At Mozilla.org the brand new betaversion of the open source browser Firefox is ready for download and test. The new Proto-theme of the Mac OS X version is one of the palpable changes: The theme is quite stable now and it’s a visually step to a Mac OS X 10.5 user interface. In bright contrast to the bad habit of web 2.0 applications which encourage users to use the all-time-beta apps in productive purpose, Firefox should be explicitly not used in productive environments. It’s also not suited for that because many of the plugins are not ported to Firefox 3, yet.
So, it’s really all about testing … and everybody is invited and encouraged to join the Firefox beta 3 bug hunt … and report them at Bugzilla.

The people at Skyhook Wireless really did a smart job with their Wi-Fi Positioning System: They just use the highly distributed public and private Wi-Fi infrastructure of everyone as reference points for their location tracking. So basically every WiFi-enabled device can use their technology if Skyhook Wireless scanned and located the hotspots that specific area.
I did not find any competitors, yet. Sure, there are companies like innerwireless with their PanGo location management software, or Cisco with their Wireless Location Appliance, or the Finnish ekahau working in the field of Wi-Fi locating technology. But they all focus on closed business solutions where a dedicated infrastructure is used for tracking.
So the Skyhook Wireless WPS solution looks like an innovative and unique way – and an interesting way to realize navigation and location based services in metropolitan areas. Opening up their API for web developers was a brilliant idea – so let’s use it.

No need for handheld GPS devices which do not function properly in metropolitan areas

The cooperation with Apple in terms of iPhone and iPod touch also effects the Mac now: Today, Skyhook Wireless released their Loki 2.0 Firefox toolbar for Mac OS X and Windows XP. Now it’s possible to check the own location with Loki – if there are enogh WiFi-hotspots in reach known by Skyhook Wireless.
Quite amazing technology with a JavaScript-SDK for Web developers, too.

Steve Jobs presented a new feature of the iPhone – and also the iPod touch. Especially the iPod touch transforms into a new category of devices by adding location based services: By cooperating with Skyhook Wireless it is possible to get the own location by triangulating the signals from different WiFi-hotspots. The iPhone uses also the well known method by using the cell-ids to find the current location. It’s quite interesting, that it seems that Apple is not cooperating with the mobile network operators to get the location by cell ids and triangulation: They realized this feature by cooperating with Google. When I think of the hurdles to realize mobile Location Based Services (LBS) with the different operators … this is not a bad idea.
We really can be curious, whether the iPhone SDK will be the kickoff of a new era in LBS. Maybe Apple will also provide the iPhone web developers with the LBS-SDK Loki SDK for their web applications – that would really roll up the LBS-scene

Great news for all web application developers: David Heinemeier Hansson, the rails-core-team and many others from the rails community put an early present under the xmas tree: Ruby on Rails 2.0.1. Thank you!