We’re giving a talk with Tim Gauntley about what exactly the learning commons is and we’ll share our exciting work in the field.
Filed under: Shore News, education
December 1, 2011 • 10:45 am 0
Adobe Dumps Flex
Adobe has announced their intention to donate its Flex SDK, for building web applications, to the FOSS community. While the Open Spoon Foundation has been working on an open source fork of Flex, it is our suspicion that Adobe will donate the SDK to the more mature and capable Apache Software Foundation. Causing a furor among Flex developers, Adobe has announced that they believe HTML5 is a better technology for moving forward than the Flex platform. This of course has raised concerns that the Flex platform will recede into the classification of abandonware, as Adobe has a tendency to abrubtly terminate support for technologies that it deems a failure. So where is this going exactly? Is this a generous donation to the FOSS community? Or is it just Adobe dumping their abandonware? Hopefully the answer may be found largely in the former, as opposed to the latter.
Filed under: Dry Dock, Shore News
November 29, 2011 • 11:05 am 0
Your Favourite E-Reader, Open Source
Barnes & Noble has of late received a great deal of credit from the open source community for standing ground against Microsoft in the battle over patents affecting Android. They’ve also received recognition for allowing the Nook to be so easily rooted. Amazon on the other hand, lost many supporters after remotely removing purchased e-books from users’ Kindles. Now in an unusual twist, Amazon has released the source for both the Kindle Fire’s version of Android, as well as for the formerly proprietary Kindle OS. Is this an attempt to garner more respect from the FOSS community? Is it an attempt to win back users left bitter by the thought that the e-books they own might not be theirs after all? At the very least, it indicates a bright future for the Kindle as an open platform.
Filed under: Shore News, mobile
November 14, 2011 • 5:17 pm 0
New Kindle Fire ships today! But not for Canadians…
Amazon released the Kindle Fire today ahead of schedule, but unfortunately the bargain priced tablet doesn’t offer many of the services through Amazon Prime to Canada. At least the recently released Kobo Vox has a similar price point, though it’s not dual core and lacks the hype the Fire is generating from developers.
Filed under: Shore News, mobile
November 9, 2011 • 1:40 pm 0
Near Field + Mobile – thoughts on #AndroidTO
We had a great time over at AndroidTO and wanted to share some thoughts that were top of mind after the show.
The panel presentations on Building a Business on Mobile, and Mobile Champions offered great insight into why companies and organizations find mobile so challenging and what approaches to mobile strategy and app building are most likely to succeed. A big takeaway from these presentations was that mobile apps don’t usually sell themselves (as in the case of Angry Birds); hustling is key to success.
We also delved into some of the exciting technologies just starting to make an impact in the market. One of the newest of these is Near Field Communications (NFC) which, while not yet commonplace, has the potential to profoundly shift the way devices are used in the future. Google, VISA, and Mastercard have all implemented NFC in some way, so there is a lot of momentum in payment systems such as Google Wallet and Paypal. Beside the NFC point of sale systems, NFC can be used for product identification, device-to-device information transfer, and countless other applications, as well using highly localized device sensing. With the tags being so cheap to deploy, it’s something we are sure we will be able to explore further at next year’s AndroidTO.
Filed under: Shore News, mobile
