Recently released Wezwij Taxi is surprisingly no.1 free application in Polish AppStore since few days, and became no.1 one day after release.

I have just learned that AppStore is amazing phenomenon. It is quite impossible to predict impact of an application before it gets released. Some “silly” apps stay on top for weeks, while some real gems are quickly forgotten. So it is worth to test even most crazy wicked ideas against iPhone users putting them into life as AppStore app.

It is high time to release own application iPhone after spending a while doing apps for companies. So I decided to make something useful for myself what others can appreciate too.

Here are my very own apps:

• Strefa a Wirtualna Polska Strefa MP3 streaming audio client. Strefa MP3 is a portal containing over 100’000 songs of amateur and professional polish artists, every day brings tens of new songs. IMHO that is much better than commercial radio stations serving all those boring pieces we already heard before thousand times.
• Wezwij Taxi a polish taxi catalog and taximeter in one app. Now this program has one purpose: keep updated database of taxis for major cities of Poland. But in the future, I think this app can turn into some kind of one button taxi call, using your GPS position without a need to call or name your position to the operator. Useful for those traveling to unfamiliar cities.

Update: Strefa is already available at AppStore, Wezwij Taxi waits for fixes and resubmit.

Intel has put great effort to put complete open-source drivers into recent kernels for its devices. Only device that is clearly missing there is GMA500 (aka Poulsbo, aka US15 chipset, aka Atom Z5xx family). This is understood as it does relay on Imagination Technologies PowerVR core licensed out by Intel to produce GMA500, so most of the driver parts cannot go open-source as it would imply of violation of some agreement between ImgTec and Intel.
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Seems it is very hard to spread the news about CMSity around the world, and acquire some user base of this project. Till now I did few commercial deployments of CMSity, however the cmsity.com page hits look really miserable.

I wrote mails to many CMS magazines asking to drop a note about my project. However only two of them replied and posted something on their sites about CMSity. So I still miss some more reviews that can put a breathe into the project. But it seems my mails are ignored by majority of big CMS related sites making very hard to promote new project like CMSity nowadays.

Since I believe this software presents great value and outperforms other popular solutions I consider releasing it as open-source, however probably not GPL but some license that will force the code to stay by the author (me), deny all the forks, making all community changes happen to be included in the source code base.

Open-source is a great idea, but I have seen too many projects that were just bloated, forked and spoiled by masses of developers that were just about put something of themselves in the project regardless of quality of the included changes, missing overall sense and directions of the project itself. That is why I decided to keep the code closed initially, while giving the licenses for free, but it seems non-open source project are just kicked out of the focus today, and releasing the source code is a “must” to gain the momentum.

I was rather sceptic to Haml once I have first time read about it. But after recently playing a while with it I can frankly express that it is simply outstanding template engine for Ruby. What I miss about Haml is some seamless integration with some i18n framework (gem).

So I decided to create Haml “mod” that uses GetText (FastGettext alternatively) to automagically translate static texts from Haml templates during precompilation stage. So something that you don’t see and you don’t need to worry about. Read the rest of this entry »