We’ve just completed the deployment for Skyblox, a new, Atlanta based company that’s looking to bring managed Wifi to businesses around the country. They’ve just started their pilot run in the Virginia-Highlands neighborhood. The cornerstone of their product, and what differentiates them from other Wi-Fi providers, is using the hotspot to form a local community message board. This message board allows local businesses, community groups and individuals to make small posts around local events. The message board for a specific community will always display when a user signs on through a neighborhood hotspot. Or, if they choose, they can always see what’s happening in a specific part of town from viewing the WWW page from their home computer. Of course, it’s all powered by Appcelerator.
The Skyblox portal makes extensive use of the (relatively) new Yahoo Maps widget. Everything that happens on the map is controlled by just the following:
<app:yui_map id="mapContainer" api_key='apikey'
initial_location="Atlanta, GA" zoom_level="8" max_zoom_out="8" height="230px" width="358px"
on_marker_click='r:portal.select.location.request'
on="l:add.map.markers then add_markers
or l:portal.map.recenter then center_and_zoom
or l:portal.map.recenter then best_fit after 1s
or l:portal.map.best_fit then best_fit
or r:portal.get.bloxlist.request then clear_map
or r:portal.change.neighborhood.request then clear_map
or l:select_map_location then select_location"
></app:yui_map>That’s a lot of functionality for not much work. The end result looks like this:
If you want to try the map for yourself, you can always get the widget from the Appcelerator developer network. If you want to check out the hot spots in action, you’re only two blox away.
Popularity: 100% [?]
(This post originally appeared on my personal blog. I wanted to make sure Appcelerant readers saw the good news as well.)
Yesterday, we announced that Larry Augustin had joined the advisory board of Appcelerator.
Larry has been working with us for awhile now and we thought it was time to formalize our relationship.
Larry is probably one of the most well respected thought leaders, angel investors and business executives in open source. Larry literally was one of the main figures behind the rise of open source…especially as it relates to open source as a business.
Larry has been involved in open source for more than 20 years. Most notably, he founded VA Linux (now Sourceforge, NASDAQ:LNUX), where he launched SourceForge.net, the world’s largest open source software development community. He led the company through an IPO in 1999. Also at VA, he acquired Andover.net, merging SourceForge.net, Linux.com, Slashdot, and other well-known Open Source Internet sites to form the Open Source Development Network (OSDN). Larry holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame.
Larry currently is an investor and/or board member to SugarCRM, Hyperic, Fonality, Pentaho, Compiere, Medsphere, Springsource, Mulesource, Zend, WS02 and a few others. He was also a director at JBoss, which was acquired by Red Hat (NYSE: RHAT) for $420M and Xensource, which was acquired by Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) for $500M.
Larry will continue to help us focus our efforts on growing our open source community around rich Internet applications (RIA) as we pioneer a path toward bringing rapid open source RIA development to the enterprise market.
Welcome aboard, Larry.
Popularity: 5% [?]
We just released a new website at http://try.appcelerator.org
You can visit this website to give Appcelerator a try — right in the comfort of your browser. No downloads necessary.
This little utility is built with Appcelerator and gives you the ability to see the simplicity, elegance and power of what we call the “Web Expression Language”. This utility will help you construct simple web expressions and test them on-the-fly.
Enjoy!
Popularity: 8% [?]
