Hi! I've enjoyed your essay "The Magic Ink" immensely. Very useful ideas for making software less dumb.
In "Inferring context from the environment" , you wrote: "I believe that location is such vital context, Powerbooks should come with GPS receivers pre-installed, with an easy software API. Developers would then write software to take advantage of it, and other computer makers would follow suit." http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/#p2 I'm participating in an open source project called GeoClue where we're building an API for easy access to geographical positioning. However, we believe that GPS alone is not enough for position information. It consumes battery, takes time to get a fix and only works outdoors. In some scenarios like in-car navigation GPS is very useful, but in many situations other position sources like cell phone network or WiFi can be useful (see http://highearthorbit.com/why-the-iphone-doesnt-need-gps/ for more on this) To support the "multiple sources of position information" idea we have created a positioning service that can abstract away the access to multiple position sources. With GeoClue, application developers only need to use a C library or make a D-Bus query for location, and it will be provided from whatever backend is available. Some examples of this in mobile Linux use: http://vilunki.wordpress.com/2007/07/19/geoclue-release/ http://vilunki.wordpress.com/2007/08/12/wrapping-up/ Here is more about GeoClue project: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/GeoClue Just thought this might be interesting to mention :-) /Henri -- Henri Bergius Motorcycle Adventures and Free Software http://bergie.iki.fi/ Skype: henribergius Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jaiku: http://bergie.jaiku.com/ _______________________________________________ GeoClue mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/geoclue
