Posting to Locomotion has slowed down over the past week as my team has focused exclusively on the release of our first big Open Source web application codenamed “MediaCore.”

MediaCore is a free open source video, audio, and podcast publishing platform. It is built for organizations who wish to distribute media in a variety of formats on their website while maintaining the ability to control the user experience.

• Check out the project, features and docs at http://getmediacore.com
• View the demo at: http://getmediacore.com/demo
• Watch the screencast on how the product works
• Give us feedback over at Concept Feedback

Over the past year we have built the entire platform from the ground-up to create one of the most cutting-edge podcasting and media platforms available anywhere on the net. In coming months we will be documenting the process of how we created MediaCore, the stumbling blocks we hit along the way, and the lessons we have learned in designing and marketing an Open Source project. It has been an exciting road and we are looking forward to the next few months as the project unfolds.

A huge round of applause should go to Nathan Wright, Anthony Theocharis, and Melanie Wright for all their hard work in making this dream a reality for Simple Station. I couldn’t have done it without them! I would also like to thank the TurboGears development community for the valuable feedback they have provided us with throughout the development process.

We have already enjoyed some early success including a glowing email from Leo Laporte of TWIT.TV, and a whole slew of feedback from various web design agencies. As the project continues to evolve we will be leaning heavily on the community for guidance on design feedback and feature requests.

If you are a fan of MediaCore you might want to consider following us on Twitter or becoming a fan of MediaCore on Facebook

It has now been almost exactly a full month since my last blog post and the truth of the matter is simply that the gears have been majorly turning at Simple Station. We have been preparing a new open source product that is now nearing the final stages of completion and we have been buried in preparing the marketing, documentation, legalese, and branding for the product. The good news is that the project is scheduled (finally) for completion around the middle of November, but has experience delays because… well… we have never launched an open source project this big and we want to make sure we’ve crossed all our T’s and dotter our I’s.

The process of getting a project ready for prime time and an open-source launch has been an interesting one as there are so many factors involved in an initial release I just had not considered. Take for example the question of licensing. When you are considering to launch an open source product you have to choose a license, but the question is which one to choose. Do you choose the GPL, the LGPL, MIT, or BSD license? Or perhaps do you try to do something where you might retain a little more control? Reading through everything and getting a thorough grasp of what the terms of each license would mean for a project is a fairly major task as it has long reaching implications. Outside of licensing there is of course developer documentation (which is HUGE), installation instructions, screencasts, marketing copy, branding & design, public promotion, search engine optimization, creating community support forums, setting up public GIT repositories, and project hosting to name but a few. Through this process I have gained so much respect and admiration for open-source projects like Wordpress or Drupal as it certainly takes a huge amount of dedicated effort on behalf of the maintainers to even get to lift-off… let alone maintain and guide a community.

19 or so more days till launch…

The latest version of Firefox (version 3.5) has been released this week and features a few substantial new features. Head on over to Mozilla and download the latest and greatest version of my favorite browser. Among other important things such as support for HTML 5 there are new tools for protecting your private data and also several improvements to the underlying engine that increase the performance of web based applications such as Gmail and Google Docs. A worthy update to be sure.

Seth Godin recently crafted a long list of phrases surrounding the word “open.” I’ve often heard these words mentioned by either clients or colleagues with little understanding as to what “open” actually means. If you are considering marketing something as “open source” it might be worth while checking his list to make sure you are on the right track. What kind of open are you looking for?

We have also just finished our first ever open-source application called Simple G. Simple G is a ready to roll-out PHP calendar application that reads information from public or private Google Calendars and displays it by day, month, or event.

See it in action, here: http://simplestation.com/calendar
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Today I installed the free Firefox plugin Ubiquity and was amazed by the new concept and the possibilities it unfolds for both users and web developers alike.

Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

While you certainly can read more about Ubiquity yourself… I was very impressed by a variety of functions that have already come in handy for me.

Contemplating a trip to Central America I have had to look at many pages which are often in spanish. It’s annoying to have to refer to babelfish or google translate constantly and I’ve often wished a translation could be done on the fly by selecting text and letting Firefox handle the rest. Enter Ubiquity.

First I go to a spanish speaking website…

I highlight the text and then type “translate” into Ubiquity. I hit enter and it translates the entire text in the page itself.

Then lastly I select the newly translated text and pull up the screen for Ubiquity and type “email” which then automatically opens up Gmail and composes an email with the text that I have selected.

All I can say is that’s just plain brilliant. You can do all kinds of things with ubiquity. You can select a phrase or word and then:

• translate the text to english
• google map it
• email it
• get a definition
• look it up in wikipedia
• search Google for it
• and a whole lot more!

I can see increasingly that as web services and open API’s get more prevalent that tools like Ubiquity will become an everyday part of our browsing experience. Huge kudos to the team behind the concept!

Also here’s a good video on the concept:

Well it’s officially September and our big summer code push is almost over. We’ve just finished off a handful of new websites which we will be showcasing in our design portfolio this month – but the bigger news is that we’re preparing to launch our first 2 big open source products. We will also be relaunching our own website with a fresh design to accommodate our new products.

There are no official timelines yet for when we will launch them, but it likely will happen close towards the end of September / beginning of October. Both open source products will be based off of the Zend Framework and will most likely be released under either the MIT license or the BSD license. The products are also uniquely positioned, meaning that both don’t have direct competitors in the open-source market as there isn’t anything else out there that provides the functionality that they do. We are still working on naming both products so instead of giving everything away now we’ve decided to wait until the end of the month.

As mentioned in our reasons why to choose us we touched briefly on web-standards. This is something I’ve felt needs a little more explaining, and it’s worthwhile taking a read through this article if you are unsure what web standards are, or how they might apply to the design and development of your website.

Check out the full article on our website.