Wow, it's been since June 10th, almost 4 months since my last entry. Time flies...especially when you are busy. In the interest of keeping people informed, here are some of the new things I've been working on with regards to The Horde Project,  with an indication as to what version of Horde the work applies to:

Horde_Service_Twitter (H4 Only)

Since stating to use twitter, I figured it would be helpful to have my Twitter timeline appear in Horde, since that's what is usually loaded in my browser. Following my typical NIH rule when it comes to Horde, the result is the new Horde_Service_Twitter library and the twitter_timeline block for Horde's portal.  Horde_Service_Twitter supports authentication to Twitter via both the standard http authentication method as well as via OAuth. The latter making use of the Horde_Oauth library. The portal block allows you to publish a new tweet,  shows the most recent tweets by the people you are following and allows you to reply to a displayed tweet.

The addition of Horde_Service_Twitter, along with Horde_Service_Facebook, adds some exciting possibilities for integration points with other Horde applications. Horde already has some address book and calendar integration with Facebook, but other possibilities include things like automatically posting a notification to Twitter or Facebook when a set of new images are uploaded to Ansel, or maybe when a new blog post is published with Jonah.

Ansel (H3 and H4)

Ansel has gotten a fair amount of work recently and is ready for a 1.1 release. The most obvious change is full support of geo-tagging features.  Ansel has always been able to read,and display an image's meta data...but up until now you couldn't do much with any of the location data. Now, Ansel will recognize GPS coordinates in the meta data and display small thumbnails of those images in an embedded Google Map. There are various locations throughout Ansel where you can view these maps. You can also add location data to images that do not contain it as well as edit any existing location data. Full support for reverse geocoding means that you can (re)tag an image by either typing a textual name for the location (such as Philadelphia, PA) or by typing in actual GPS lat/lng coordinates. Of course, you can also (re)tag an image simply by browsing the Google Map and clicking where you want the image to be located.

Ansel's bleeding edge code has officially moved out of Horde's CVS repository and into the git repository, horde-hatchery. A fair amount of refactoring and internal improvements have already been done in getting Ansel and Horde_Image ready for Horde 4. Among these changes is better support for image meta data, with a new driver based on exif tool. This allows recognition of not only EXIF tags, but also IPTC and XMP data as well.

iPhoto/Aperture Export Plug-Ins (H3 and H4)

Related to the Ansel application, are new export plug-ins for both of Apple's image management applications, iPhoto and Aperture.  Currently available via Horde's horde-hatchery git repository, these plug-ins allow you to upload your images directly to an Ansel server from within iPhoto or Aperture. All meta data is retained when uploaded, including keywords that added using Aperture or iPhoto. You are able to create new galleries from the plug-in's interface, browse thumbnails of existing Ansel galleries (to see what images you have previously uploaded), and choose if the images should be resized (and to what size) before uploading.  Both plug-ins support configuring multiple Ansel servers if you happen to have access to different installations.

Even though these live in horde-hatchery, they will work with both Ansel 1.x as well as the bleeding edge Ansel code that lives in  the hatchery. The iPhoto exporter supports iPhoto '08 and later, and the Aperture exporter is written for Aperture 2.1 or later.  Both require OS X 10.5 or later. They should run on either PPC or Intel hardware, but have only been tested on Intel. Currently they are available only as source (which can easily be compiled using XCode) but a development build should be available shortly.

Kronolith (H4 only)

I've been tasked with adding support for resource scheduling to Kronolith, and the work is mostly complete. Resources may be invited to events by the event organizer using the existing attendees interface. Resources can be set up to automatically determine if they are available, and respond to the request automatically. There is also support for resource groups. Resource Groups are just a grouping of resources that are similar. When a group is invited to a meeting, the first available resource from that group will accept the invitation. For example, you have 10 projectors available and it doesn't really matter which projector is used for a meeting. Instead of going through all the projectors to see which one is available, you can just invite the projector group to the event. The first projector that is available during the meeting time will accept the invitation.

During some recent quality-time I spent with my schedule (read: "trying to figure out how to add more time to a day"), I had an a-ha moment. Why am I switching back and forth between weather data and my calendar to see the weather for a day of interest in my calendar? Why can't it just display in the calendar?  We already have some code in Horde that interfaces with the weather.com API (thanks to PEAR's Services_Weather package), so why not provide the weather data via the listTimeObjects API so Kronolith can pick it up?

