tola

I'm very sad to hear that Novell will be dropping Hula and withdrawing the lead developers. They claim there is no market for the product, but I know that a lot of people (including me) have been looking forward to a first official release for a long time. Perhaps this is just a result of their recent cosy relationship with Microsoft.

The Hula Project is (was) an email and calendaring server with Googlesque web interfaces which was set to rival Microsoft Exchange. I was particularly interested in the CalDAV support for calendaring and LDAP address books. The problem was that it has been in development for so long and other projects have sort of filled the void.

I'm sad that the Hula Project has lost it's commercial sponsor and I now can't help but feel that it was given away in the first place because it was considered to be of no commercial value. But I hope that this is only the beginning. I hope that the open source community can now adopt this project and it will live again, perhaps under a different name.

Synopsis

Software for a home central computer which features a media centre, social software and home automation with a minimalistic and multimodal web interface.

Codename

Moya

Rationale

Anything from an email to a song to an electrical appliance in the home can be modelled as a resource and identified by a Universal Resource Identifier (URI) in an information system.

On the world wide web, a web page is just one representation of an abstract resource. That resource can have other representations which can be interacted with by the user in different ways, depending on ability; preference or environment.

Moya will attempt to model these resources and allow users to interact with them in many different ways, resulting in a flexible smart home.

Features

Social Software

• Synchronous and Asynchronous telecommunication with text, audio and video
• Calendar
• Contacts
• Mediablogging

Media Centre

Syndicated, live and archived media in text, images, sound and video.

Home Automation

• Lighting
• Climate
• Multimedia Distribution
• Security
• Energy Efficiency

Misc

• Single sign-on
• Natural language command

Use Cases

Moya is a central computer for the home, an appliance for information. It is a computer but it doesn't live on a desk, it sits in a corner somewhere out of the way. Its function is to connect everything digital in your home together and to act as the digital hub for your life. The kind of things Moya looks after are your email, calendar and address book; your phone, instant messenger and answering machine; your TV, films, music, pictures and news; your heating, lighting and security.

You can interact with Moya using audio, visual and tactile input and output. Interaction is via a whole range of devices including touch screens around the house, an adapted TV, an ordinary PC, a mobile device or even a light switch. The best part is that you will be able to access the system from anywhere you can find an Internet connection and almost all functionality is usable remotely.

Implementation

See Moya