The GNOME and LiMo Foundations have today announced their intention to collaborate closely with a key partnership. With immediate effect the LiMO Foundation will become a member of the GNOME Foundation’s Advisory Board and the GNOME Foundation will become an Industry Liaison Partner for the LiMo Foundation. According to the pair, this development represents a natural formalization founded upon the significant use of GNOME Mobile software components within Release 2 and Release 3 of the LiMo Platform.

“This close alignment between LiMo and GNOME provides important support for this commitment and will take in an expanding ecosystem of products and services developed by GNOME developers in conjunction with the members of LiMo Foundation,” says Morgan Gillis, Executive Director of LiMo Foundation.

“LiMo has a proud heritage of well established open source technology and is committed to bringing open source innovation to a broad range of commercial products. This close alignment between LiMo and GNOME provides important support for this commitment and will take in an expanding ecosystem of products and services developed by GNOME developers in conjunction with the members of LiMo Foundation.”

“The objective of GNOME Mobile is to provide a platform for the next stage of client computing. We are committed to bringing the quality and freedom of GNOME to users on mobile platforms,” said Stormy Peters, Executive Director of GNOME Foundation. “We are excited to work with commercial partners like the LiMo Foundation to ensure that GNOME Mobile technologies are available on mobile and connected devices incorporating the LiMo platform.”

More information on LiMo’s work with open source communities can be found here.

Are you interested in mobile operating systems? You can find our review of Android 2.2 here…

The sales of Android phones in the UK have jumped up a staggering 350% during 2010 according to GfK Retail and Technology. The contract market as a whole only grew by 1 percent in the same period.

“The figures suggest an increasing number of consumers are now asking for Android handsets by name,” commented GfK analyst Megan Baldock. “Operating Systems are no longer simply a by-product but a key selling point in their own right.”

Android’s share of the UK mobile phone contract market has grown to 13.2% in Q2 2010, say GfK, despite the release of Apple’s iPhone 4 and the impending arrival of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.

Are you interested in developing for Android? Check out our Android Development Masterclass…

Last month’s Hadoop Summit in Santa Clara, California, saw a number of interesting developments around this increasingly hot open source project. Hadoop is a top-level Apache project that provides a Java software framework for storing, managing, processing and analysing the massive datasets produced by enterprise web and cloud computing applications. Inspired by Google’s internal software framework and file system, Hadoop includes the HBase distributed database, HDFS distributed file system, MapReduce application framework, Hive data warehousing application and a number of other open source tools, languages and common utilities.

Hadoop’s list of users increasingly reads like a who’s who of the web. And, as revealed at the summit, many are now contributing significant, enterprise-tested technologies back into the project.

Yahoo announced it was handing over ‘Hadoop with Security’ and its in-house Oozie workflow engine to the open source community. Hadoop with Security is a custom integration of the open source Kerberos authentication standard to enable secure collaboration and sharing of datasets, as well as hardware sharing between different instances. Oozie, meanwhile, is a workflow and job management tool for complex work processes and global scale ETL (extract, transform, load). Oozie works with most of Hadoop’s core components and, coming straight from Yahoo’s operational systems, has been pretty thoroughly tested.

Twitter also announced that it was open sourcing Crane, a tool for moving data from MySQL into a Hadoop infrastructure. Crane has, again, been pretty thoroughly tested, with Twitter using the tool as part of its arsenal to lift 7TB of data into Hadoop every day. While all of this may seem like immense corporate benevolence, Hadoop is a prime example of free software working as it should.

Hadoop’s large corporate users are effectively forced to contribute their most critical tools and tweaks back into the community. The alternative is to risk the project’s community developing alternative tools or taking the core components off in directions that leave them constantly refactoring their proprietary tools and developments.

Somewhat at odds with this then, Cloudera – the company that now employs some of the creators, committers and key contributors to the projects that make up Hadoop – used the summit to announce a risky new proprietary business model with a set of closed ‘enterprise’ tools for Hadoop.

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Committing these sins will cause you burn in Android hell and you will have no place in the Android Market.

