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With an iPhone, I would recommend looking at something like http://nat.org/blog/2009/08/playnice-google-apple/

It's designed to grab your location from MobileMe's Find My iPhone and update Google Latitude, but you can probably short-circuit the process with a bit of elbow grease :)

http://nat.org/blog/2009/12/powered-by-immigrants/

http://nat.org/blog/2009/12/powered-by-immigrants/

This isn't really intended for people who want to make SuperAwesomeLinux 17, although it could certainly be used for that. It's target audience is software companies, and open source projects, who want to provide a quick and easy way to create virtual machines to run their software.

It's designed to get around the problem that to get your software into a company at the moment, you need to provide installation instructions, which may or may not work, and could take hours to follow. This is just what's needed to get anyone to *look at* your software. By providing virtual machines it becomes a lot simpler to get people to take a look at your software, because they just need to download it, and fire up VMWare or similar.

And then, when they want to put it into production, they can move the VM to their virtual servers (most large companies have them now, it's our standard method of deployment), and start it up.

That's me paraphrasing badly, if you want it from the horse's mouth, have a read of Nat Friedman's blog entry on the subject.

What about the (over-ambitious, and hence comatose) dashboard project[1]? Is that close enough to what is needed?

1. http://nat.org/dashboard/

Answer me honestly: Does PulseAudio have that feature because they heard it would be in Windows Vista? Honestly, now, please give me an answer.

Because if PulseAudio implemented the feature after seeing that it was in a Longhorn beta, or hearing stories of Microsoft developing it, then I'd say "that thing that Microsoft is doing" is a pretty good definition. (At least as far as this case goes.)

A better example would be something that Microsoft or Apple *hasn't* done. Do you have one?

Hey there dumbass. Check out the sort of people you're generalising. Lights? Nourishment? What a dumbass. Do you even know what countries this laptop is for?

Yeah, I'm sure the Spotlight-alike dropdown menu widget just came from thin air.

Of course it didn't come out from thin air, just because some random slashdot troll didn't know about it until yesterday doesn't mean it hasn't been in development for a long time. It started with the Dashboard project, somewhere in mid-2003, who, about year later started the Beagle desktop search engine as their backend.

At this time, Google, Microsoft and Apple were almost certainly developing their own things, but since they were all unannounced, it was a case of convergent evolution, you can't rip off something you don't know exists.

Now, given this background framework and existing stand-alone search apps, sticking the search into panel applet is hardly a huge leap, but if you want to make it into rip-off of something, it's admittedly google desktop and copernic desktop search, not spotlight.

Spotlight was hardly the first. Google predates it, so does http://www.nat.org/dashboard/ Which is somewhat similiar. Even beagle could be used before spotlight was released.

Let me highjack this for a moment and expand to the Windows platform -

Are there any decent calendaring applications that let me /subscribe/ to online calendars?

Plenty of programs will import iCal calendars (which seems to be the most popular format), but it's a one-time thing. I'm looking for something more like RSS - import what's there now, and check back on a regular basis for updates.

Importing isn't very helpful if I have to do it manually every couple days.

I think the time is ripe for a new kind of calendar application. Most calendars programs are pretty simple and assume there's just one person involved - you. The assumption is any event on the calendar is one that you are involved in. There's not much notation for differentiations like "This is something I'm doing" and
"This is something I'm interested in"

Here's a use case. I open my calendar program. I go to my custom views for "entertainment". I check out what movies are showing next week, what plays, what concerts, sports events, etc. I see my favorite band is coming to town, so I mark that entry. Now, if I go back to "my" calendar, I see that concert. Two days later, the bassist gets sick and the concert is postponed two weeks. When I open my calendar program, it alerts me that the event that I was interested in has changed.

Nothing I have found comes close to this. To be honest, most were just plain painful to use, and none had anything close to my dynamic calendars ideal.

