One of my sesions at BlackBerry DevCon Europe was with Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart who is a Senior Technical Director, Open Software at Research In Motion. In his session, Eduardo gave us an overview of Open Source activities at Research In Motion. Eduardo is certainly a man of great experience in the Open Source copmmunity having worked at Oracle where he was Architect for Open Source and Community in the Application Platform Group for Oracle. Before Oracle Eduardo was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems where he participated and led projects in multiple areas including IDEs, OS, Java, many JSRs and in Open Source. Hiring him shows you that RIM is quite serious about developer relations in the Open Source Space.

After almost five years in existence, Microsoft has decided to shut down Windows Live Gallery website which proved to a popular destination for Windows users to download a wide variety of software gadgets, plug-ins and other applications. The following notice appears on Microsoft the website:

In order to focus support on the much richer set of opportunities available for the newest version of Windows, Microsoft is no longer supporting development or uploading of new Gadgets.

One of the reason’s for the website’s departure is the upcoming Windows 8 for which a developer preview has already been released. Again, quoting Microsoft:

With Windows Developer Preview, developers can create rich app experiences where customers focus on their important tasks. Apps are at the center of the Windows Developer Preview experience and are alive with activity and vibrant content. Users immerse themselves in your full-screen app while Windows gracefully gets out of the way.

Windows Developer Preview allows you to leverage your existing skills and code assets so you can create great experiences for your customers. Gadget and web developers can now use their HTML5 and CSS3 skills to build native Windows apps. .NET Developers can use XAML, C#, and Visual Basic to build beautiful Metro-style apps. Game developers can use the power of DirectX 11.1 to build amazing, immersive gaming experiences. Driver developers benefit from increased productivity with the new, integrated Visual Studio development environment.

With Windows Developer Preview, you’re ready to imagine, build, and sell the next great app.

“If this then that” is a fabulous web automation service where you create simple “recipes” of what triggers any following action automatically. There are lot of services available that you can link together using the service. e.g. you can create a trigger that whenever u create bookmark on delicious, then it gets tweeted; or if you favorite a video on youtube it gets posted on facebook; or when you post a picture on flickr it gets saved in your dropbox etc.

There are loads of services compatible with it from flickr, instagram, gmail, google calendar, evernote, readitlater, last.fm, youtube, facebook, twitter, gtalk, craigslist, linked.in, stocks, weather, tumblr, foursquare and many many more. You can quickly sign up and start creating your own recipes or formulas, as well as recipes created by others. You can start browsing them and find huge library of interesting automations that you can configure for yourself, creating the perfect synergy of services you always wanted.

Try it out @ ifttt.com

GMail had implemented “offline” mode for their popular email service around 2 years back, but this latest extension for Google Chrome browser takes it a step ahead by offering a proper email client working within Chrome for your Gmail account.

The extension keeps a look out for active net connection and whenever possible will sync your mails. But in the offline time you can still read all the cached emails, write new emails and keep them in outbox. As soon as internet is available again it will re-sync your inbox, outbox and other pending actions.

You will get all the features in offline mode like searching / filtering messages as you would expect them to work in online mode. But with additional streamlined, focused, clean and responsive  interface.

Get the extension @ Chrome web store

Google has launched an official HTML5 Google Music web app. Since its a HTML5 page which mimics the looks of an Android app, so expect this to work on any handset with HTML5 capabilities let it be iPhone/iPad, modern Symbian phone or Windows Mobile 7 devices.

It has everything you would expect from a proper music player like sorting by artist or album. It has a rich, responsive UI that allows users to access their Google Music accounts. The web app will use around 25MB of your device’s storage for caching the music files and with a decent 3G connection the audio and performance is butter smooth.

Try it out by pointing your browser to music.google.com

Lazy Meter is web based app that is basically a to-do list, but presents the concept as a productivity enhancement app. It only shows tasks that you have planned for today. You can then focus on completing those tasks. You can drag drop tasks to set them in priority. You can “pause” any task to postpone them for tomorrow or click the tick check-mark to hide the completed tasks from list. This simple approach forces you to get things done without any time wasting on detailed scheduling of time slots for each task.

