Andrej Koelewijn

Google used to be a search company making profit on adds. Today’s release of the Nexus One ’superphone’ illustrates that Google is turning into the next Microsoft: a supplier of software platforms and applications. The Nexus One isn’t a phone, it’s a device to access the web. It’s just another Operating System to use [...]

Recently David Pogue suggested smartphones like the iPhone should be called app-phone instead. I think focussing on the apps is wrong. For me, the thing that the iPhone does better than most other phones is internet access. The iphone is a net-phone. It is your mobile internet terminal. But it’s more than that, it’s also [...]

Here’s a simple file monitoring tool which uses cometd to push file changes to a webpage.
The server part consists of a groovy script which uses Apache Camel to monitor some files. It then uses Apache Camel to push the lines added to the files to the browser with Cometd. In the webpage a bit [...]

I’m convinced that open webtechnologies are suited for more than just web page development. I don’t see why you can’t write desktop applications using open webtechnologies. So, I’m also pretty optimistic about what Google is trying to do with Chrome OS.
Many of the problems people currently see with Chrome OS are in my opinion [...]

Firefox 3.5 has been released. Not everybody is excited about this release, but most reviews are quite positive. In my opinion, the enhanced javascript performance is the most important improvement, but features like the html 5 video and audio tags, offline support, @font-face, geolocation support and cross site XHR are not to be underestimated.
As far [...]

Here’s a quick example how you can build a RESTfull Grails application and deploy it to Google App Engine. For this example you need Grails 1.1.1 and GAE SDK for Java version 1.2.1.
I’m going to create a small service which will return a wind forecast. The forecast data is hardcoded as this is just some [...]

Must read follow-up on Web 2.0: Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On.
One aspect stressed in this article is the importance of mobile phones. Not just as a means to use the internet while on the move, but more importantly, as a way to collect data.

I’ve just been watching the google wave presentation. Pretty amazing application, it’ll probably scare the hell out of a number of communication software providers. But what’s even more amazing is that it’s almost entirely build using HTML 5. Just one feature needs the Google Gears plugin: drag and drop of desktop resources to the web-page. [...]

Some good info on Wolfram Alpha: Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine” and See Wolfram Alpha in Action: Our Screenshots. The screenshots suggest that Wolfram Alpha has more in common with Business Intelligence tooling than with search engines. And the database they’re building to support this is a big datawarehouse containing data from selected [...]

Yesterday i went shopping for two child car seats. The store i went to first didn’t have the brand i was looking for. So i entered childrenstore into google search on my mobile phone. To my surprise it showed me the results sorted by distance. First time i used google’s location aware search. Very [...]