WidgetPad Introduces Web-based Open-Source Development Environment for iPhone Widgets

WidgetPad Inc., a provider of collaborative developer environments for hybrid Web-based mobile applications, has announced WidgetPad for iPhone. WidgetPad for iPhone helps developers easily create native applications using standard Web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, and distribute them as stand-alone applications via the Apple iTunes store. WidgetPad is a collaborative, open-source environment that will allow thousands of developers to share source code and learn from each other.

WidgetPad takes the complexity out of creating native applications and eliminates the need to learn platform-specific API sets and tools, by taking advantage of emerging new standards, such as HTML5. Available through the Web via a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, WidgetPad for iPhone allows developers to create fully interactive, media-rich mobile applications. These applications can leverage all of the iPhone’s advanced hardware capabilities (GPS, accelerometer, compass, etc.) by simply accessing WidgetPad.com through standard browsers – Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Some key features of WidgetPad for iPhone include:
- Editing: Source code editing for JavaScript, HTML 5 and CSS (with syntax highlighting)
- Resource management: Uploading of various resources (image, sound, and other JavaScript and CSS files) and project management
- Code Sharing and Forking: Automatic sharing of all public projects
- Secure cross-domain scripting: Easily create mash-up applications with existing Web services accessing Web-service APIs over the domain boundary securely
- Application previewing: Run the application on a PC/Mac browser without the iPhone (Safari compatible)
- Publishing: Developers can choose to publish applications to iPhone either via a generic WidgetPad client (free), or as their own branded applications (free or paid)

Upcoming versions of WidgetPad will allow developers to seamlessly port applications to other smartphone devices such as the Palm Pre and Blackberry. The basic version of WidgetPad for iPhone, which is free, allows developers to distribute their applications to iPhone users via a generic WidgetPad client (also free). The source code of those “public” applications will be automatically shared among other developers (MIT license), creating a great learning and collaborative environment for developers. The premium version of WidgetPad for iPhone, available later this year, allows developers to create “private” projects and distribute stand-alone applications to the Apple iTunes store.

For more information about WidgetPad for iPhone and to instantly start developing hybrid applications for the iPhone, visit www.widgetpad.com.

WidgetPad Inc. is a provider of collaborative developer environments for hybrid Web-based mobile applications. The company’s development environment allows Web developers to easily and cost-effectively create hybrid web applications for smartphones and mobile devices, such as iPhone, Palm Pre and Google’s Android devices. The company was founded by Satoshi Nakajima and Yuichiro Masui. Nakajima is the creator of the world’s first CAD application for the personal computer, and a defining force behind the architecture for Microsoft Windows 95 and the creation of Internet Explorer 3.0. Masui is a contributor of various open source projects, such as PukiWiki, and played a leadership role in building Ruby on Rails community in Japan. WidgetPad is based in Bellevue, Wash.

TypeHost Releases Three Open Source Themes for Drupal – Drigg 5.x

TypeHost Web Development, a Drupal Solutions Provider and open source web design company, has released three free themes for Drupal 5.x installations using the Drigg module for social bookmarking sites. Drigg is an extensive set of modules that transforms a Drupal installation into a social bookmarking site similar to Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, etc. The following themes were developed specifically to integrate Drigg with Advanced Profile Kit and are free to download and use in your Drigg-based Drupal 5.x sites.

Drupala Theme for Drupal 5.x Drigg Install:
The main theme for our social bookmarking / blog portal / social networking installation profile. This theme is derived from the Drigg base theme, but changes the menu structure to allow for more flexibility in working with taxonomy & views when building portal sites. The Drupala theme is two columns, optimized for APK & Drigg, and cross-browser tested in FF, IE6, IE7, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. Uses bright blue gradients to define blocks & site sections, relatively clean, quick loading & scalable. Open Source / GNU Public License.

Download: http://www.typehost.com/free-downloads
Example site: http://drupala.com
Tutorial for Custom Login: WebDevNews.net

SEO-Mix Theme for Drupal 5.x Drigg Install:
The Drupala and SEO-Mix themes are only different in the color of the top buttons in the GUI, and the SEO-Mix theme uses an “up only” voting button, while the Drupala theme uses a +/- system. Included with the download of the Drupala theme above & part of the Drupala profile. Open Source / GNU Public License.