There's some hope. Nat Friedman started the Hula Project last year (though JMZ had some reservations -- a good read, as Jamie's obversations usually are) which is open source and has the backing of Novell. I'm not sure if they've actually gotten anywhere, though; the open source landscape is littered with failed projects that started off as a code-dump from some major corporation. But at least someone seems to have the same idea and is trying to make a go of it...

I've been waiting a long time for this. And this, and this, and this.

I'd sure like to see 3d GTK+ widgets and window decoration, all following the same global illumination, complete with specular maps and all the advanced pixel shader techniques available the desktop could become truly beautiful.

Apple wasn't the first to use the Dashboard name on unix desktop app though. Dashboard is/was a unix app similiar to Apple spotlight. Seems to have a couple of years of inactivity, but it sure used the name Dashboard.

> I like Evolution but would like to see a cross-platform PIM
> in the suite as an alternative.

Tor Lillqvist was hired by Novell to help get Evolution running on Windows. While I was working on Revolution and was subscribed to evolution-hackers I remember that he'd occasionally post progress notes there.

I'm not sure how far that effort is along at this point, although Tor certainly seemed to be making excellent progress and was patching all sorts of Gnome/Win32 bugs in various projects.

Yeah, it's related to this idea of "contextual information," like in the application Dashboard (not the Apple one). I think I read that Microsoft wanted to integrate this into Windows, though I don't know if they're doing that anymore. Anyway, the idea is that, whatever you're doing (chatting, writing a document, reading email), your "sidebar" will show you a set of search results that have been deemed related to whatever you're doing. So if you're writing a paragraph about how penguins have been learning to hang-glide, in the sidebar you might see a set of Google Scholar results for penguin hang-gliding, as well as emails and chat transcripts in which you've brainstormed about this project. Whether this is actually a useful presentation of data is something I'm skeptical of, but I think the idea of contextual computing is very interesting. Right now, even though OS X makes it easy to do, using a computer involves manipulating abstractions of low-level representations, such as organizing files into directories, and assuming that "multi-tasking" is a really good idea, even though it causes distraction and is not actually possible for people to do effectively. A computer can multi-task well, but people don't.

(I forgot, again, to check "use txt"...why isn't it default dammit...)

Funny...we're thinking about the same thing: recently I've realised that adress http://calendar.google.com/ (as opposed to http://boo.google.com/ for example) is actually configured on their server and working, although right now it points only to their search site. Could they be preparing for something? :) I mean...why configure the adress at all?
And half a year ago I mailed Google with proposition that they can perhaps do something like Hula
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html (worth reading IMHO...)
http://hula-project.org/
http://www.nat.org/2005/february/#15-February-2005
http://nat.org/2005/august/hula.html - how it looks now
Hmmm...easy webcalendar, with parts made "public" so other people can see what you're planning partly, and integration with Gmail to announce something automatically to others/retrieve their calendars/etc.
Another feature that isn't mentioned anywhere and would be great IMHO - some kind of collage of few webcalendars (of others) on one, yours, so you can adjust...
I actually submitted this recently to /. but it got rejected...oh well, fvck this.

But back on topic.
I should say "ignore me", I remember suddenly that on my own computers I haven't had acces to the net through most of last year :P
However...I DID noticed extremelly high, compared to previous times, email usage on my part...I guess thanks to something that Gmail done right and you probably mention.
(BTW, too bad I never played with IMAP really...but I haven't stumbled upon any free provider that I know wouldn't suck and any client for that matter...but when you think about it, Gmail is conceptually very similar to IMAP...)

(I forgot, again, to check "use txt"...why isn't it default dammit...)

