Hands on Sailfish OS: Intelligent building kit for tinkering and porting - Golem.de. Hmm - not really as open as one might have hoped, but more open than one might have feared. Sounds like a good hacking basis for tinkering projects anyway. Especially the combination of a "real" Linux and an Android environment for apps is pretty cool because it avoids technical isolation.
mobil
Here's what I found worth reading this week, collected and uncommented:
Processing on iOS. Just stumbled upon it. What it says - processing.js in a spartan but usable mini-IDE. Nice for in between. And somehow fits well with the tablet. Ending sketches is a bit awkward, you have to tap or press on a bar at the top or something, which nobody tells you. But otherwise everything is clear. There are two more that I found, one costs 89 cents and delivers an interface analogous to PDE and the other is pr0c0d1n6 - it's quite expensive at forty-five, but it has a really usable IDE.
IBM Worklight - Mobile application platform. Eclipse-based and presumably Java-infested in a typical IBM fashion, but still perhaps worth a look: an IDE for mobile applications that a) includes both client and server and b) supports multiple target systems (iOS, Android, web applications). So basically something like Titanium Appcelerator or Phonegap, but with server infrastructure and management tools included. And you can choose how portable you want to be and integrate native extensions if you need them (and of course sacrifice parts of portability in the process).
Android-x86 - Porting Android to x86. Hmm, could this be a fun toy for my old eeeBook? I mean, it would be a pretty fat tablet with an integrated keyboard and an incompatible processor, what could possibly go wrong?
AugmenteDev. Absolutely cool toy - you print a few markers (small pieces of paper with patterns), place them around, and then you simply load a few 3D models onto your iPhone or iPad - these then appear at the locations of the markers, correctly scaled and rotated according to the markers. Very entertaining, even if it sounds banal at first. My to-do now is to convert my SL avatar into its own 3D model in various poses, and then have these as models on my iPhone to take photos from all sorts of places with my avatar in the picture. Oh, and the app is free for iOS and Android.
Pocket-sized fuel cell charges phones for two weeks - Mobile Phones - CNET - CNET Asia. If this thing becomes a reality, I want one. Finally, mobile power that can be stored and then activated anywhere outdoors when needed. Plus, a battery charger connected via USB for the camera battery (or check if you can charge directly in the camera via USB) and the job is done.
Gprowl is a nice little script that monitors a GMail account and sends messages when a new message appears in the inbox. With this, you can create push notifications if you use Sparrow (which does not yet support push notifications). Of course, it also works with forwarding and BoxCar, but I don't really want to forward my spam to other servers ... (and hey, the script is in Python!)
41MP Nokia 808 smartphone hints at pixel-binning future for small sensor cameras. I also raised an eyebrow at first reading - 41 megapixels in a phone sounds ridiculous, and Symbian doesn't really sound future-oriented. DPreview takes a closer look at what these 41 megapixels actually mean - the chip is significantly larger, so the pixels aren't really smaller than those in normal 8-megapixel phone cameras. Multiple pixels are combined to create a typical target image in the 5-8 megapixel range (the full resolution is also available as an option) to improve noise and other artifacts. Therefore, it is most comparable to the Foveon concept, where the pixels are simply placed in front of each other instead of next to each other. However, Symbian is not future-proof regardless of the photo part.
Linux L2TP/IPSec with iPhone and Mac OS/X clients | PEEN.NET. Helped me install an L2TP/IPSec Gateway on my server that works with the iPhone. This is already a quite nice solution to not shout all data out loud at hotspots. However, due to the deactivated NAT transport in the Ubuntu package (due to security concerns), it is a bit fiddly because you really have to manually compile the strongswan package. Additionally, it's a bit annoying that you always have to manually activate the VPN on the iPhone - it doesn't stay active at the top. What you actually want with VPNs is for them to always be active - because otherwise you end up sending data accidentally over unencrypted and listenable paths.
forger the digital sculpting app for iPad. 3D modeling on the go on the iPad following the clay shaping model. Could be interesting for one or the other who wants to bring it over to Blender to Collada to import it into Second Life, for example.
Codify – iPad. Hey, looks nice for the iPad - a Lua IDE, where you don't provide the results as your own app, but let them run within the environment instead. Not a bad approach, the old basics were nothing else - and you can play around on the iPad without any additional tools, graphics and multitouch and stuff also work. Maybe exactly the right thing for doodling on the go.
Breaking: HP Makes Big Shift on WebOS, Exiting Hardware Business - Ina Fried - Mobile - AllThingsD. That's it for WebOS - the future sounds different.
Official Google Blog: Supercharging Android: Google to Acquire Motorola Mobility. Well, yes. Google is buying Motorola (ok, the part of them that is interesting for phones). Wow. Just spent 12.5 billion. Seen via Twitter by Don Dahlmann. I believe the next Nexus will then probably come from Motorola ...
Kindle Cloud Reader. Nice story - under Chrome it is installed as a Chrome application with offline storage of the books. This is very practical on Linux, because there is no native reader there. And on the iPad it should also work similarly - I have to check that out too (although there is also the normal Kindle Reader there).
Nokia N9 first hands-on!. Ok, it's a MeeGo phone and after Nokia's cooperation announcement with Microsoft no one really knows where MeeGo (Nokia's Linux-based phone system) will go, but the N9 is absolutely cool. And MeeGo has underneath the Linux system that was developed with the N770/N800/N810 tablets and the N900/N950 phones (N950 is the developer version).