I got a new phone and was terrified about the manual work that would be needed to sync all of my contact details. But then I thought, we’re in 2008 so there must be an open source way of doing this!!

Funambol MobileWe did the trick perfectly! Funambol allows syncing over the air emails, contacts, calendar, tasks and notes with mobile devices. The site reports syncing capabilities with 1.5 billion mobile devices and thousands of online services. You can sync your information from GMail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, Thunderbird, AOL, MS Outlook (if you’re still using it), and emails from POP and IMAP access.

I’ve seen countless times websites that would allow me to dig through my GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, contact list to invite friends over. A pretty neat piece of code that can help a website to grow its userbase quite well.

Open Inviter is the open source bit of code that can allow users to install this functionality wherever needed. The list of supported communities and CMS platforms is huge! Open Inviter can link to users to their contacts in GMail, AOL, Yahoo!, MySpace, Orkut, Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and loads more.

If you’re working with a team of people to build a software, a website, or a plain and simple group project, Bugzilla is a very good task management web based tool.

I’ve used in the past the commercial application JIRA which in some ways resembles Trac, so my familiarity with Bugzilla is pretty recent.

This web based app is pretty simple to use: you report bugs, change requests, new feature tasks, and calls for investigation, assign it to someone and follow this task’s progress until its resolution and QA check.

My favorite cross-platform music manager Songbird is now on its 1.0 release!! I’ve written about Songbird before and it is fantastic to report that finally the first full release is available.

Why do I like Songbird so much?

• it is open source;
• cross-platform (Linux, Windows, MacOS X)
• built on top of the same framework as Firefox, it allows me to navigate through other websites and easily get songs that are embedded in these websites;
• also inheriting from Firefox is the ability to have add-ons so its functionality can be greatly expanded.

Using GStreamer for playback means that Songbird can easily play several music formats, and do it well. Also improved for the 1.0 release is the performance (using much less system resources), faster to startup, some cool add-ons that come bundled with the software, a nice way of handling iTunes library migration, and more.

I’ve just started using Mozilla’s Ubiquity. What is Ubiquity? Part of Mozilla Labs, this is a Firefox add-on to expand the power of your browser. It acts much like Gnome Do or Launchy, but inside the browser.

Say you are browsing a web page and want to send a piece of text you found to a friend, highlight the text part you want with a simple click-and-drag, call Ubiquity (normally by hitting Alt+Space) and then write the command “email”. Or, say you’ve found and address and you want to see it on a map, call Ubiquity to give you a nice Google Maps mashup view. It even translates a piece of text on the page you’re looking at!

Months ago I used Adobe Air based Twhirl to use Twitter on my Linux machine. However, as an open source enthusiast this application just didn’t fit well in the list of programs I used.

So, after searching around once more I found Gwibber, written in Python and GTK. With it you can attach your Twitter account, plus Digg, Identi.ca, Facebook, Jaiku, Pownce (erm… this last one not for long), and add some RSS feeds for your reading pleasure.

This post is a short note to express my appreciation to the entire community behind the Linux kernel (and Ubuntu).

I moved recently and have been working for 2 months on a laptop, waiting to get internet installed at home so I could turn on my desktop once again. Today I bought a Sitecom Wifi USB adapter, tried it on my desktop (still) running Ubuntu 8.04 and it didn’t work.

Today I had to add subtitles to a short movie. Problem is, I had never done that before, I’ve seen subtitle files but never actually done any changes to them. Let alone create subtitles!

So, I go to my Ubuntu’s Add/Remove Programs app to look for what is available for me. I found and installed Gnome Subtitles.

The program was pretty simple to use. I opened a video, started transcribing the audio myself into the subtitle lines at the bottom of the screen and pressed Ctrl+Enter when I wanted a separate subtitle line. Gnome Subtitle has a movie preview window so that I could see exact time (or frame) any dialogue was spoken for me to sync the subtitles to.

Fedora 10 has just been released! Open source fans can now enjoy the most updated Fedora release with lots of improvements.

What is new? The release notes state a lot of good improvements such as:

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  Any reader already tried it? I&#8217;d love to read your opinion about it.
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While trying to make my productivity life easier on my machine, I started searching for a program that would allow me to have a 2-way sync between my desktop and RememberTheMilk. As I’ve mentioned before, Evolution does only 1-way sync to my favorite task management web application.

So, searching away in the vast world of the internet I found Tasque. Built for Novell’s Hackweek v2, Tasque plays nicely with Gnome and RememberTheMilk to display tasks.