Created OxygenGuide, an open-source offline travel guide

A lot of people were asking for it, so this weekend I developed OxygenGuide and released it under an open-source license.

Imagine you are traveling around the world and suddenly find yourself in Riyadh looking for a restaurant or a place to sleep. Carrying travel books is a pain, and browsing the Internet on your mobile phone abroad will probably cost a lot.

That's where OxygenGuide comes in: It is a compact offline travel guide that takes only 150MB of your smartphone's storage space. The data is based on Wikitravel, but customized for small devices. With this world travel book on you mobile device, you will travel lighter and further. The current version works for notebooks such as the Eee PC. I will try my best to release an Android version during the next weekend.

Update: Now usable on Android too.

Google gave me an Android smartphone!

I just came back from Google Developer Day 2009, where I attended enlightening presentations about OpenSocial applications optimization, advanced Android programming, and how to push the limits of the Google Maps API, among others. I definitely recommend watching the videos when they come online. I ran into a lot of acquaintances and got introduced to very interesting people. As if it were not enough, Google offered me this shiny smartphone running Android!