MatchstickTV and FirefoxOS

Earlier this year, I spent some time developing for FirefoxOS, a Mobile OS based on a linux kernel and Mozilla browser. To be honest, I have a Revolution phone from Geeksphone which flashes between Android and FirefoxOS, and it has been Android since day one. It work well for what it needs to do as an Android device. However, the idea of an instant developer community for FirefoxOS is compelling - it just hasn't appeared yet because the OS hasn't become a large enough target yet. And, like ChromeOS before it, this may never happen.

MatchstickTV is a recent kickstarter project that takes FirefoxOS and uses it to run an HDMI dongle very similar to Chromecast, but based on open source apps on an open source development platform and an open source OS. It's a little cheaper as well, but I suspect that is not an important selling feature. On the other hand... because there is nothing in particular to license here, this sort of thing could become a great conference giveaway over time, just like USB sticks used to be.

Honestly, I think a tablet using FirefoxOS with a bunch of onboard educational applications - similar to the original OLPC program, perhaps - would be a really good thing. There is a niche for browser-based mobile, and Mozilla is doing a lot of smart, good things to capture it.

Firefox OS and Mobile Health

I have to say, I am very excited about Mozilla's Firefox OS, formerly Boot to Gecko, a Mobile OS built on web standards like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, powered by a small Linux kernel. The OS is going to target less expensive phones, without requiring the power that Android or iOS do. If you were thinking PhoneGap, a Firefox OS app is much simpler than that. Why am I embedding in WebKit when I can boot to Gecko?

So the downside will be market penetration. In Canada or the States, or the UK. In Brazil, in Mexico, in eastern Europe, these phones could hit a sweet spot and build a strong developer community.

And this is why I'm excited. The real strength of mobile health is not going to be iPhone apps for American Doctors; it's going to be useful tools for areas that aren't already serviced by Epic or Meditech... In LMIC countries, a suite of mobile medical tools, and particularly one you might modify or extend yourself, that will be invaluable.

The developer phones are cool and orange as well.

Android orientation observations

I really really enjoy my Nexus 7, and I'm excited about the prospect of a 10" Android tablet from Google. At first blush, the tablet appears to be a personal device, but I have to say, it's so easy to share... I can hand it to you and say, "look at this": shared. I can sit down on the couch with one of my children on each side and we can watch cooking videos together: shared.

This is not OLPC... this is One Tablet per Couch, and I think that's a really important distinction, until the tablet supports local development, which I don't think it ever will.

I like the portrait-centred form factor, and I am frustrated by applications that flop around when I lay the tablet flat. I've talked about this before; when I look at the tablet I see a perfect place to prototype and play board games, for which you need to lay the tablet flat. A Monopoly board doesn't have portrait or landscape orientation. People sit around it and interact with it equally. This should also be true of a table when it is laid flat, and it can never be true of a mouse-driven device. Never. That's the power of touch.

At this point, I see the tablet having 3 basic modes, and I hope application design moves in this direction: portrait mode is for typical operation, like reading books or web pages, etc; certain types of content (video, text annotation, high quality images) break out into landscape automatically - I'll re-orient the device and share with the people around me when this happens; and laid flat, any other orientation is inconsequential - it's a free for all.

Please comment... this makes absolute sense to me, but maybe differs from other people's tablet experience.

My other quibble at this point, coming from a board game lover: SVG support in Ice Cream Sandwich and Jellybean is good, but not great. I would love to see an Android OS that provides better support for SVG filters and SVG DOM manipulation using WG XPath - but that's a subject for another day.

Tab Sweep: 2010-02-03

Note: apologies to anyone actually reading this - I intend to collect and comment on things I come across during the week, then push the post out via Twitter on Friday. As this is a cumulative process, if the content seems light there will probably be more later. The alternative is to keep the post in draft for a while, but this seems lame.

From IBM's Smarter Planet: Education

School districts operate on tight budgets in good times, but when Pike County found their IT budgets sliced by 80%, they knew it called for drastic measures—or true blue-sky thinking.
A rural Kentucky district of 10,000 students, Pike County administrators had struggled with providing IT resources for its students, teachers and staff. Desktop computers were still running Windows 98 with failing CD and hard drives; and access to the district's portal, which houses the applications and information the students and teachers needed,was inconsistent.
Working with IBM Global Technology Services and Desktone software, the district developed a virtual desktop infrastructure delivered as a cloud service. Students now boot the existing hardware with a special CD that bypasses the operating system and connects them instead to a high-performing virtual desktop environment. This in turn links to the district's portal site with all of the tools and information they need. Pike County can double the life of its hardware—it's planning on using seven-year-old machines without sacrificing performance—while providing students, teachers and administrators with equal, transparent access to its assets.
The district estimates cost savings of 64% over five years, compared to the cost of servicing the desktops on premises.

Now, I'm a big fan of the work that Walter Bender has been doing at Sugarlabs, as far as live booting a Sugar/Fedora OS off a USB stick, and this is more of the same. A combination of live booting thin OS and cloud computing is very potent.

Another former OLPC employee, Ivan Krstic, who now works in core security at Apple, comments on martian sandtraps. I at first thought he was speaking of golf, but apparently not. Since he began working at Apple, Krstic posts infrequently, but invariably leads to spit-take.