Example site: http://www.seo-mix.com

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OSnews: Linux Officially Reaches 1% of Desktop Market Share

OSnews blogs that the website marketwatch.com, which tracks software usage statistics, has officially reported that Linux has passed the 1% market share position for desktop operating systems. According to the site, Windows has dropped over the last year while Apple’s OS X has gained. The site also tracks usage of iPhone and iPod for client access to the internet. For example, iPhone is listed at .55% of all traffic vs. .07% currently for Android. Windows accounts for 88% of all users, Mac just under 10%, Linux 1%, and all other clients from Sun to video games and mobile phones amount to around 1% together. Interestingly, the W3 counter / Global stats has Linux usage over the same period (April 2009) at 2.16%: http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

“Linux usage share on client devices has surpassed 1% for the first time in our tracking.  Linux has been successful primarily as a server operating system, but client usage share has not kept pace with server share  Linux has reached this important milestone on the client as Linux-based systems have become more functional, easier to use, and pre-installed on computers from vendors like Dell.”

That pre-installation is important in the spread of desktop Linux is supported by numerous reports as well as common sense. Yet, the bottom line is going to be user experience, stability, and available software vs. dedication to the open source philosophy. For most, buying a machine with the OS set up and running is standard. The increase in popularity of netbooks and the use of Linux as a pre-installed OS on those machines may be leading the trend combined with increased uptake in the education & development communities.

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FOSS – The Free! Summit – May 11, 2009 – San Mateo, CA

Free Open Source Software developers will have a soapbox in Silicon Valley this week with TechDirt’s sponsorship of the Free! Summit May 11th in San Mateo. According to the website, the conference is already sold out with no more seats available. Mike Masnick CEO of Floor64 and founder of Techdirt will act as the conference MC and moderator while Chris Anderson, editor in chief of WIRED, is the Keynote Speaker. The conference is being produced by SageScape.

“As the digital economy drives down the marginal costs of technology and a generation of young consumers grow accustomed to giveaways, it’s no longer a question of ‘How can you compete with free?’ but a matter of ‘How can you afford not to compete with free?’”

“At the same time, the current economic crisis is making the need to turn free into cash more critical than ever, and some argue that free is doing more harm than good to content creators who rely on ‘traditional’ business models to pay the bills. The recession has proven that it takes no prisoners, and some companies won’t survive unless they can figure out how to monetize free – and quickly.”

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Forrester: 87% of Companies Save Money with Open Source Solutions

Forrester Research, a leading business intelligence company targeted at the Fortune 500, has done a number of interesting studies on the adoption, use, and response of open source software in the corporate IT environment. Cnet has just posted an article charting “open source sales” vs. the negative trending economy and quotes a poll taken by the company in 2008. In that survey, Forrester reported 87% of companies saved money with open source solutions and 92% felt that the open source application met or exceeded their quality expectations.

• “87 percent of those surveyed realized the cost savings they expected from open source;
• 92 percent of respondents have had their quality expectations met or exceeded by open-source software. (Try getting anywhere near that number with proprietary solutions);
• The manufacturing sector has been a primary adopter of open-source middleware, while financial services (at least, up until the meltdown) has been fastest off the starting blocks to go to open-source applications;
• Speaking of open-source applications, a significant percentage of the enterprises surveyed have adopted or will adopt the following open-source software within the next 12 months: CRM (67 percent), ESB (47 percent), ECM (66 percent), etc.
• Intriguingly, Forrester also tracked adoption of open source via proprietary applications: a full 72 percent of all surveyed organizations know that much of the proprietary software they license includes open-source components, while 39 percent regularly combine open source and proprietary software to solve business problems.”

Acquia is hosting another report by Forrester – Web Content Management and Open Source, Answers to Frequently Asked Questions, written by Stephen Powers, with Kyle McNabb and Shelby Catino.

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LifeRay – Social Networking & CMS Web Publishing

LifeRay is one of the leading open source CMS software platforms available for social networking, portal development, business intranets, corporate extranets, forums, archives, and general web publishing. LifeRay has already been downloaded over 1 million times, with an average of over 60,000 downloads per month. The software comes with numerous bundled versions and has already won accolades such as the InfoWorld 2007 Technology of the Year Award for Best Open Source Portal.

