First, the MeeGo. I always second all open source projects. It was my path for independant consultant and developer. The excellent idea of killing or borders and constraint, opening your inventions to the world and grabbing others' ideas to adapt and adopt is unbelievable. More... open source projects are by the definition open, so everyone can join at any moment and everyone IS invited. The more hand, the better evolution on the way.
What about MeeGo? It's brand new effort initiated by Intel & Nokia towards building a decent, powerful yet lightweight, universal operating system for mobile devices like netbook or phones. Why so excited? Because it's open. So don't wait for anything proprietary that your phone manufacturers would (or not) provide to you in your black speaking box. Stand up, join the community and make your phone/netbook/GPS device or whatever you want work your way.
Having that, I already made my first step and got involved into MeeGo L10N area. Since I am more like PHP and web-oriented guy I can't so far find a place among all those geek programmers and I decided to apply Force to localization subproject. I've seen many badly translated UI's they were introducing more confussion than help and I don't mean to allow my new phone talk to me 'po polskiemu' because nobody took care of checking if translated string are suitable, or make any sense either way.
The other thing that woke me up this spring was and article that came to me thru Google Buzz. OMG! They are running Midgard for ten years already. See? Good stuff :)
This also remided me about my first commercial Midgard implementation. Back in 2000 when MS NT server made me cry and tear my hair off, I accidentally stepped into Midgard website. Those days it was kind of version 1.2, without any knee bending features but had something... user-friendly URL handling. No more index.php?id=123&style=456!
The bad news was that the only admin UI available was old Asgard and was not a tool for real rich content editing. Anyway, it took several months to put things together and Midgard combined with my home-brewer Nadmin Studio clone started to work for Poznan International Fair website including some 50 microsites - one per each exhibiting event. Whatever.
Today, reading the article, I just quicly pointed my browser to www.mtp.pl and, hey!, they are still runing some kind of Midgard. No idea what version, or if they use MidCOM or own solution but look at it. Another ten years old, pure and special Midgard website :)
Those days Midgard evolved a lot. Version 2 has been released, the design has changed a lot by moving towards independent content management solution that can be a web site or a desktop application, but one thing remains - Midgard is still a hell good and powerfull stuff.
