Always dreamed of running a sweatshop, but were worried about the legal ramifications? Sick of paying American workers boatloads of money just because the government says it's fair? Really, it's a free country, so you should be able to pay people whatever you feel like, no? Who cares if they need a certain wage to live, no one forced them to take the job. You're the victim here. But like Superman flying over the horizon in his confusingly bright colored outfit, a hero is coming to save you.
Behold, Offshoring.com, where you can hire cheap, skilled labour for as little as $4 an hour. How is this possible? Because the workers are in the Philippines. You can hire everything from programmers to graphic designers for a fraction of what they cost in the US. According to their website they are an American company with a headquarters in Atlanta who send people to the Philippines to run offices staffed with skilled Filipino workers. These workers will work whenever you work, Monday-Friday, and speak English. No word in the FAQ as to whether the workers are chained to their computers or not.
And, as an added bonus, you can fire any worker you want for whatever reason AND you don't even have to do it yourself. You just tell the office and they fire the worker for you. Which, one would assume, involves a large trap door and some sort of flesh eating monster. God bless capitalism.
That certainly didn't take long. Just a day after going live, HuddleChat is no more. HuddleChat was a web-based multi-user chat room utilizing the new Google App Engine. It bore a striking resemblance to Campfire, a similar application from 37signals. The main difference was that Campfire used a freemium model (free for up to 4 users, fee for more users), while HuddleChat was completely free.
Now, technically, there's nothing wrong with developing an application that looks and feels a lot like a competing application. After all, is it surprising that two web-based multi-user chat rooms are going to look a lot alike? You have a chat window, a message window, a friends list window, and so on. It all seems rather obvious. But while Google App Engine is open to anybody (or at least the first 10,000 users to sign up during the beta), HuddleChat was actually written by two Google employees during their free time. And that made it hard to see as anything other than a direct strike at 37signals' Campfire. It sort of screamed "Hey, we like your product, now we're going to clone it, make it free, and drive you out of business!"
Needles to say, 37signals wasn't very happy to see HuddleChat, and now there's a message on the HuddleChat web site explaining that the application has been removed. So now if you want a multi-user, web-based chat room with transcripts and file uploads for team meetings or group chats, it looks like you'll have to stick with Campfire. Until someone else comes along with a free clone.
A lot of folks say that Google's new App Engine is basically a free clone of Amazon's Web Services. And they're pretty much right. So we probably shouldn't be surprised to find that some of the applications already making use of Google App Engine are free clones of other popular programs.
HuddleChat is a web-based mult-user chat application built with Google's App Engine. And it's almost identical to Campfire, a chat application from 37signals. But while Campfire provides free chat rooms for up to 4 users, and charges a fee for rooms with more users, HuddleChat lets an unlimited number of users chat for free.
The interface is pretty slick and offers a bunch of features that make it ideal for virtual team meetings. Chats are automatically archived, and you can upload files like images which will be displayed in the chat. They're also saved on a Transcripts & Files page. You can invite any user by sending out an email from the site, or you can share the room's URL. Best of all, users can sign into a chat room using their Google ID. So if you already have a Gmail, Google Calendar, or Picasa account you don't need to sign up for a new account to use HuddleChat.
Predictably, the folks at 37signals are less than pleased with HuddleChat.
Update: Astute blogger Emily Price noticed that there's at least one important Campfire feature missing from HuddleChat: Search. Which is kind of funny when you consider the fact that HuddleChat is hosted by Google and was developed by two Google employees.
Google has just announced the preview release of Google App Engine, which the company is describing as " an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google's infrastructure." Think of it like Amazon's web services, but as a fully integrated solution. With Amazon's services, developers can mix and match the various components with each other or with other solutions -- Google App Engine is a one-stop shop of sorts.
Most appealing, Google App Engine is free. During the preview, there are only spots for the first 10,000 developers who sign up, but Google's information page says that free accounts will be available after the initial preview. Of course, the free accounts do have resource limitations (500MB of storage and 5 million page views a month), but free is free!
Let's get into the details:
Applications can be served from the free appspot.com domain or from an external domain via Google Apps
Python is the only language supported right now -- Google says they look forward to supporting other languages in the future, but for right now -- Python is where it is at
Google's service API is built into App Engine -- so Google Accounts can be easily integrated into an application
During the developer preview users are able to register up to 3 applications
The SDK is available for Mac, Windows and Linux
From our perspective, this news is exciting -- if not for what it offers right now -- but for the potential in the future. Only initially supporting Python is a curious choice (though we are big fans of Django), but the ability for developers to execute scalable apps using Google's resources -- for free -- is extremely exciting.