The first step along this path was to create a new "mini" application - or an application that does nothing other than expose data via the listTimeObjects API. This resulted in the lightweight TimeObjects application that now lives in the horde-hatchery git repository.  This does put another level of abstraction between the weather data and Kronolith, but what I didn't want to do was start a trend of having to write a new Kronolith Event driver for any new type of time data that might be desired.  With TimeObjects, now all that is needed is to drop a new driver into TimeObjects' lib/Driver/ directory and it will be picked up and exposed via the API.

With the addition of the new TimeObjects application, Kronolith can now display the forecast data for up to the next 5 days directly in the calendar view. The high/low temperature along with the general conditions for that day are displayed, with a tooltip popup showing more detail. Currently, for this to work, you will need a contact in Turba that is marked as your own and containing enough of your location information to satisfy weather.com's service. Horde will also need to be configured with the weather.com api keys...just like the weather.com block requires. A future addition will be to allow choosing (multiple?) locations via a Google map in Horde's preferences.

Since the listTimeObjects API really isn't documented anywhere other than our source code, a little introduction may be in order.  If you are not interested in Horde internals, you can skip to the end.

The API allows any Horde application to expose it's data as events to be displayed in Kronolith.  For example, via this API, Turba can provide the data needed to display contact birthdays and anniversaries in Kronolith.  Nag can display task due dates etc... For this to work,  an application needs to expose two methods via it's own API: listTimeObjectCategories(), which returns the categories of time objects available (birthday, anniversary etc..) and listTimeObjects() which returns the actual data.  The data returned includes information such as the start and end times, a title, a description, icon, and link.  For more information I will direct you to the phpdoc at http://dev.horde.org.

As always, a warning that the TimeObjects code is Horde 4 only, and as such is not considered stable.

There are now two new Horde merchandise shops open. These Spreadshirt shops are in addition to the existing CafePress shop we have.

The shop at horde.spreadshirt.net is for our European customers - as there will be no additional taxes or custom charges. The other shop is at horde.spreadshirt.com and is for our USA customers. Both shops offer flock printed polo shirts and T-shirts as well as some other cool stuff!

Keeping up with Facebook's Open Stream API, Horde just got a new Horde Block, the Facebook Stream Block. With this block you can view your stream feed (filtered by any of the same filters available on your Facebook Home page),  add a "like" directly from the block,  update your Facebook status, and see how many new notifications you have. This block will replace the previous Facebook Summary block that I wrote about previously.

Like most of the stuff I work on, this one started out as a personal "wouldn't it be cool". I wanted to add a block on my portal that would allow me to quickly update my Facebook status, while seeing the most recent status updates of my friends without having to actually login to Facebook. I started by looking at the official Facebook PHP Client library, but wasn't happy with it's code structure, and the quality of the code wasn't really up to my standards, so I decided to completely rewrite it. The result is Horde_Service_Facebook and is available only on the Horde 4 development line, from the horde-hatchery git repository.

In addition to the new library, I've also started to add some integration points in Horde for users to interact with Facebook. The first such integration point is the Facebook block - which allows the user set their status, and see the most recent status updates.

Next up was an attempt to scratch an itch that another Horde developer had. He wanted to fill in missing email addresses in his Turba address book from his friends in Facebook. Unfortunately, I quickly found out that Facebook does not allow applications to obtain a user's email address. Well, actually, it will give you a proxied email address, but only if the user whose email you want has added your application and given it permission to get the proxied address. Not helpful at all for our purposes. I continued on with the Turba integration anyway, and the result is a Facebook driver for Turba that does provide at least some useful information, such as the friend's birthday - which can then be displayed in the user's Kronolith calendar.

The most recent integration point was made easier to implement thanks to the just released Open Streams API. Ansel now has initial support for automatically posting to the user's Facebook stream after images are uploaded to any of the user's public galleries. A small thumbnail of up to 5 images (linked to the Ansel view for that image) will be shown on the stream, along with the name of the gallery. The new Streams.publish method removes the requirement to create templates (and thus have to manage them) like we would have to do with the older PublishUserAction method.  Eventually, there will probably be user prefs in Ansel to allow/disallow such automatic posting either per gallery or per upload.

Setting up the integration is not too difficult, and involves creating a new Web Application on Facebook.  You will need to provide Facebook with what they call the Canvas Callback URL. This should be set to the URL of the horde/services/facebook.php page on your Horde server. This is the page that Facebook will redirect and post values back to during each user's initial application authentication.  Next, you will need to set the API Key and Application Secret in Horde's configuration. This is done on Horde's API Keys configuration tab.

That's it. Now each user can visit his or her Facebook Integration Options section of their user preferences and authorize the application as well as some of the permissions it will require.

 Keep in mind that this is still very much bleeding edge development code, and as such may still contain bugs and/or missing features. Comments and feedback are always welcome...