DelayToleraNt

Google has released a beta version of Google Gears which is a toolkit for developing offline applications. The client part of Gears is a web browser plug-in which installs with simple single click install (so simple that is definitely worth trying). Then user is able to store web sites locally for later offline access. One could e.g. store travel information to a laptop and then later while on the road access the site without network connection.

The Google Gears architecture uses local data storage to store the website data locally on the machine which runs web browser. When the network connection cannot be used to access the server, the Gears may provide the web resource from local data base in the user’s own machine.

Dojo Offline Toolkit is an extension on top of Google Gears that advertises to make the using of the Gears more easier, worth checking out.

UPDATE: We followed (maemo instructions) which are given for older PPC based Macs, the OSX flasher worked perfectly well also with new Intel based MacBook. After all, it’s the version of the firmware that counts in the end, not the version of of the flasher itself.

Here we also explain how we succesfully managed to flash the N800 firmware by using the freely available beta version of VMware Fusion. The installation process of VMware on Intel based MacBook was a straightforward procedure. Then one can use his favorite Linux distribution as a VM guest operating system, we used the Ubuntu 7.04 distribution, which worked nicely (except for minor difficulties in mounting the USB but booting the guest OS with USB attached helped). The advantage on working with distribution which used .deb packages is that the same packet manager is used in N800 and one has to learn the tricks only for one packet management system.

The procedure of installing a Linux distribution causes perhaps a bit more overhead than necessary, but one also gets a nice introduction to virtualization for free. The beta version of WMware Fusion downloads for free without registering and the quality product was a pleasure to use. The virtualization approach helps to use also other Linux based development tools on Mac.

OpenC is a set of POSIX libraries for s60 on Symbian. These libraries can be used by developers to easily start writing software on s60 platform without steep learning curve.

The Delay-tolerant Networking (DTN) paradigm aims to design future networking protocols and architectures in a way that they work in environments where large delays occur and end-to-end paths for communication may not exists. DTN Research Group is a forum that gets together the professionals from industry and academia who work on DTN research and development.

This site is currently (July 2007) under construction. Beginning from autumn variety of topics on mobile system development and research will be covered here by an expert on the field. Stay tuned.