Tangara, a new portable music player that sports serious iPod Classic vibes, totally eclipsed its initial crowd-funding goal as of Monday. So the open-source iPod alternative could become a reality.
Complete with a touchwheel, the nostalgia-provoking player from startup Cool Tech Zone differs from Apple’s famous iPods in major ways. Mainly, its open hardware and open-source software make it easy to access, customize, repair and upgrade.
Maccy is a fantastic macOS copy-paste manager that supercharges your clipboard history. It allows you to copy … and copy … and copy again, and still paste the first thing you copied. Of course, it works with cut-and-paste too. It’s super well-designed and very easy to use. With a simple keyboard shortcut, you can bring up a small menu to instantly paste something you cut or copied hours ago.
It’s a fantastic utility that will quickly become a must-have on every Mac you use. You can buy Maccy for just $9.99 on the Mac App Store, or build it from its open-source code yourself.
The Linux 5.13 Kernel Linus Torvalds released in final form on Sunday adds support for M1-powered Macs in the open-source operating system for the first time.
The update followed a public testing phase in May. It adds support for the M1 chip as well as a handful of others based on the ARM architecture. As a result, people can now run Linux natively on Apple Silicon hardware. That includes the new M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini and 24-inch iMac.
Apple on Friday unveiled an open-source project to help third-party developers of password managers work together to create strong passwords that are compatible with popular websites.
The job is clearly more complex than many might suspect.
Nitro is a very promising new todo list app for the Mac (plus a bunch of hippie platforms). It keeps your notes in a plain text file on Dropbox, and is available free from the Mac App Store.
VLC, the popular open-source media player, has made its comeback on iOS and is available to download now from the App Store. The release comes more than two years after VLC was pulled from iOS due to licensing issues, but this time it’s back for good — with lots of improvements.
Although Mozilla has stated that it won’t produce hardware for its upcoming Firefox OS, the company has teamed up with Spanish startup Geeksphone to offer a pair of developer devices. Called Keon and Peak, the devices are designed to provide developers with the opportunity to “tap the future of mobile” and get to grips with the platform that will soon be trying to steal marketshare from Android and iOS.
Allan Odgaard’s TextMate has been a beloved text editor since 2004 and one of Cult of Mac’s favorite apps for about just as long, but since 2009, development on the app has slowed to a crawl: three years ago, Odgaard said TextMate 2 was about 90% complete, but a public alpha didn’t hit the web until December 2011, and as of writing, a final version still hasn’t been released.
However, in a surprise (and very awesome move), its source code has: TextMate 2 is going open source.
One of the consumerization of IT trends is the use of cloud storage. Most of us already have experience with iCloud and other personal cloud services like Dropbox, Google Docs, and SugarSync. The big advantage to all these solutions is their ubiquity – you can access documents and files in the office, at home, on the road using your iPhone or iPad, and pretty much anyplace else. Though they may raise data security and privacy concerns, personal or public clouds are extremely easy to use and always available.
The popularity of major cloud providers is causing a number of companies to offer easy to configure private cloud options that businesses can physically deploy on their own network or that can be hosted by the developer or a cloud service provider.
This week, ownCloud, which already offers an open source cloud storage and sync, announced new business and enterprise options that offer a great deal of flexibility.
Here’s Tomahawk, a music player with a difference: it plays music from anywhere and almost everywhere. Not necessarily music from your collection, either.
The range of devices running Linux grows every day. Now you can add one more to the list: Electrolux (Frigidaire) in Brazil has just announced the Infinity i-kitchen, a smart appliance running Linux on an embedded 400MHz Freescale i.MX25 processor. With 128MB RAM and a 480×800 touch panel, the i-kitchen provides the user with unparalleled control over his refrigerator operations.
Open source devotees, iPhone users and hedonists unite! News today that low cost, OpenBTS GSM cell phone service is being tested at Burning Man in a true trial-by-fire fashion:
Today I bring you a story that has it all: a solar-powered, low-cost, open source cellular network that’s revolutionizing coverage in underprivileged and off-grid spots. It uses VoIP yet works with existing cell phones. It has pedigreed founders. Best of all, it is part of the sex, drugs and art collectively known as Burning Man. Where do you want me to begin?
“We make GSM look like a wireless access point. We make it that simple,” describes one of the project’s three founders, Glenn Edens. [Network World]
The economic and environmental potential of the system is promising, particularly for remote and under-developed areas.
