Still don’t have a Chumby here, but Dave has one, which is seriously cool, because fun hacking is bound to happen on it. (As some has already.)
I covered the Chumby before it came out, here in the September Linux Journal. Now that I know it’s out in the world, I’ve invited LJ readers to jump in and have fun too. Dave says, It’s easily as innovative as the iPhone, but it isn’t getting as much attention. Take a look you won’t be disappointed.
I’m sure we won’t be.
I’ve seen one of these – figure that maybe this takes off in spaces where Chumby licenses their technology to say, a Kitchen Appliance maker.
An embedded Flash-player-on-Linux environment seems novel. What would be nice is if Adobe open-sourced a base-line Flash player runtime so that desktop Linux users (on PPC and AMD64) and embedded developers had more ability to use and create technology like this. Free projects to create SWF players are nice, but nicer still would be Adobe following Sun’s lead, taking the leap to make their runtime free.
Doesn’t so much matter to me. But some folks might like a Chumby that was “leather free.” I applaud all the open sourceness of it all, but a vegan Chumby should be available on the menu.
Clearly the computer overdelivers for the average consumer. We can assume that Chumby is the first in a long line of limited network attached devices.
Sean, check out gnash — Flash player clone.
Cliff, I don’t plan to eat my Chumby, so I don’t care what it’s made of.
I bought a Chumby as soon as I received my invitation about a month ago. It is definitely the coolest gadget I’ve laid my hands on in a long time. My frustration is that I’m not a developer, so I can’t make things for it. I am, however, a user and I have lots of ideas for neat gadgets that would make it so much more useful to me.
I’ve blogged some of those ideas, and am hoping for some way to communicate them more effectively to those who have the ability to implement them.
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