AMT Blog

Mosh is an open source remote terminal application that supports intermittent connectivity, allows roaming, and provides speculative local echo and line editing of user keystrokes.

It aims to support the typical interactive uses of SSH, plus:

• Mosh keeps the session alive if the client goes to sleep and wakes up later, or temporarily loses its Internet connection.
• Mosh allows the client and server to "roam" and change IP addresses, while keeping the connection alive. Unlike SSH, Mosh can be used while switching between Wi-Fi networks or from Wi-Fi to cellular data to wired Ethernet.
• The Mosh client runs a predictive model of the server's behavior in the background and tries to guess intelligently how each keystroke will affect the screen state. When it is confident in its predictions, it will show them to the user while waiting for confirmation from the server. Most typing and uses of the left- and right-arrow keys can be echoed immediately.
• As a result, Mosh is usable on high-latency links, e.g. on a cellular data connection or spotty Wi-Fi. In distinction from previous attempts at local echo modes in other protocols, Mosh works properly with full-screen applications such as emacs, vi, alpine, and irssi, and automatically recovers from occasional prediction errors within an RTT. On high-latency links, Mosh underlines its predictions while they are outstanding and removes the underline when they are confirmed by the server.
• Mosh adjusts its frame rate so as not to fill up network queues on slow links, so "Control-C" always works within an RTT to halt a runaway process.
• Mosh warns the user when it has not heard from the server in a while.
• Mosh supports lossy links that lose a significant fraction of their packets.
• Mosh handles some Unicode edge cases better than SSH and existing terminal emulators by themselves, but requires a UTF-8 environment to run.
• Mosh leverages SSH to set up the connection and authenticate users. Mosh does not contain any privileged (root) code.

Mosh does not support X forwarding or the non-interactive uses of SSH, including port forwarding. It is free software, available for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X.

Read more…

Like what we post? Share your thoughts on the comments below. If you wish to get regular updates on what we post, do subscribe to our RSS Feed

If you had been a fan of Google’s App Inventor for Android, during its first release, you will be excited to know that MIT announced the public beta version of the new app inventor, today. 

App Inventor for Android lets users create apps for Android phones by manipulating programming blocks in a web browser.   Since July 2010, Google has run App Inventor  as a large-scale public web service as a part of its Google Labs suite.  With the wind down of Google Labs, as of December 31,  2011, Google ended support of App Inventor. 

In order to ensure the future success of App Inventor, Google Research has funded the establishment of the Center for Mobile Learning at the MIT Media Lab.  Sometime in the first quarter of 2012, the Center plans to provide a large scale App Inventor service for general public access, similar to the one Google ran.  MIT’s will be posting progress on getting their public service up and running at MIT Developer’s Blog. 

Read more…

Like what we post? Share your thoughts on the comments below. If you wish to get regular updates on what we post, do subscribe to our RSS Feed

WeViews is an Open Source Objective C library for programmatically laying out UIViews, Supporting iPhoneOS 3.0+, iOS 4.0+. It's distributed under the Apache License 2.0

Take a look at a brief, but interesting video introducing WeViews right below:

Read more…

Like what we post? Share your thoughts on the comments below. If you wish to get regular updates on what we post, do subscribe to our RSS Feed

Although writing often considered a solitary pursuit, it is not always true. Most brilliant books are products of collaboration. Author of the book often work together with Co-authors, editors, proofreaders, translators, designers and a host of other people contribute their expertise at various stages of creation of an extra-ordinary book. 

Booktype is a free, open source platform that lets you create beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Amazon, iBooks and almost any ereader within minutes. You can either create books on your own or collaborate with others via an easy-to-use web interface. It also allows you to build a community around your content with social tools and use the reach of mobile, tablet and ebook technology to engage new audiences.

Booktype, developed by Sourcefabric was launched at O’Reilly Tools of Change publishing conference 2012, on Feb 14th.

Read more… 

Like what we post? Share your thoughts on the comments below. If you wish to get regular updates on what we post, do subscribe to our RSS Feed

Mobile Boilerplate is a professional front-end template that lets you develop robust mobile web applications faster and better. With it, you'll be able to spend more time developing and less time reinventing the wheel.

Salient Features of MBP

• Mobile browser optimizations.
• HTML5 ready. Use the new elements with confidence.
• CSS normalizations and common bug fixes.
• Home page icon for Android, iOS, Nokia
• Mobile IE conditional switch
• Cross-browser viewport optimization for Android, iOS, Mobile IE, Nokia, Blackberry
• Better font rendering in Mobile IE
• iPhone web app meta
• INSTANT button click event
• Textarea autogrow
• Hide URL bar method
• Prevent form zoom onfocus method
• Mobile site redirection
• Mobile sitemap
• Mobile bookmark bubble
• User Agent Detection
• The latest jQuery via CDN, with a local fallback.
• A custom Modernizr build (including Respond.js) for feature detection and a polyfill for CSS Media Queries.
• An optimized Google Analytics snippet.
• Apache server caching, compression, and other configuration defaults for Grade-A performance.
• A build script to automate the minification and concatenation of your HTML/CSS/JS.
• Cross-domain Ajax.
• "Delete-key friendly." Easy to strip out parts you don't need.
• Extensive inline and accompanying documentation.

Read more…

Like what we post? Share your thoughts on the comments below. If you wish to get regular updates on what we post, do subscribe to our RSS Feed

HP has decided to open source Enyo 2.0, in order to broaden the reach of WebOS by adopting the standard Linux kernel, and making Enyo development framework run on all the major browsers within a month or so.