Funny...we're thinking about the same thing: recently I've realised that adress http://calendar.google.com/ (as opposed to http://boo.google.com/ for example) is actually configured on their server and working, although right now it points only to their search site. Could they be preparing for something? :) I mean...why configure the adress at all?
And half a year ago I mailed Google with proposition that they can perhaps do something like Hula
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html (worth reading IMHO...)
http://hula-project.org/
http://www.nat.org/2005/february/#15-February-2005
http://nat.org/2005/august/hula.html - how it looks now
Hmmm...easy webcalendar, with parts made "public" so other people can see what you're planning partly, and integration with Gmail to announce something automatically to others/retrieve their calendars/etc.
Another feature that isn't mentioned anywhere and would be great IMHO - some kind of collage of few webcalendars (of others) on one, yours, so you can adjust...
I actually submitted this recently to /. but it got rejected...oh well, fvck this.

But back on topic.
I should say "ignore me", I remember suddenly that on my own computers I haven't had acces to the net through most of last year :P
However...I DID noticed extremelly high, compared to previous times, email usage on my part...I guess thanks to something that Gmail done right and you probably mention.
(BTW, too bad I never played with IMAP really...but I haven't stumbled upon any free provider that I know wouldn't suck and any client for that matter...but when you think about it, Gmail is conceptually very similar to IMAP...)

Funny...we're thinking about the same thing: recently I've realised that adress http://calendar.google.com/ (as opposed to http://boo.google.com/ for example) is actually configured on their server and working, although right now it points only to their search site. Could they be preparing for something? :) I mean...why configure the adress at all? And half a year ago I mailed Google with proposition that they can perhaps do something like Hula http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html (worth reading IMHO...) http://hula-project.org/ http://www.nat.org/2005/february/#15-February-2005 http://nat.org/2005/august/hula.html - how it looks now Hmmm...easy webcalendar, with parts made "public" so other people can see what you're planning partly, and integration with Gmail to announce something automatically to others/retrieve their calendars/etc. Another feature that isn't mentioned anywhere and would be great IMHO - some kind of collage of few webcalendars (of others) on one, yours, so you can adjust... I actually submitted this recently to /. but it got rejected...oh well, fvck this. But back on topic. I should say "ignore me", I remember suddenly that on my own computers I haven't had acces to the net through most of last year :P However...I DID noticed extremelly high, compared to previous times, email usage on my part...I guess thanks to something that Gmail done right and you probably mention. (BTW, too bad I never played with IMAP really...but I haven't stumbled upon any free provider that I know wouldn't suck and any client for that matter...but when you think about it, Gmail is conceptually very similar to IMAP...)

Funny...we're thinking about the same thing: recently I've realised that adress http://calendar.google.com/ (as opposed to http://boo.google.com/ for example) is actually configured on their server and working, although right now it points only to their search site. Could they be preparing for something? :) I mean...why configure the adress at all? And half a year ago I mailed Google with proposition that they can perhaps do something like Hula http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html (worth reading IMHO...) http://hula-project.org/ http://www.nat.org/2005/february/#15-February-2005 http://nat.org/2005/august/hula.html - how it looks now Hmmm...easy webcalendar, with parts made "public" so other people can see what you're planning partly, and integration with Gmail to announce something automatically to others/retrieve their calendars/etc. Another feature that isn't mentioned anywhere and would be great IMHO - some kind of collage of few webcalendars (of others) on one, yours, so you can adjust... I actually submitted this recently to /. but it got rejected...oh well, fvck this. But back on topic. I should say "ignore me", I remember suddenly that on my own computers I haven't had acces to the net through most of last year :P However...I DID noticed extremelly high, compared to previous times, email usage on my part...I guess thanks to something that Gmail done right and you probably mention. (BTW, too bad I never played with IMAP really...but I haven't stumbled upon any free provider that I know wouldn't suck and any client for that matter...but when you think about it, Gmail is conceptually very similar to IMAP...)

How does dashboard compare? http://www.nat.org/dashboard/

That's being reimplemented as part of Beagle.

I sat back and saw most of the video demonstrating the WinFS beta. Clearly the guys in the video are pretty excited about what they've done. But shouldn't the gnome community be excited by projects like Dashboard? What about gnome storage. It seems like both of these projects accomplished a lot in a short period of time. It seems like these projects should get "marketed" a bit more.