There are overall three category of tasks: Play (todays tasks), Pause (postponed tasks from today), Stop (long term tasks not planned yet). You can click any of these buttons to look at list of those tasks; attach some notes or reminder dates with them to re-schedule them. The meter on top indicates your total tasks and how many tasks you have completed and how many you have postponed. It overall increases productivity when you know how much you have planned to accomplish each day and then you pursue to meet that target.

One thing that is important to bring an overall improvement in yourself are the charts indicating very important data of how much productive you were on each day. You can also check your overall accuracy of planning by checking how many tasks you plan and later postpone each day. You can then evaluate yourself using this data, that maybe you are planning too much to accomplish, or maybe just getting lazy to accomplish all that should have been accomplished each day.

Overall if you are thinking you are slacking too much each day or forgetting to do important tasks on time, you probably need LazyMeter to help you focus on achieving required productivity each day.

Try it out @ LazyMeter.com

iPhone community religiously use Instagram app for photo sharing and but only problem with that is that not all their non-iPhone friends are on Instagram. So, the best way to share your photos with them is still the good old facebook. InstaFB is a web service for all those who feel this way. It connects to both your Instagram and facebook account and transfers your photos from Instagram to facebook albums.

Once activated, the service continues to sync all new photos that you upload to Instagram to your Facebook profile and also generate a wall post to inform your facebook friends. There is a limitation of facebook API to allow only 50 photo uploads at a time, so do keep that in mind that your one sync should not be greater than that.

Use the service @ InstaFB.com

SyncDocs brings lots of desktop implementations for Google Docs to make it behave like Drop Box as well as act as a locally installed software and much more. It allows you to sync any folder with google docs, so if you have a folder full of excel files or word documents etc, then you can sync whole folder and all those files will be made available on Google Docs. Whenever you update those files locally it will update them online too. It also adds a Google Docs drive and folder shortcut. If you just need to transfer a single file you can just copy paste them to this drive too. The ease doesn’t stop there, the same abilities are added to windows context menu too. Right clicking on a file will give you option to open the file directly in Google Docs web-app. Moreover you can create new google docs from your desktop too. So, if you are like me who doesn’t own a heavy cost desktop office suite then these options make it a a big time saver when people send some MS Office documents in email or when you have to prepare some new document by yourself to send to someone.

You can share your documents with even other people over internet by just right clicking any doc and selecting share option from context menu. This bridges the gap in making Google Apps as easily accessible desktop app all the while keeping its net based footprint to share your documents.

Download SyncDocs @ Official site

Cammster is a simple web service with which you can setup a security system for your home using just a webcam. This website allows you to your connected webcam to take periodic pictures and sends you email alerts if it detects unusual levels of activity thus turning in to an effective low cost motion detection system for your home.

There is also option to send you SMS whenever motion is detected for immediate notice, but that service is payment based, email alerts on other hand are free. There is no additional software to be installed. Just register a free account using your email and you can start using this service. There is a sensitivity setup, which is good for setting up too many unwanted alerts. e.g. If you have fans running, then motion of paper or tissue fluttering will be alerted as well. So, using the sensitivity setup you can configure that how much motion must be registered to generate an alert event and it will take a snap to show you what motion was detected.

You can even configure multiple webcams by just opening as many windows / tabs of website as you want on configure different webcam in each window for complete security solution.

Use the service @ Cammster.com

Attachments.me is a one of a kind service that grabs your attachments from email accounts as well as social accounts to consolidate them in one location and then allow you to download or share them with ease. You can configure your yahoo mail, gmail, facebook and twitter accounts in this service. It will monitor both the social network streams as well as emails in your inbox to check for images, audio, document links. And then show them to you for further action.

Once you connect your accounts, it will crawl through the streams of data in your accounts to show thumbnail preview of attachments available in them. You can filter the attachments by format type like: music files, images, documents, movies, archives etc. From there you can download quickly as well as directly transfer important attachments to your dropbox account.

Use the service @ Attachments.me