The LifeRay Portal is composed of two main sections: the LifeRay Journal and the LifeRay Collaboration Suite. The LifeRay Journal is the content management system of the portal, allowing web publishers to easily post content, manage pages, create hierarchical menus, and site structure. The LifeRay Collaboration Suite is the social networking aspect of the portal, which includes forums, wiki collaboration, blogs, email, calendars, and tagging. Both of these can be extended by open source “portlets” that add increased functionality to the system.

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Email Upgrades – Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0

While internet technology evolves at exponential rates, most personal users and businesses rely on email software that hasn’t changed much in over ten years. That too is changing as more and more offices are making the switch to Zimbra. Using open source standards, Zimbra outpaces traditional email clients like Outlook, and integrates calendar, spreadsheet, wiki collaboration, and advanced search functionality in an innovative AJAX interface that is easy to use.

Zimbra is a commercial open source application that is owned and managed by Yahoo.  The main software package is known as Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0, and is available in the following versions:

• Open Source Edition
• Consumer Edition
• Business Email Edition
• Standard Edition
• Professional Edition

“Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 5.0 is a truly modern, innovative messaging and collaboration application. Zimbra is the leading open source solution for enterprise, service provider, education, and government environments; offering administrators and their end-users unmatched benefits.”

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IBM leads IT Companies in Proclaiming “Open Cloud Manifesto”

IBM, AT&T, Sun, RedHat, Rackspace, SAP, and other companies (see full list below) joined together to endorse what is being called the “Open Cloud Manifesto” last week as part of a new push to define the next era of data servers on the internet. According to industry reports, Google and Amazon might be part of the group but were not included in the initial group of signatories. The entire venture is being seen as an aggressive open source challenge to Microsoft due to requirements such as “Cloud providers must not use their market position to lock customers into their particular platforms and limit their choice of providers” and “Cloud providers must use and adopt existing standards wherever appropriate. The IT industry has invested heavily in existing standards and standards organizations; there is no need to duplicate or reinvent them”.

For those interested, you can read the Cloud Manifesto in its entirety.

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OSFlash – Open Source Flash Development

Following up on the release of Adobe CS4 and the Flash 10 “Astro” beta, a great resource for Open Source developers is the OSFlash website, which hosts a large number of ongoing development projects. The site includes Flash IDE alternatives, such as the excellent online authoring environment built in Ajax at Antimatter that allows you to create Animated GIFs, SWF (Flash), SVG Animations, and other formats for free. The site is definitely worth a look at:

Ajax Animation:

http://antimatter15.110mb.com/ajaxanimator/build/

There are numerous projects involving command line tools, compilers, and format converters at OSFlash, as well as Eclipse plug-ins, ActionScript libraries, and frameworks for Flex, Flash, and ActionScript. To see the full list, including Flash applications and utilities, visit:

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The Top 10 Open Source Content Management Systems

As a web designer working online since Netscape 1.0 building sites for clients, the biggest change I’ve seen in thirteen years in the industry is the advent of the Open Source Content Management System as the preferred platform for development. Nothing is more illustrative of the change between first generation web standards and the web 2.0 evolution than the CMS trend. Providing a great base for social networking, including blogs, forums, wikis, image galleries, comment logs, ecommerce, voting, bookmarking, tags, and innumerable other extensions along with traditional web publishing methods, the CMS is the preferred platform for most web designers building sites today. Open Source has led to the establishment of huge, user-powered development communities that are dynamically changing and constantly upgrading, offering free software, themes, and modules for building professional web sites. The ubiquity of the shared hosting LAMP – Cpanel – Fantastico set up has popularized the CMS far beyond even the developer/design community.

The top 10 Open Source Content Management Systems:

1. Drupal
2. WordPress
3. Joomla
4. Media Wiki
5. Liferay
6. TYPO3
7. Moodle
8. Dolphin
9. Pligg
10. Movable Type

Honorable Mention:
Xoops, Geeklog, e107, Mambo, Nucleus

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