Last 5 Posts from 2007/February

SDK will be powered by great speakers, like Chris Lattner from LLVM fame, Koen Kooi from OpenEmbedded, Mika Leppinen from Maemo, John (J5) Palmieri from RedHat/D-Bus/OLPC, Mika Rytkonen from Open-C, Leonardo Santagada from PyPy, Johan Dahlin from PyGTK... Ok, enough names! What's interesting? Chris works for Apple, he is the core developer of LLVM, which includes ARM backend, being helped by Lauro from INdT. It can be integrated into GCC as backend or "middle-end" and was even considered as a replacement for its current implementation, GIMPLE. Many things makes LLVM interesting, like SSA internal representation (also done in GCC4), vectorization (MMX, SSE), Link Time Optimizations (LTO)... It's also being considered as backend for PyPy, enabling Python to run faster... you know, develop fast and run fast :-) Koen will cover OpenEmbedded, an effort to make cross-compiling, packaging and assembling common infrastructure easy. It's already being used by some projects and is considered for Maemo. John will give hints on when and how to use D-Bus to help processes to interoperate. D-Bus is advocated by freedesktop and is being used by KDE and Gnome. It's a key component of Maemo, which uses it from Address Book to Browser to Chat. Nokia guys will present Open-C, the POSIX API for Symbian, enabling us to port some of our applications to it and also enabling Symbian developers to get used to our dear POSIX. God knows if they'll have to move to Linux in future... it's better to be ready when (if) that time come! ;-)

Bossa Conference is almost there and we have great speakers for many areas. In this post I want to bring UI guys to your eyes. INdT has managed to get many well-known names together. While Rasterman will talk about Evas, a technology Canola will use in future versions, we'll also bring Zack Rusin, the guy behind Qt4 graphics system, including Qt/Embedded, Qt/OpenGL-ES and Qt/OpenVG, and you all should know that N800 has unused OpenGL-ES hardware acceleration... don't you? ;-) Together with the dear Canola team (like myself, mind you...) we should have a great deal of in-depth developer information. On the UI concept side, we'll have Juho Paasonen and Kalle Vahlman, both from Movial, and Marcelo Oliveira, from INdT and Canola fame, that will have a chance to discuss new ideas and talk to tech guys mentioned above. So, regarding UI matters, Bossa Conference should rock!

INdT released a new product for Maemo: Carman. It's an application focused on car-lovers, in their own words "For the hobbist and the tuning addicted".

Open Source matters: Carman is LGPL! Download, Hack and Distribute it!

The second beta of Canola is to be released tomorrow! Many great improvements, bug fixes and N800 support!

Stay tuned!

Now back to test... ;-)