When the iPhone Dev Team announced on April 1st that their team was being dismantled, and their intellectual property was being swallowed down the gullet of some fat-cat enemy of the people, Some sites took the bait (albeit with a small dose of skepticism).
Now that the fog that is April Fools Day has lifted, the iPhone Dev Team has revealed that, like Hilary Clinton (and Rocky), they are not going to abandon their mission. In fact, just to show that they are good sports, they gave Engadget a hands-on walkthrough of their new Pwnage tool, which will let you load any firmware you want on your iPhone, including patched firmware not signed by Apple (bring on the Linux!). The video is available here.
Update: The Pwnage tool is now officially available from the iPhone Dev Team; though, for now, the tool is Mac only.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is renowned for his developer evangelism, and is well known in the tech community for his rousing, if presumably fruity-smelling, cheerleading on stage. Clearly, the active lifestyle maintained at conferences is something that Microsoft wants to instill in all developers, leading to their latest online offering: 'Active-Build Live Developer Workouts Beta'.
According to Microsoft, "when we looked away from the Windows Vista team, we realised that most developers spend a serious amount of time in front of their computers, y'know, coding. To aid our developers further, we've launched Active-Build Live Developer Workouts Beta with a whole series of fitness videos from Steve Ballmer himself".
The service, included with every MSDN subscription, takes the form of a YouTube-esque player, a desktop client that prompts developers to take a break, as well as links to the Zune Marketplace to download videos for on-the-go use.
Sources at Microsoft say that distribution talks are 'ongoing' with a number of other providers to further the reach of the series, and that in a moment of post-workout delusion Ballmer attempted to negotiate with Apple for an iTunes release. Senior executives at Apple, speaking on condition of anonymity, are reportedly clueless on how to proceeed: "The iTunes intern who brought up the idea, along with [Apple CEO] Steve Jobs, are both currently under sedation after an internal meeting. It would appear that the videos fell somewhat below [Jobs'] 'impeccable taste threshold' and until Steve is fit to return to work and fire the intern, we're not sure how to proceed on any projects, internal or otherwise."
As usual, Apple PR declined to comment on 'market speculation', however recent rumours indicate that John Hodgman will appear once again at the start of Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference keynote in an OK-GO-inspired Mac/PC 'Treadmill' Advert.
It's understandable, of course. Most new Linux users feel more comfortable with something a little heavier than a window manager like Fluxbox or WindowMaker. The interesting thing, of course, is that many new users are either consciously or unconsciously playing the field of not only distributions, but desktops.
Rest assured, KDE will not text you a hundred times a day to beg, plead or curse if you switch desktops. GNOME will not mail you a dead fish from the opposite side of the country, book rate. In this relationship, it is always okay to have a wandering eye, not only for what is out there, but for what's on the horizon.
We like Enlightenment as it stands now. It's one of our favorite window managers. It doesn't feel too foreign to the new user, but it is still extremely lightweight. If there was a spectrum with the heaviest desktop environments on the right, and the lightest window managers on the left, just right of the middle would be the venerable Xfce, and just to the left of the middle would be Enlightenment.
But as for what's on the horizon for Enlightenment? We have seen e17. Right now it's an alpha release, and we're waiting not too patiently for the coming out party. We are smitten.
The iPhone SDK has been out for couple of weeks now and I've been using it to develop an application for my work as a technology demonstrator. My experience thus far has been largely positive. I wasn't surprised by how well-made the SDK is, even at this beta stage. The amount of work involved in releasing any SDK, let alone one that is so tightly scrutinized, cannot be underestimated.
Consider that I am learning three new things simultaneously: programming in Objective-C, learning how to use Xcode, and what is available in the iPhone SDK, I am going to describe the whole experience instead of just confined to the SDK.
RegExr is a web tool for testing those widely used (yet often confusing) regular expressions. Regular expressions (regex) are search patterns that help you find strings of text in e-mail messages, text files, etc.
Things like Usenet search tools, Google Code search, and Open Office support regex, and regex versatility far surpasses simple wildcard searches like *.exe. For instance, a regular expression like .*@([^.]+\.)*example.com$ will find all email addresses from example.com (and its subdomains).
To use RegExr, type your expression in the top box, and then type/insert text in the box below to see if it matches your expression. You can use the helpful sidebar to learn about and insert different regex strings to build your overall pattern.
If you want a more feature-rich program, are running Windows, and have $39.95 to spare, try RegExBuddy. The RegExr developer plans to release free AIR versions of his product for Mac OS X and Windows.