Dashboard is a great example of what can be done once information is easily searchable. MS makes these demos and tries to get people all excited about search. But come on, how hard are these things once the data is indexed? Like most things, it's all about how the applications use the API that make it cool. Having folders in a DB only goes so far.

What about Reiserfs4? Another project that could take the whole gnome-storage and WinFS concepts a bit farther.

BTW, It's interesting that MS has decided to try the non-polished look to get the word out on things. :) The video reminded me of the Wobbly Windows demo.

the Lucene (http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene) indexer will be inplememtned within Hula the web and cal application (http://hula-project.org/Hula_Server) made from open sourced Novell NetMail code. Samples of the search engine have been comitted and should start functioning within weeks, just in time for the new cal UI, which you can now view a demo of here: http://nat.org/2005/august/hula.html That's looking to be an amazing app...

Not finished yet, but it might be something you're looking for...

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
http://www.nat.org/2005/february/#15-February-2005
http://hula-project.org/

Free account:
http://nat.org/2005/june/#Planet-Hula

Not finished yet, but it might be something you're looking for...

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
http://www.nat.org/2005/february/#15-February-2005
http://hula-project.org/

Free account:
http://nat.org/2005/june/#Planet-Hula

The sidebar reminds me of Gkrellm and Dashboard

• File cataloging grouped by relevance. This probably won't be as good as it would have been if they'd fully developed WinFS, but from what I've heard they're still planning on having it to some degree.
• Implicit query.
• Games. Cedega still lags behind Windows for support of DirectX at times, and even when Cedega supports the current version, it's not always easy to get games running with it. Games are still probably the main reason why a residential user would stick with Windows.
• USB device support. I've seen it mentioned on Slashdot a lot recently about how Linux's USB support still apparently isn't that great.

>So what will Linux do that Windows can't already do?
>Will it wash my car? Make a nice scrambled egg and
>bacon? Still has a web browser. Still has an email
>program. Still point and click.

It might not wash your car, but you *could* set up a home security/surveillance system with it if you got some cameras/sensors and wanted to. Also, there are a number of experimental robots in existence running Linux now, so if you were smart enough on the hardware end you very well possibly *could* build something that could wash a car...same for the egg and bacon. There's a HOWTO in existence for a Linux-powered coffee machine.

>Perhaps the decision makers of Linux should focus
>on newer ways of doing things.

You mean like this, this, this, or maybe this?

>So where is the free folks? Only a matter of time
>before licensing fees are added.

Been here recently?

Not to be antagonistic, but before forming an opinion, you might want to do some actual research to base it on first. This is one of the most ignorant comments I've seen for a long time.

• Beagle isn't a re-implementation of Spotlight. It appeared before Spotlight emerged.
• Recent changes have been increased indexing speed unbelievably.
• inotify will soon be in the main kernel.
• A real SQL engine? Yet you want speed and don't want "an assload of extra libraries"? And why SQL anyway? Lucene is hardly a bad piece of software.
• The daemon does run in userspace; I imagine you'd be surprised how few mono apps run in kernel-space....
• Beagle does not require you to run as root. Running as root is actively discouraged.
• Not "EVERYTHING" is indexed anyway: only files in your home directory by default.
• There's a configuration system being added to, providing better control over what gets indexed anyway.
• The whole meta-data extracting tool is actually relatively complex, if you want to do it right/flexibly/efficiently.
• The initial point of creating Beagle was to facilitate the searching requirements of the very nice Dashboard project; not just because somebody decided they wanted a supposedly over-engineered crawler.

Only temporarily -- in the longer term the computer device won't be external. It'll be cybernetically integrated into your brain and will become your memory.

Besides, the goal of isn't just a wearable PDA; it's a device that has the "intelligence" to sense your context and provide the information you want without you having to ask for it. Look at Dashboard (the GNOME app, not to be confused with the Apple one) to see an early primitive example.

here is some more info

You may also find Dashboard interesting...

