G.ho.st is on the news

Following the presentation at the "D" conference: http://d6.allthingsd.com/20080528/ghost/, we're all over the news now: http://news.google.co.il/news?hl=en&q=g.ho.st&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wn :-)

One of the most amazing musicians I've seen!

Asaf Avidan from Jerusalem:
http://www.myspace.com/findlovenow

If I wouldn't see his picture, I'd think it's Janis Joplin. Check out his web site - amazing!!!

Smartest browser and OS

Want to know what browsers and operating systems the smartest people use? Try this IQ test: http://www.iqleague.com/.

Top 5 reasons to do open source

5. Better public image - sell a story, not only a software - contribute to the community and it will pay you back.

4. Closer to the customer - it's an old and proven paradigm, and you cannot get any closer than actually involving your customers in the development process. It is especially useful with new and innovative products where customers do not know if they need it or what features they need

3. Better product - feedback matters - “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” (Linus Torvalds).

2. Lower overhead - unpaid and outsourced work by volunteers and commercial companies adopting the product and an efficient and inherently distributed development environment allowing extending the team and hire selected community members w/o changing the infrastructure

1. Broader market - more features on wider range of client platforms and the geographical advantage - with the help of the community you can support more languages and more location specific features.

It's not all sunshine though, the disadvantages are that you cannot control volunteers, the “Benevolent dictator” model means you have to control all the commits, review all the code that comes in, and spend much more time on the integration of the new code. There is also some management overhead, distractions (the so called “bike shed” effect) and your business model should deal with the fact that your intellectual property is not protected.

Pixie - a mobile web client for G.ho.st

A few weeks back I started a new open source project called Pixie, a simple, lightweight user interface for G.ho.st, a free virtual computer that runs on any browser as a PC. Pixie is designed for mobile phones, mashups, and limited environments such low-bandwidth high-latency networks, some subnotebooks, and older computers.

Particularly we are working on a free and open source library that will simplify the development of mobile web applications and help making them work on most mobile devices made by many different manufacturers and used by different cellular carriers.

We believe that this is a classic project for the open source community because otherwise only very large and rich corporations can afford supporting so many different target environments, and they would not do so just for the greater good.

The project is hosted at Google Code at: http://code.google.com/p/pixie-os/

Talk at the Colorado Software Summit

I was invited to talk about the G.ho.st web operating system and the virtual web file system at the Colorado Software Summit. We will discuss how we built our system using open community standards, such as OpenID, DataPortability, OAuth, OpenSAM and WebDAV, and how to consolidate multiple and diverse online services and provide the freedom of choice of location, device, and user interface.

More details are available at: http://www.softwaresummit.com/2008/speakers/bar.htm

Web developer toolbelt

Firefox Add-ons for development and debugging


Switch User Agent
Use it to change the User Agent string of your Firefox browser: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59

Web Developer Toolbar
A Swiss army knife for every web developer: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

View / Remove Cookies
This add-on is very useful when developing features depending on security cookies: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/315, when you frequently need to check cookies of a currently displayed web page (Right click the web page View Page Info Cookies).

Force Content Type
Add-on that allows you to force the browser to use a custom Content Type: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3207. It is very useful for reviewing REST / SOAP API responses as XML instead of "text/plain" as some systems return.

Firebug
Script debugger and network sniffer for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

YSlow
Extension of the Firebug add-on: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/. Helps you finding performance problems in your web pages quickly and easily.