Apparently Mike Cane is done with his eBook Test blog, declaring the Apple iPad a future contender, or something. The vision of the iPad/iStore/iBook etc is there, even if the reality is not, yet, but we can confidently say that, yes, the iPad will change the way we read. Though I'm still holding out for the new Pixel Qi technology from OLPC alumnus Mary Lou Jepsen.

From London writer Marc Nash, an excellent critique of Roberto Bolano's 2666 and the hoopla surrounding the global reading of same at #2666 on Twitter. I am taking part in this reading, but wish I had read Bolano's Savage Detectives first, simply because of 2666's sprawling nature. Comparisons with Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest and Finnegans Wake seems apt, based solely on the fly-leaf and first 100 or so pages.

Nice Valentines Day Cards, from Save the Children.

Ivan Krstić joins Apple Core Security

I have been following Krstić's writing for several years now, and have found his weblog to be both informative and entertaining. I have no doubt that he will perform many good deeds at Apple, not the least of which will be adding an element of transparency to the organization. Consider me a fan of his writing, and I hope he continues to do so as he has in the past.

For more information, look here, here and here

Sugar on a Stick

Currently enjoying Cincinnati's Koala Fires - follow them on twitter to download a copy of their debut ep.
Also enjoying Loney, Dear's Daytrotter Session

After all has been said and done about the successes and failures of the One Laptop Per Child organisation, it is still built on a very sound set of principles, one of which is that children's education works best when the child owns the technology. When Sugar Labs separated from OLPC, they took this premise with them. Sugar on a Stick is a project currently in beta at Sugar Labs, which allows you to leverage Fedora LiveUSB to store the complete running Sugar OS on a USB stick.

I encourage you to help out with this project if you have primary school aged children (even older - I have really enjoyed the TamTam music software available with Sugar). The Sugar OS has been designed with children in mind. People who criticize the OLPC project for not training children in the use of Microsoft products (because these are an industry standard), are missing the point, I believe. Microsoft operating systems and applications are an industry standard because they are ubiquitous. You use them at work, you have a pirated copy at home, etc... just as the Macintosh equivalents are similarly pervasive. I love my OLPC XO for a variety of reasons, but it is an island in my life, because I am surrounded by pervasive operating systems and applications, and I always have been. Unfortunately, the OLPC laptop doesn't change this.

Sugar on a Stick could.

Technology is ownership, portability, pervasiveness. With the Sugar on a Stick beta, Sugar Labs is driving toward these goals.

In defense of SUGAR

Have I mentioned how much I love love love the Hood Internet? I am always impressed when a project is able to straddle the intersection of theory and practice, and to do so seemlessly. The idea behind the Hood Internet, apparently, is that people no longer have time to listen to both hip-hop/R&B AND indie rock, so the two djs who are the Hood Internet have made it their mission to mash up the best and the worst of the two genres, and the results are nothing short of spectacular. Standout tracks for me were R Kelly/Broken Social Scene, Project Pat/Shout Out Louds, and the ABSOLUTELY FREAKIN' ASTOUNDING Common/Bloc Party track (courtesy of Dr. J). All tracks are freely available (through zShare, which can be an awful pain, unfortunately), and if you get a chance, suport the Hood by checking them out live at various music festivals.

I love my XO, and what One Laptop Per Child stands for. There has been a lot of talk recently about Sugar breaking away from OLPC, culminating in the recent foundation of Sugar Labs, and this can only be a good thing. For me personally, the Sugar interface presents an incredible shift away from the time-wasting and procrastination which have plagued my past endeavours. In a similar vein, I have been really impressed in the past with the simplicity of the operating system, if you would call it that, in the original Alphasmart word-processor. The Alphasmart has now evolved into the Dana, a cool word-processor designed for students, which runs PalmOS, but the original OS consisted of 8 buttons each representing a file. Click the button and start writing or editing. This leaves no scope for time-wasting. With Sugar, you benefit from a similar simplicity. When I open up my journal (the Sugar activity manager is called the journal), I see links to the last 10 activities I have been working on. More are available if I scroll down, but I rarely do, since, chances are, I want to resume one of these ten activities, even if I have no activity in mind when I turn the laptop on. When I complete an activity, for instance, by finishing up a document, I back it up on the SD card and remove it from the journal

Another innovation that raises the Hood Internet one level beyond is their use of photochoppery to enhance user experience: each audio mashup is accompanied by a visual mashup, showing the various artists hanging out, often in unusual circumstances. These images are offered for comic effect, but the effect is perfect, and well-executed and effortlessly ironic. I am myself a fan of the independent rock, however, I do find it often lacking in old-school Elvis-style libido, which, as Kurt Cobain taught us, rhymes with mosquito.

I can see the advantage to this for a child or a student or myself, as a writer; in my professional capacity, I have spent countless hours digging about for a particular document on Windows, but I deal with countless documents. When I am writing at home, however, I may have two or three documents in progress, but not more than this, and by being able to access "the last thing I was doing," quickly and efficiently, with no mucking around, I am saving time.

This is one reason I like Sugar, and one way it does something for me that Windows, or for that matter KDE or OSX, does not.