UPDATE: The developer has recently released a significant update to RegExr that adds a code-sense engine and replace functionality.
With all the buzz around OpenSocial, it's easy to get lost in hype. While we were at SXSW we caught up with Kevin Marks, a man with more techno-credibility than you can shake a stick at. He's currently working on OpenSocial for Google, and he's got a lot to say about the concepts behind organizing and connecting the diaspora which is the current state of the social web. Our own Christina Warren cuts through the hype in this short interview.
Yahoo!, MySpace and Google announced the creation of the OpenSocial Foundation today. The foundation is a non-profit entity aimed at ensuring "...open and transparent governance of the OpenSocial specifications and intellectual property."
On the final day of SXSW Interactive 2008, we were lucky enough to sit down with Kevin Marks from Google's OpenSocial project. Kevin broke down what OpenSocial is, where it is going (MySpace, Hi5, and Orkut among others had already signed on as of our interview) and what the plans are for the future. We'll be posting our interview with Marks shortly.
In the meantime, you can read more about the new foundation after the jump
The API will enable trusted 3rd party sites to access your Google contact information without asking you to provide your login information. So next time Facebook, Plaxo, or another service wants to import your Gmail, Google Calendar, or Google Talk contacts you might not have to give up your email password. Likewise, 3rd party software and web sites will be able to export contact lists to Google. And developers could write software that will keep your Google contacts synchronized with your desktop or mobile personal information manager.
In other words, if someone has some free time on their hands, they can write an application that will allow you to synchronize your Outlook and Google contacts. You know, like the application we were kind of hoping Google would release along with Google Calendar Sync yesterday.
It's hard to get by with just one chat client these days. Your contacts aren't likely to be limited to a single service, like Google Talk, MSN Live or AIM, so a multi-chat client is a must. Now the multi-chat experience is about to get a lot better for AIM's 27.8 million users, with the launch of AOL's Open AIM 2.0 initiative.
Open AIM will aid the developers of clients like Meebo and eBuddy by releasing documentation for OSCAR, the protocol that the official AIM client uses to connect to the service. Open source libraries are now allowed to access the AIM network, and developers are free to create mobile or corporate versions of AIM to their heart's content, and AIM will now all kinds of widgets and plugins.
What does this mean for users? For one, some of the compatibility issues with third-party clients might finally go away -- file transfer is the one that's always been a sore spot for us. AOL is promising access to AIM's voice and video capabilities, too. Keep an eye out for updates to your favorite chat client, because the devs are likely working at full speed to add new features under Open AIM.
Officially it's "five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties", unofficially it's the biggest event of the software geek calendar. SXSW Interactive starts Friday in Austin, Texas and we'll be hitting the ground tomorrow like some sort of invading army.
We've already managed to book plenty of interviews with tech luminaries, and we're sure to stumble across more. We'll also be doing some live blogging, taking lots of photos and video, and posting to Twitter.
Keep checking Download Squad for all the SXSW happenings, or if you're more of a river of news kind of person, we've got this SXSW 2008 RSS feed you can use to make sure you don't miss a thing.
Linux users aren't exactly known as big fans of proprietary software, but sometimes a big commercial app comes in handy. iTunes has been up and running on Linux for a while now, but it was missing one big reason to choose it over an open source music player: iPod Touch and iPhone syncing. These two Apple gadgets need to be unlocked to work with a third-party music player.
But now iTunes on Linux is reportedly able to recognize and sync all iPod models, including the Touch and the iPhone. Maarten Lankhorst recently alerted the wine-devel mailing list that he got iPod-iTunes syncing to work on a Linux system with Wine, iTunes 7.6, and minimal patches. Good news for anyone whose 'Pod wasn't supported by the available open source apps.
There's still a little more work to be done before this will work on unpatched Wine: direct access to the device in explorer is not supported, although it should be coming soon. For now, at least there's a solution for Windows users who also want to keep their iPhones and iTouches locked - even if it's still proprietary.
Always dreamed of running a sweatshop, but were worried about the legal ramifications? Sick of paying American workers boatloads of money just because the government says it's fair? Really, it's a free country, so you should be able to pay people whatever you feel like, no? Who cares if they need a certain wage to live, no one forced them to take the job. You're the victim here. But like Superman flying over the horizon in his confusingly bright colored outfit, a hero is coming to save you. 
Google has just 
Do you remember our youth? The good times we had, the games we played, and that great discussion we had about 
Officially it's "five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties", unofficially it's the biggest event of the software geek calendar. SXSW Interactive starts Friday in Austin, Texas and we'll be hitting the ground tomorrow like some sort of invading army. 
