We've just been to the CeBIT 2009, known as "the world's largest trade fair showcasing digital IT and telecommunications solutions" as Wikipedia states.
During our tour through the various exhibition halls, we primarily focussed on knowledge management and skill management
solutions since that is the area where we want to improve Mediabird. I can recommend you to go to the stands of the Fraunhofer Institut
and TU Berlin, stand B39, in hall 9 which both present their excellent approaches in the fields of Business Intelligence and Data Mining.
There was also quite a strong focus on semantic mapping and content analysis.
In particular, we enjoyed the get together organized by the Digital New Media Forum. They also have quite a nice after-fair party
in hall 6 in case you're interested.
I bet many of you programmers out there have heard about ORM, object-relational mapping. That is about converting object-oriented data structure into SQL-accessible relational database structures. For now there's been several approaches to do this, including Hibertnate, Doctrine, Propol and many others.
For Mediabird to be as compatible as possible, we have now evaluated Doctrine and other PHP ORM solutions.
Unfortunately, there is no cross-language toolset (where only the syntax would be different) and additionally, when integrating with third-party platforms such as CommSy or Moodle, we'll have to think twice about how to get through to the database (using ORM). We'll of course appreciate any support by experienced ORM developers.
For now, it seems to be the best option just to use Doctrine for the ordinary Mediabird widget version and develop a layer for the Moodle DB wrapper and CommSy. Well, thatis a wrapper for a wrapper, but anyway.
And for those of you interested in using Mediabird from any site, there's an easy-to-embed widget version in development. That will allow you just to insert a snippet of HTML on your website and to allow the users of your website to take notes using the Mediabird website. There will be back-linking from the notes to your site, such that your users will never loose the link to your pages... Stay tuned.
Picture by jsgraphicdesign.
There's been a lot of people coming to our site from this article here. The article deals with the question of how to join open source team and there is a remark that the Mediabird project is hiring. And yes, we are looking for PHP and Javascript developers. More here.
We are currently doing a video tutorial and step-by-step introduction for new users. We will refresh the software during the next days to integrate these features.
A few guys asked us why the Mediabird notepad is not full-screen but more memo-sized. The reason for that is that we want to enable the user to concentrate on the essential facts rather than having to study loads of text. In addition to that, Mediabird is easily integrated into other platforms and environments because it does not consume as much space as most of the available learning environments.
For all Moodle users: We've now finished the Mediabird Moodle plug-in for MySQL and PHP 5.2 setups and will now work on integration further DB providers.
As the LEARNTEC is almost over now, it is time to report about our exciting experience here in Karlsruhe.
During the last three days, we were given the opportunity to present Mediabird to the public. We have spoken with both educational as well as business customers and discussed interesting ideas in the fields of cooperation and further improvements.
You can now use the new software directly from your account. All previously created data has automatically been converted to the new 0.5 version.
To give all users and interested people a preview of the upcoming Mediabird release 0.5, I've quickly recorded a screencast which presents some of the nice functionality we've implemented so far:
The presented highlights include:
Being able to handle all operations from the notepad rather than separate views
Having a proper handling of sheet insertion
Being able to keep an overview by just hovering the navigation buttons
Accessing the different levels of content with three tabs on the left
The next step will now be to finish the implementation and make this release stable.
We will try to accomplish this during the next two or three weeks.
Picture by sterlingpr.
