repurposed for the greater good.

City-Go-Round helps you find hundreds of useful transit applications around the country. They encourage public transit agencies to open their data to software developers. While many agencies now provide open data, many others do not.

To qualify as having open data, an agency must:

1. Publish their schedule data as a GTFS feed. Google publishes instructions on how to create GTFS feeds.
2. Provide an official URL where your feed can be downloaded.
3. Send email to transit-developers@googlegroups.com with the URL of your feed. Note: this is a public mailing list.

Traffic 2.0 is an attempt to rethink transportation information.

Metroplan is an e-ink enabled system map, powered by an embedded array of solar cells. Metropass is an rfid transit card. Metropoint provides information about bus arrivals readable from up to 150 feet.

Related Dailywireless location-based stories and transit connectivity stories include WiFi on Trains Conference, SF Bay Unwired, Smart Card for Toronto Transit, Transit TV in L.A., How to Create Transit Applications, Flickr Bike, Bikes and BART Get Mapped, Traffic Cameras Get Smart, Road Radar for Traffic Flow, Google Earth Gets “Live” Overlay, Cell Bazaar, iPad Street View, 360 Degree Haiti Video, Microsoft’s Streetside: Indoors via Stills & Video, 3D Mapping, Google Streetview on Cell Phones and Live Map Integrates Photosynth 3D Tours.

View full post on dailywireless.org

AAS Insight #120: Open for Ideas, Yahoo and Nokia
Steve and Rafe talk about Open for Ideas (Nokia’s approach to Innovation), the Nokia – Yahoo strategic alliance, the possibility of the first Symbian^3 phone from from an Asian manufacturer, Creebies, Nokia Messaging for IM for S60 5th Edition Nokia phones and more.

Read more on All About Symbian