Want meta-data search (spotlight) on GNU/Linux? Try installing Beagle.

From Beagle's webpage; "Beagle is a search tool that ransacks your personal information space to find whatever you're looking for. Beagle can search in many different domains:

documents
emails
web history
IM/IRC conversations
source code
images
music files
applications ...and much more

Have a look at uber hacker Nat Friedman's videos of hot Beagle Action.

In short, beware teh Gnome.

Want meta-data search (spotlight) on GNU/Linux? Try installing Beagle.

From Beagle's webpage; "Beagle is a search tool that ransacks your personal information space to find whatever you're looking for. Beagle can search in many different domains:

documents
emails
web history
IM/IRC conversations
source code
images
music files
applications ...and much more

Have a look at uber hacker Nat Friedman's videos of hot Beagle Action.

In short, beware teh Gnome.

You mean like dashboard?

check out the flash demos of beagle at http://nat.org/demos/. Watch as, in a chat window, a man discusses snow, and it instantly appears in the search results. Not a new search. The chat log appears in the old search window, because of inotify. This is waaay beeter than grep, dude.

• Dashboard
• Piper for a while was trying to implement an entire new Unix desktop based on GUI-based command-line scripting, but never quite got off the ground, and eventually abandoned the idea.
• Knoppix and other liveCDs are innovative -- an entire operating system on a CD-ROM! -- though you might quibble with "prior art" in the form of boot disks that you'd use to play your DOS games. They didn't have entire filesystems on them, though, so I'd maintain that this was innovation. A Windows liveCD exists in a primitive form somewhere, I think, but I don't know anything about it.
• gaim and other pluggable communication programs -- Firefox and xchat spring to mind -- are very useful, and you can probably find a plugin on one of those programs that does what you want. To my knowledge, the furthest the proprietary world got in this direction was skinning, but I could be wrong.
• Also in this vein is KDE, specifically the use of DCOP to help automate GUI tasks. DCOP isn't very well known and you have to discover it, but it can be very useful.
• GNU Screen, to my knowledge, is one-of-a-kind software, though you might cite inspiration in terms of VNC programs, which I don't know much about.
• I believe the concept of numerous virtual terminals on the same physical terminal (ie. Alt-F1, Alt-F2) is not only unique to OSS, but unique to Linux.
• 
  Ethan

We can currently download Beagle for open source operating systems and desktops, and it's already somewhat usable. It's written in C# and requires Mono, and I think it's one of the killer apps for OSS too. We've also see it ported to Windows so things are getting very interesting here.

So between Spotlight and Longhorn and Google and Beagle, it's not just a 2-way battle :)

Rather than "Starter Edition," here's some suggestions, if anyone from Redmond just happens to read this. (I know they won't do it - it's more a mental exercise while I eat)

1. Go download this, and make it natively multi-user if it isn't already. Give it a strong native security model, too...you can get some ideas here, and the best part is, they won't mind you doing that if you don't try and patent said ideas. Also, modularise your GUI, and don't prevent users from accessing the CLI when they want to.

2. Have the CLI composed of this and this for us CLI types.

3. Make the Add/Remove Programs panel essentially a net-aware frontend for either this or this.

4. Use this for hardware detection. Also re drivers, get rid of the suicidal policy of seeing third-party hardware vendors as the enemy, and actually support them...via tools, docs, etc. These people are your friends...they'll help you stay relevant.

5. Download this and use it as your default FS, and then get this and this, (although you already seem to know about this last one) and incorporate both of those into your stock UI. You've essentially got WinFS right there, without all the added complexity you'd no doubt throw into it if you tried to code it from scratch.

6. For the Agent angle, incorporate the last point, as well as putting help/docs in a non-binary format, making them searchable with this, converting said search results for use with this, and then use the AIML output as input for something like this. Also, instead of making the agent a tightly anthropomorphic personality, make it more generic, and more as though it's simply "the operating system" communicating with a user, rather than that dog or Clippit instead.

