PreCentral: Zhephree's Wooden Rows goes open source, invites new data sources to cataloging party

[News Reporter]

A few months back, webOS developer extraordinaire

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(Zhephree, as he calls himself in the mirror) released his newest app, a media-cataloger for the TouchPad titled . Shortly after release Wooden Rows saw a back-end overhaul, thanks to its reliance on Amazon's database causing some terms and conditions issues (Amazon's totally cool with you querying their database for info, so long as you're not doing it from a 'mobile' device, such as a tablet - presumably they don't want to enable comparison shopping that might undercut their own prices, however unlikely that might be). Things have moved forward from there, but with other projects taking up the front burners on his development stove, Gauchet decided to take a radical step with Wooden Rows: open source.

The app is still , but the entire source code is now hosted on GitHub for anybody to tinker with and see if they can improve. Specifically, the hope is that others with a data source of their own they love that they want to see in Wooden Rows can code it in themselves and Gauchet will take their pull requests, merge them into the official client, and release it to the public with all of the newness included. Kind of like .

Additionally, as part of the open source drive, Gauchet hopes to get some assistance porting Wooden Rows to other platforms, including Android and iOS. While he'll still be handling the server-side coding, the app itself is available under the Apache2 license. So, technically if you felt up to it, you could download the code and compile it yourself - that that's not the point of this project.

So here's the question you have to ask yourself: Are you a Wooden Rows fan, or would you be if it cataloged your antique fire extinguisher collection in addition to your Blu-rays? Then head on over to GitHub, take a look at the code, and see if you can help improve Wooden Rows.