Apropos Swiss Webapps
Talking about product-oriented, international web-companies based in Switzerland:
- futurelab's snapmania deployed at album.nzz.ch (Image 1) The Swiss Post (owner of search.ch) offers a competing service, together with daybyday.de
- map.search.ch now is being integrated into Google's results, just search for a town in Switzerland and find a link to their map. Sweet. (Image 2)
- So: The Swiss Post becomes cool. They are not going win in the field of foto-apps, but having confirmed and checked records of just about everybody in the country they will win big in the digital identity business. They're looking for PKI partners.
Just stating the obvious. No?
KwaMedia public alpha
Kaywa have
released a public alpha version of the
media manager their CEO
Roger has been talking about for.. for years, I think.
It's supposed to be something very much like
del.icio.us - not for web resources, but for things. They start with books (using Javascript for ISBN lookup from Amazon), but other media types should follow soon.
It runs on
Rails, which is pretty cool - and quite a strategic break with their other products all being made with PHP. New developers new toys, I guess.
With my semantics hat on, I don't quite like it yet: RSS/XML everywhere is nice, but RSS/RDF, using e.g urn:isbn, would have been useful, too. You know, an Amazon->RDF bridge with a
folksonomy on top.. yummy.
Edit: Despite the obvious connections, this little piece of software is not actually a Kaywa project. I'm told it's a private venture by Patrice ("a Jesus Freak and freelance software developer"). Fun with APIs
That's what happens when a brilliant designing programmer plays with
open APIs: amaztype by Yugop (.com/.net).
Our IMS/QTI 2.0 presentation engine
What you see above are some screenshots from two projects realized using mediagonal's IMS QTI v2.0 quiz engine we built last year.
The IMS Question and Test Interoperability v2.0 spec came out about a week ago, it`s meant to provide a standard for interactive assessments usable in whatever your learning management system might be, it deals with quite a number of question types, feedback and statistics, and includes a type system as well as a profile of XHTML.
Our quiz engine, written in Macromedia Flash, consumes such QTI XML files, along with further XML documents specifying some more special behavioral aspects and the entire layout specification. It should be able to plug into any system, for Moodle there is a special adapter component. Moodle is also the base for the projects shown above (for Paul Klee Zentrum and Jugend und Wirtschaft / LerNetz), we therefore improved Moodle`s question management and editing and implemented QTI v2.0 export.
In fact, I shouldn`t say "we" in this case: I did not write a single line of code for that software - nice to see a team growing and growing more powerful like that.
Berner Zeitung interviewing Stefano Mazzocchi
Piggy-Bank on Kaywa blog
Merci
Valentin for the screenshots.
Update: The
official annoucnement is out. I quote:
«What Mosaic did for the web, we think Piggy-Bank will do for the
semantic web!»
Sounds like a bit too much, but hey, those guys have all reasons to be proud :)
Raffael implements del.icio.us support
Raffael from Kaywa has implemented del.icio.us support into my blog, you see my latest links below on the right hand side. If I got them right, Kaywa will integrate this into their admin interface and soon offer this nice little feature for their other customers, too.
It's not an incredible innovation (has been there in other blogging systems for quite some time, and it's barely a dozen lines in BXB), but this has been the first visible change to the Kaywa platform for a pretty long time, so it is a good thing to see in any case. New features are always a good thing. ;-)
So thanks a lot and congratulations to Wanni! Just not sure whether I should perceive this as unpaid beta-testing or generous sponsoring :-)
Tomorrow: BXE 1.0 final
Today on IRC:
<chregu> morgen kommt BXE 1.0.0 ;)
Haven't heard anything about a party, although it would well be worth
one. Congratulations, Chregu!
Games for Hackers and Non-Hackers
Si Yuill's presentation at VIPER imho was one of the very highlights of the VIPER conference, the slides of his talk "
Games for Hackers and Non-Hackers" are online now. He did not only talk about his project
spring_alpha, but also a lot about its context and the intellectual framework dealing with social reality and norms, the role of software and, I quote, game development as critical enquiry. He was referring to "Computer Science and Law" by Bryan Niblett, I'll have to go fetch that one at the Basel library later this week.
