Wow, I just realized that this year is probably the one most packed with conferences ever for me. To be honest, I also count barcamps since the best conferences are for me those where I (1) get to drink some beers with awesome people, (2) learn about new techniques and technologies and (3) get ideas for new projects. So barcamps definitely qualify ;-)
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The Year of the Conferences
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New "Light" theme for Ubuntu
Seems like Ubuntu is finally about to dump the primarily brown theme it has been using for the last ... well, since its first release. On the equally new brand page you can find a screenshot for each variant of the theme (dark and bright) as well as the new logo. Personally, I think the new look is really nice, judging from the screenshots I saw (Putting it on my netbook would kind of defeat the purpose of that devices ;-)). It appears to me far more mature and slightly more "professional" than the previous "Human" theme.
What I don't like, or at least haven't come around liking, is the new window-button order (the buttons you see in the upper left corner of each window in these screenshots): For me, the action I use the most on any given window is the "close" action. And this is just easiest to reach when positioned in one of the outer corners. Perhaps has a patent on having the close button in the top right corner and it being red ... who knows.
If you want to know more without installing it, Ars Technica has some nice hands-on article.
Now I just have to find some not-used notebook with an Intel chip that I could put this onto :-/
[via arstechnica.com]
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Gowalla finally got an API
Primary link: gowalla.com
It's been quite a while in the making but Gowalla today finally made an API for their geo-location service publicly available :-) Compared to what Foursquare has to offer, this one is rather limited because it's read-only. But this is IMO actually a good thing since then it's not that simple to easily cheat the system from the outside. On the other hand, the documentation mentions POST-requests often enough to suggest that check-in support or some other operation that requires write-access is planned for the future.
Another absent feature is OAuth support, which isn't really an issue right now, since you barely need to do authenticated requests anyway, right now. I guess, we will see it when the time comes for write-access. Applications, on the other side, require an application key in order to access any of the provided data.
Given that the API is read-only for the time being, there are some obvious limitations of what you can do with it. Nevertheless, this would have been more than enough to add some more information onto the Twitterwall for the recent Barcamp Klagenfurt 2010 and I'm pretty sure, many people will create some useful and some just plain funny tools with it :-)
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Barcamp Klagenfurt 2010: Recap
Alle Jahr wieder hat auch dieser Februar ein Barcamp in Klagenfurt gesehen. Es war wieder an der Universität Klagenfurt, es kamen wieder jede Menge Leute aus unterschiedlichsten Beweggründen und Branchen ... und war wieder großartig :D (Disclaimer: Ich war ein kleiner Teil des Orgateams, also muss ich es als großartig bezeichnen, selbst wenn es das absolut war ;-))
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Apple's iPad: Still looking for a use-case
Steve Jobs did it again and announced a device, many people think will change the world. Well, I for one am still wondering what kind of use I might have for it. A few years ago while still working at University projects I had the chance to play around a little bit with a tablet PC running Windows XP and it was barely usable for what I wanted to do with it. Granted, Apple has done some miracles with the iPhone user interface, but what would I want to have mostly the same in 9.7" device without any real benefit?
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