Mosembro, short for “mobile semantic browser”, is a proof-of-concept web browser for the Android mobile platform, which has integrated support for microformats. It was my entry for the Android developer challenge (but was called SmartBrowser back then), and while it wasn’t one of the 50 finalists who made it to the second round, it did finish in the top 25% of all entries, which is pretty good, I suppose.

The goal of this project is very simple: to make a better mobile browser with the help of embedded semantic metadata.

What does it do? It scans any loaded web page for microformats and inserts special links into it, based on any microformats it may have found. These links then enable the user to quickly perform tasks like looking up an address on a map or adding an event to his calendar. While manually performing these tasks is very simple on a computer, it can be pretty tedious on a mobile device without a proper keyboard, mouse, or even without the ability to copy and paste text.

Full feature list, demo videos, downloads and source code are available at the Mosembro project page.

But despite all the difficulties, I managed to finish it. And only 4 short years later it’s finally available to anyone desperate enough to be actually willing to use it, for free.

It’s called yaRuler (yet another ruler – yes, very original, I know) and it looks like this:

What a ruler might look like

Full feature list, screen shots, downloads and source code are available at the yaRuler project page.