7. Give Outlook a major overhaul. This and this are examples of directions it IMHO should go in.

Just some random ideas, anywayz. Dreaming's fun. ;) I'll probably get modded Offtopic, but it was worth it.

No windoze version. Novell and Nat (check out his blog at http://www.nat.org/ have rumored that a port was in the works. Problem is that Evolution is based on native linux libraries. You can't really do a port, you just gotta start all over.

If you're going to do that, you might as well just go web based. I know there are some limitations, but it's still easier than building a new client.

Tim

If you still don't get it...well...there are people who don't think tabs in web browsers are a good idea either. Not that I spend much time attempting to understand them... :/

For those who don't know what Beagle is (like me) here is a link and some demos.

so why should I? I personally think it looks crappy and ameture. Nat Friedman, the creator of Ximian, had this to say about it:

"Also, I don't like the winning login splash for GNOME 2.10. It is poorly chosen.

Why? Because the chooser (and I really don't know who chose it) made the classic mistake of failing to distinguish between things that are interesting to the user and things that are interesting to the team building the software. To the team of hackers behind the project, it is interesting and noteworthy that this is a new release of GNOME, and that with each release it gets a little better. It is worth taking note of this milestone, and celebrating it.

And that is what the height-chart theme of the splash screen suggests. But it is not interesting to the user. There is utility in putting the version number in the splash, but the main role of the splash screen design should probably be to convey the personality of the desktop the user is about to experience, not how long it has been under development. "

I agree with him.

Many people hate the new splash screen. No offense to him, but it's my opinion that the selector of the splash has particularly bad taste. There were several better ones.

"When it's ready"

Calm down, its just one of the few Linux/FOSS-related radio shows. If you want to know what he talked about: reading Nat Friedman's blog basically gives you the very same information! In the interview he spoke about: Evolution, Hula, SUSE / KDE and XGL. However, the interview is from 14 february which means its more than a week old. Comapre this to his blog which has a post from 22 february with interesting Hula news!

Also of interest is the last LugRadio had an interview with Miguel de Icaza. To you, i say: just read Miguel or Nat's blog. You really won't miss much from there. The added value of it to me, is that its both informative and fun to hear. The informative part is, for me, mostly a repeat while the fun part is used instead of background music.

Calm down, its just one of the few Linux/FOSS-related radio shows. If you want to know what he talked about: reading Nat Friedman's blog basically gives you the very same information! In the interview he spoke about: Evolution, Hula, SUSE / KDE and XGL. However, the interview is from 14 february which means its more than a week old. Comapre this to his blog which has a post from 22 february with interesting Hula news!

Also of interest is the last LugRadio had an interview with Miguel de Icaza. To you, i say: just read Miguel or Nat's blog. You really won't miss much from there. The added value of it to me, is that its both informative and fun to hear. The informative part is, for me, mostly a repeat while the fun part is used instead of background music.

Nat is a great guy to watch if you want ideas. His blog always has nice little insights into the technologies he's working on, or on things he thinks should exist. He has some great projects up his sleeve, particularly Dashboard which gives Tiger's Spotlight a real run for its money.. and it's all on the Linux desktop!

Nat is a great guy to watch if you want ideas. His blog always has nice little insights into the technologies he's working on, or on things he thinks should exist. He has some great projects up his sleeve, particularly Dashboard which gives Tiger's Spotlight a real run for its money.. and it's all on the Linux desktop!

that XGL screenshot is probably the prettiest X capture i've seen in a long while. kudos to David Reveman.

Beagle rocks. It was pretty easy to get set up on Ubuntu (Hoary). If anyone has yet to see Beagle in action, check out Nat's flash demos. The "live queries" demo is my favourite.

I'm really looking forward to Dashboard (not mentioned in the article), the desktop app that uses Beagle to gives relevant information that it's collected on your computer about your current activity. It sounds really cool, and Open Source hackers came up with this before Microsoft did.