Monthly Archive:: November 2006

In a posting to the Hula mailing list, Novell has stated that it is no longer providing full-time developers to work on Hula. Hula was unleashed in February 2005 to much fanfare. Things seem to have been quite recently, despite the news that iFolder and Hula would be combined into something called Maui.

Motorola is shipping the first model in its Scpl ("scalpel") line of Linux-based phones set to replace the ubiquitous Razr. The Motofone F3, available today in India, is an extremely low-end phone featuring an "electronic paper" display, breakthrough battery life, and usability features for the illiterate. Additionally, Linux may have taken another step toward mobile ubiquity with a new initiative from Trolltech called Greensuite.

Opera Mini 3.0 was released today (get it here). Major new features include camera support, RSS feed reader, SSL and https support, content folding, and speed improvements. Screenshot here. Today we also celebrate here at OSNews the first hits of the Opera-based Wii browser (via a proxy hack to allow generic web browsing) and the Sony PS3 browser. We would be grateful if you could snap a picture of your TV with your gaming console rendering OSNews and send us an email with it or post a link below.

The OLPC's interface is simply way too complicated. I just read through the human interface guidelines for the project; and by god, I got lost after only a few paragraphs. How are kids supposed to learn all this? Read on for my thoughts.

Gnash (open source implementation of Flash) is now working on Haiku. "I've been busy porting the latest Gnash 0.7.2 release to BeOS this weekend. I did start this port as the other version that was apparently ported earlier this year never had a public release. I've achieved a full port that is using the AGG rendering backend and a native BeOS GUI. I also wrote a Firefox plugin based on my SVG plugin. The native BeOS audio handler is yet incomplete, which is the reason why I didn't release anything yet."

"I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006.The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week."

Add some sparkle to your Java applications with Quartz, an open source project that offers an extensive set of job scheduling features. This article introduces the Quartz API, starting with a general overview of the framework and concluding with a series of code examples.

Six months of design, engineering, integration, and testing has culminated in the finest release from Terra Soft to date. Designed, not just assembled, Yellow Dog Linux v5.0 featuring E17 is immediately available for your Sony PlayStation 3.

"Leather, a material that calls to mind, at one extreme, Diana Rigg, tight thigh-length boots, the crack of the whip and, at the other, well-worn sofas, ancient libraries and the air of long-faded wealth. Somewhere in between sits Asus' latest leather-covered laptop, the W6Fp."

"For a computer that's been around for over a year now (to beta testers), the A9 has had relatively little detailed coverage in the RISC OS world. This makes it hard to judge whether or not to spend hard-earned cash on the little blighter. Having owned one for a few months, I've recorded my impressions of the A9home. It's not complete by any means (I've not got round to hooking it up to a printer, for example), but I hope it's helpful for anyone thinking of taking the plunge."

"While still far from perfect, Ubuntu 6.10 'Edgy Eft' is both an improvement over the so-called 'long-term support' release and a decent operating system in its own right. It's in a much better place than any other free-of-charge operating system has been before now, but I don't think it'll give any commercial operating systems a run for their money."

"Haskell is a valuable language for a lot of different reasons, but the most important one is that it changes the way that you think about programming. Haskell does things in a very different way from the imperative languages that most of us are familiar with. And it's an extremely well-designed language, so there isn't a ton of crap standing between you and the concepts that you can learn from it."

"If like me, you do most of your work from the command-line, using vim to edit files, mutt for e-mails, cd/ls/mv/find/etc instead of a file manager, then you may get annoyed by having to fire up a GUI calculator to make (what may sometimes be) a single calculation. This article shows how to quickly perform standard calculations on the command line."

"Apple researchers have built a full working prototype of a Mac tablet PC and three Companies in Taiwan are now costing a product for a potential launch in mid 2007. Sources in Taiwan have said that the focus has been more on the home and the education environment than the enterprise marketplace. Several months ago I was told that Apple was exploring a neat new device that is basically a touch screen that links to various source devices including a brand new media centre that Apple is planning to launch next year. The Mac tablet has been designed to handle third party applications such as home automation software that will allow users to control lighting, audio, entertainment devices and security feeds. It also acts as a full blown PC has wireless linking for a new generation of Wireless Hi Fi speakers that are currently being tested by Apple."