Enyo is an object-oriented JavaScript framework originally targeting webOS and WebKit. After HP’s announcement to open source webOS in December 2011, the company had decided to broaden webOS’ reach by porting Enyo to all major browsers and basing webOS on the standard Linux kernel. The first step was achieved: HP has open sourced Enyo 2.0, a core JavaScript library that now runs on Chrome, Safari, IE and Firefox, both the mobile and desktop versions. Enyo 2.0 is missing the UI toolkit which needs more work to run on multiple browsers, but it is promised to be ready in a month. Enyo-based applications can also be run as native iOS/Android/WP7 apps via PhoneGap as shown in this example. A developer ported the Paper Mache application to Google’s mobile OS making it available on Android Market.

Enyo’s philosophy is to allow developers to build large applications based on components that may contain any number of other components. A number of examples showing the source code and the results in the browser can be accessed at Enyo Samples. Enyo core functionality is packed in a 13 KB zipped file, making it appealing for mobile development due to its small size.

HP has detailed the next steps for webOS:

• The release of a WebKit distribution that supports HTML5 (including Canvas and 3D textures), Flash and Silverlight, plus support for application interfaces including multi-touch.
• webOS will make use of the standard Linux kernel greatly broadening the devices it can run upon. Sam Greenblatt, HP CTO and member on the board of OSDL (Linux Foundation), is currently leading the webOS strategy.
• webOS will use Google’s open source LevelDB, an embedded key-value data store, instead of the DB it is currently using
• Ares 2 is going to support Enyo 2. Ares is a browser-based IDE with drag-and-drop support for developing applications for webOS

Read more…

Don't like to miss out any of our posts? Do Subscribe to our Feed 

Brendan Ribera, a Seattle based hacker introduces Mirah, a JVM-based programming language with a Ruby-like syntax, type inference, closures, meta-programming, macros etc. 

Salient Features of Mirah:

• Ruby-like syntax
• Compiles to .class or .java
• Fast as Java
• No runtime library

Requirements:

• JRuby 1.6.0 or higher.
• BiteScript 0.0.8 or higher 

Check out Brendan’s presentation at Strange Loop Conference, introducing Mirah for Android right here below. 

Click here to download:

StrangeLoop2011-BrendanRibera-MirahforAndroidDevelopment.pdf (1.13 MB)

(download)

Click here to download:

StrangeLoop2011-BrendanRibera-MirahforAndroidDevelopment.pdf (1.13 MB)

Read more…

Like what we post? Share your thoughts on the comments below. If you wish to get regular updates on what we post, do subscribe to our RSS Feed

The Funf Open Sensing Framework is an extensible sensing and data processing framework for mobile devices being developed at the MIT Media Lab. The core concept is to provide an open source, reusable set of functionalities, enabling the collection, uploading, and configuration of a wide range of data types. Funf is available with a GPL License. 

Salient features of Funf are:

• Remote configuration.
• Many built-in data “probes”.
• Automatic or manual data upload.
• Delay tolerant implementation – When internet connection is not available, caches data locally until server connection is restored.
• One-way hashing and encryption for sensitive data: Does not save any textual data or phone numbers in human-readable format.
• Encryption of locally stored database files.
• 3rd-party data input API allowing any app to leverage the Funf framework for collecting and storing arbitrary app data.
• Modular probe architecture allows for adding core data probes and modifying existing probe behavior.
• Basic survey system for manual data collection.
• Various optimizations for prolongig battery life and dealing with everyday use-cases (e.g. when SD card is not available because user is copying music files to it)
• Field proven – Deployed for over 15 months with over 100 users in an MIT living laboratory experiment. 

Read more…

Like what we post? Share your thoughts on the comments below.  If you wish to get regular updates on what we post, do subscribe to our RSS Feed

Shim is a node.js app, created by Chris Marstall of Boston Globe, in order to allow simultaneous, synced web surfing across a variety of devices and browsers. Shim was created as a timesaving way to see how BostonGlobe’s web sites render on a variety of gadgets & browsers. It works by tweaking Wifi to enable the easy synchronization of browsing sessions across several devices, with no client configuration needed.

This makes cross-browser and cross-device testing much simpler. With one click, it's possible to see a page rendered on devices of varying screen size, input technology, etc.

Visualize a group of people browsing using a variety of devices, all connected to a single Wifi access point that's running Shim. Whenever one of them clicks on a link, all the others will be automatically redirected to the linked page. 

There is no device-specific configuration required, so even simple gadgets can synchronize. We've tested this so far with iPad, iPhone, Nexus S, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Motorola Xoom, Kindle 3, Barnes & Noble Color Nook, Windows Phone 7 and a variety of desktop browsers, but it should work on most current devices that have a Javascript-enabled web browser.

Chris achieved this by turning on Internet Sharing on a stock Mac Book Pro, then modifying it at the system level to act as a transparent proxy. The laptop intercepts all wifi traffic and redirects it to a custom node.js server, which inserts a javascript "shim" at the head of each web page that is visited. The shim, once loaded in a device's browser, opens and maintains a socket connection to the server. Whenever a new page is requested, the page's url is broadcast to all connected browsers, which then redirect themselves to that url, keeping all devices in sync.

A Lawnchair is a simple, yet handy JSON storage ideal for your HTML5 mobile apps that need a lightweight, adaptive and elegant persistence solution.

Features

1. Super micro tiny storage without the nasty SQL: pure and delicious JSON.
2. Default build weighs in at 3.4K minified; 1.5 gzip'd!
3. Adaptors for any clientside store.
4. Designed with mobile in mind.
5. Clean and simple API.
6. Key/value store ...key is optional.
7. Terse syntax for searching/finding.
8. Battle tested in app stores and on the open mobile web.
9. Framework agnostic. (If not a framework athiest!)
10. MIT licensed.

Read more…

Like what we post? share your thoughts on the comments below.  If you wish to get regular updates on what we post, do subscribe to our RSS Feed