Only last week Samsung pushed out a press release announcing its new mobile operating system, named Bada. Little is known about this new operating system beyond the name of the project, but thanks to Phoronix, we know a little detail that might indicate what, exactly, Bada will be like. As it turns out, Samsung is sponsoring the Enlightenment project.
Enlightenment project lead Carsten “Rasterman” Haitzler announced on the project’s website this morning that they were working with a top-5 electronics producer – in fact, not just working, but that that company also sponsored development on Enlightenment and the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL). What does this mean for users and developers?
“It means that you are likely to see top-quality electronic devices running the same things you use on your desktop,” Rasterman writes, “This means as a developer the same libraries and API’s will be there, ready to use, out of the box. You can even start your development now in anticipation. Use Elementary, Evas, Edje, Ecore, Eet, Eina, and so on and design for a small screen with a ‘finger’ and minimal keyboard.”
There was no mention of the name of the company, but Phoronix has uncovered that this company is in fact Samsung Electronics. First public confirmation can be found in the commit log, where a edje file editor popped up, authored by Samsung, released under the GPLv3. Phoronix also received confirmation from Samsung itself.
It is very difficult to tell just how far along Samsung’s involvement with Enlightenment is, and as such, if we will really see Enlightenment and EFL on Bada. Still, does it make sense to make lots of noise with a new mobile operating system, and then use the EFL for something else entirely?
Rasterman has put out three videos showing off some of the fruits of the collaboration, and it’s clear the work is geared towards the mobile touch side of thing (notice the sliders).
There’s some pretty fancy stuff in there, and the EFL should certainly be a good fit for mobile devices with relatively limited performance capabilities. Even though I, as a non-programmer, can’t tell for sure, I have always had this idea that the EFL are very well-coded and efficient – maybe someone with experience can confirm (or deny) that?
This is fantastic news for Enlightenment! I have been very impressed with E17 every time I used it, but it was always hard to build and sometimes very buggy. Hopefully this Sponsorship make it possible for raster to fully flex his genius programming abilities and push E17 into the mainstream.
Yes, its great news for them, and its also, lets give credit, a brave and enterprising move by Samsung. One wonders who approached who. If it was Samsung, really, good for them.
Time to fire it up again and try using it full time for a couple of weeks and see how it goes. At the moment I am on fluxbox, which is very nice, it stays out of the way, and its fast. But E, its a real jewel in the crown, and fluxbox by comparison is a bit dull.
Calling it an OS is just speculation. I think it is more like an application layer. Maybe it is just Enlightenment + proprietary kernel.
(This link http://www.appscout.com/2009/11/samsung_bada_opens_up_feature.php seems to confirm that.)
I dunno, so far its all been marketing speak, so its hard to tell what it is exactly. While the overwhelming vagueness even for a press releases means we should assume as little as possible and thats leaves bada with not much, it doesn’t change the fact that if Samsung wants in on the smartphone game, they need an os. Snapping up existing technologies is the fastest and cheapest way of getting a competitive os (and at this point I don’t think anyone but Mircosoft could put together a new proprietary os to compete with the existing crop), so if Bada won’t be their os, what will?
I’m glad enlightenment found some backing, they have always been able to produce a very attractive environment that could run on lower end hardware, but their pace of development has been glacial. Hopefully this will help things a bit and the mobile sector is a good fit for their technologies.
Edited 2009-11-18 20:11 UTC
I seem to recall Terrasoft/YDL also sponsoring E17 development for the PS3 not so long ago.
Anyone know what came of it?
This is good news. I find E17’s “perpetual beta” quite annoying. With hope, something will shake loose soon with a “final release” version. Then perhaps more distros will pick it up as a default environment.
I read a while ago that a v1.0 release was planned for the end of this year.
Enlightenment is one of the best window managers, efficient and beautiful, though I remember seeing a video of it ported to the open moko and other devices using arm based processors, really a smart move since its been under heavy development and at the brink of stability, cant wait to see it happen
It is a pretty obvious move if it ever goes beyond experimental support.
If Samsung will really commit to EFL, the obvious idea is to make a framework based on EFL, basically competition for Qt. Nokia and Samsung are not that different, if you think about it
Where’s a wireframe window move/resize?
Amazing they still haven’t added in this capability yet.