Magic Ink: Context and geographical location

[Henri Bergius]

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
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