Posts Tagged open source

Adobe Flex going open source

An interesting new player comes to the open source world – Adobe Flex. Flex seems to be a powerful choice for building the new buzzword Rich Internet Applications. I’m still unsold on having an entire application be one giant flash movie but time will tell. It does have some powerful capabilities especially in the enterprise dashboard realm. MicroStrategy has released some new flex based functionality to allow developers to build dashboards on top of normal business intelligence reports served by MicroStrategy’s BI platform. I think Flex is a good fit in this arena as it is able to aggregate many reports into a sleek and sexy dashboard. Yet, I’m still struggling to see where this technology will make its place in the traditional web application environment. It is very good for displaying data to a user and providing drill down and aggregation, but I can’t see it replacing the standard forms based approach to transactional based web systems.

A nice article is here at Ryan Stewart’s Universal Desktop.

Hat tip to Nick for sending me the article.

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simplecenter is open sourced

This is old news, but simplecenter has been open sourced. What does that mean? To me it means I can get newer versions and customize it to fit my needs. To others it means that the group at simplecenter hope to make it the iTunes and WMP alternative.

I own a Rockford Fosgate Omnifi system purchased from woot more than a year ago. The device has served its purpose well – streaming MP3′s wirelessly from my PC to my hifi system. The only downfalls it has are that the device does not have a digital out interface and that there isn’t a neat touchscreen remote that will work from various rooms in the house. As well, it does not support flac and has a limited database that allows only ten thousand MP3′s to be added to the library.

Earlier this week I figured out how to hack the version of simplecenter shipped with the Omnifi to allow more than ten thousand songs – a little editing of a properties file within the jar file that housed the application’s code. However, I still wasn’t pleased with the operation of the application, using a large XML file to store the media library. I did some looking and saw that the Omnifi support direct from Omnifi has all but disappeared and that simplecenter has open sourced their code. Read the rest of this entry »

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