Monthly Archive:: August 2009

Rumors had been circulating for months about the mysterious Dell smartphone, and it seems that they've finally been realized-- at least for China. Little details about the smartphone have been released, but we do know that it'll be a 2G smartphone running Android, it's called the "Mini3i," and it "will offer a full complement of music, games and other downloadable content." The release date is still in the dark as is whether or not Dell will eventually spread its smartphone market outside of China. About Dell's Mini3i, an analyst said, "It makes sense for a company like Dell to enter the smartphone market, but what they need to do is find something that sets themselves apart." This is all too true as too many smartphones (and many other devices, for that matter) have the "Me Too" syndrome.

A fellow at CNET did a review of a beta version of another Linux distribution built specifically for netbooks. "One of those , called Jolicloud, is launching in beta in the next few months. Created by Tariq Krim, who founded and later left widget-based start page Netvibes, the alternate OS has been designed for Web workers, or people who do most of their work (or play) on Web applications and services. I've been giving it a thorough run-though over the past few days and have come away impressed at what it's trying to do. Some bits and pieces are definitely still beta, but the underlying approach of making Web sites and software applications feel the same, as well as introducing users to new ones to use is really innovative."

I had been following the mailing list for the Haiku project the past week with growing interest. The topic of discussion? Why, the alpha release, of course! What needs to be done, who needs to prepare what, and most importantly, what schedule are they going to settle on? Well, after numerous insightful back-and-forths, the community has settled on a schedule.

Finally, a week with a bit more news going on. We've talked about a lot of things this week, but there really weren't any overarching themes or whatever dominating the front page. This is the first Week in Review in a simpler format: a listing of the teasers of the more interesting stories (as opposed to a forced-colloquial recollection). They're in chronological order for your convenience.

"Opera 10 beta 3 was released Wednesday for Windows, Mac, and Linux users. With a strong European following, the preview version has been able to keep this popular alternative browser competitive by offering page rendering quality comparable to Google Chrome, while offering a robust list of features."

"As it invites the world to play in a mysterious sandbox it likes to call 'Caffeine', Google is testing more than just a 'next-generation' search infrastructure. It's testing at least a portion of a revamped software architecture that will likely underpin all of its online applications for years to come. Speaking with The Reg, ueber-Googler Matt Cutts confirms that the company's new Caffeine search infrastructure is built atop a complete overhaul of the company's custom-built Google File System, a project two years in the making. At least informally, Google refers to this file system redux as GFS2."

The browser wars have really been heating up again lately. Thanks to Mozila's Firefox, Internet Explorer is no longer the undisputed king, and browsers are popping up all over the place trying grab a piece of the pie. A new browser project called RockMelt is in development - and it's backed by Mosaic developer and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen.

It's the end of the world. Again. According to some Linux developers and security researchers, a bug in the Linux kernel has just been uncovered that makes just about every distribution utilizing kernel 2.4 and 2.6 on just about all architectures since May of 2001 vulnerable to a certain kind of attack.

Let's continue the browser talk for a while. Let's move from the pinnacle of browsing, all the way down to the very drainage pit: Internet Explorer 6. To me, Internet Explorer 6 is that annoying zombie that just won't die that chops off 80 of your health in a grueling midnight Left 4 Dead expert session. Microsoft may not say so outright, but they seem to be implying they agree with me.

"Microsoft announced Thursday that the next edition of Microsoft Office for Mac will be released in late 2010. The new edition of the venerable office suite will include Outlook for Mac, a new application that will replace Entourage." Whilst the new Outlook:Mac will not offer feature parity with the Window version, it will be written in Cocoa and feature tighter integration with OS X including Spotlight. My Take: So it only took Apple integrating Exchange support into OS X for Microsoft to finally 'fix' the abomination that is Entourage.

Australian research organisation NICTA claims to be the world's first to develop a formal machine-checked proof of a general-purpose operating system kernel, the Secure Embedded L4 (seL4). The organisation "beat" several other larger and better funded organisations to claim this achievement, according to a spokesperson.

Adobe has announced it is dropping PowerPC support from its next version of the Creative Suite for the Mac. "By the time the next version of the Suite ships, the very youngest PPC-based Macs will be roughly four years old. They're still great systems, but if you haven't upgraded your workstation in four years, you're probably not in a rush to upgrade your software, either. Bottom line: Time & resources are finite, and with big transitions underway (going 64-bit-native, switching from Carbon to Cocoa), you want Adobe building for the future, not for the past."

Two of the losers in the smartphone wars are cuddling up. Historic enemies Microsoft and Nokia today announced a wide ranging partnership covering mobile software, services, and eventually GUIs. Or as the execs put it today, as they exchanged dopey-eyed looks, the pair will "jointly design a range of new user experiences".

Peter Wayner of InfoWorld has put Palm's still brand new webOS Mojo SDK through its paces, and came away impressed. Still, there are a number of issues that need to be addressed, but all in all the big advantage he sees is that over the course of the past few weeks, a very active and fertile community of developers has organically created its own development community, creating open source applications everybody is free to install - contrary to the iPhone.