I'm extremely pleased to announce the release of version 0.3 of Woodchuck. Binary packages for the N900 are also available.

Woodchuck is a framework for scheduling the transfer of delay tolerant content on mobile devices, such as blogs, podcasts, email, social network updates, weather reports, and calendaring data. Woodchuck aims to save battery power, manage data caps and hide poor network coverage. It does this by monitoring network conditions and user behavior and, when conditions are good, tells applications (starting them if necessary) to perform an update or a transfer. The challenge is to figure out to manage these resources efficiently and to predict what the user likely needs.

By itself, Woodchuck just quietly runs in the background. To exploit Woodchuck, applications need to be modified to register streams (e.g., podcast channels) and objects (e.g., podcast episodes) with it. As such, I've been porting applications to Woodchuck. I've recently completed an initial port of FeedingIt, an RSS reader for the N900, and I hope that the gPodder port, a podcast manager, will also soon be finished. A few other ports are planned. Then, it is back to improving the Woodchuck scheduler.