1 Poor Performance
If your application is not responsive enough, your users will receive an ugly ANR (Application Not Responding) message. An ANR is thrown when your application is not able to respond to user input within five seconds, or the Broadcast Receiver does not complete in ten seconds.
An ANR message allows the user to either close the application or wait for it to respond. You know what most users will do, so optimise your application for performance. Or else.

2 Using Excessive System Resources
Always keep in mind that you are programming for low-powered handhelds and not desktop-class systems. There are far more important applications running on the device and you need to play fair. If you are not using system resources responsibly, you will slow down the whole system and the user will banish your application from their device. And so they should.

3 creating a Weird User Interface
People use applications on their smartphones because they are easy to use. Do not try to hijack their user experience. Always provide a consistent user interface.  For example, the Back button should always cause the application to show the previous screen or you should go back to the drawing board. Simple.

4 Using undocumented APIs
Never use an undocumented API, no matter how interesting it looks. Undocumented APIs tend to break applications between OS releases. They are also not tested for third-party usage. Using undocumented APIs can cause all sort of problems including performance issues and compatibility.

5 Designing for One Device (or only a small sub-set)
Android is not just about one smartphone, but a whole range of devices. If you design for all of them, you will have a larger marketplace. The Android SDK provides many APIs to support writing device-neutral applications. Use them.

Makes sure you check out our advanced Android development guide. Better yet, follow us on Twitter and get updates the minute they hit the net…

Robotics and artificial intelligence enthusiast Francisco Paz has launched a new open source robot called Qbo. Paz’s five-year-long personal project is an attempt to realise the recently stated goal of Tomomasa Sato, director of the Japanese Robotics Association, to develop “an open source Model-T robot in which all global standards may be applied to achieve a result as revolutionary as Ford’s Model-T was for the car industry.”

As with other projects in the growing open source hardware space, Qbo will be made, as far as possible, from off-the-shelf components, and all design plans, firmware and control software will be distributed under an open source licence.

The design, which Paz admits was originally inspired by a vacuum cleaner, is more R2-D2 than C-3PO. “I did not want to develop a biped robot or a robot with arms because I knew I would fail due to the lack of resources,” explained Paz on his blog.

Paz cites Marvin Minsky, co-founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, as further inspiration for the project, echoing his critique that “current developers and researchers are making more mechatronic machines instead of creating ‘intelligent’ machines able to carry out autonomous tasks.”

As such, the idea of Qbo is to provide an affordable platform for enthusiasts to implement and develop the latest robotics and artificial intelligence software. Paz has also set up a new company, Thecorpora, to manufacture a production version of Qbo, though no release date has yet been mooted.

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The market for open source hardware is hotting up, with the top 13 companies in the space turning over nearly $50million last year – according to Phil Torrone, designer at Adafruit industries. Speaking with Adafruit’s founder Limor Fried at the O’Reilly Foo Camp East in the beginning of May, Torrone also claimed that there are now nearly 300 significant open source hardware projects in development and predicted that the market will grow to over $1billion by 2015.

The presentation, given at Microsoft’s North East Research and Development (NERD) Centre, began with Limor giving an introduction to open source hardware. She briefly outlined how designers share the ‘source code’ in the form of CAD and other design files, electronic circuit layouts and firmware/software essential to the functioning of any device.

With the explanations out of the way, Limor and Torrone ran through what they believed were the top 13 commercial companies in the space, all with revenues of approaching or
over $1million: Adafruit, Arduino, Bug Labs, Chumby, Dangerous Prototypes, DIY Drones, Evil Mad Scientist Labs, Liquidware, Makerbot, Maker Shed, Parallex, Solarbotics and
Sparkfun Electronics.

Like several of the other companies, Adafruit itself produces and sells a variety of component kits for both its own and other, third-party open source hardware projects. Sparkfun, the apparent market leader in this space, is reportedly hitting annual revenues of over $10million.
Many of the open source devices on offer are extremely basic and clearly aimed at the educational market and teaching new enthusiasts. However, companies like Makerbot and Evil Mad Scientist Labs both go as far as offering open source 3D printers. Meanwhile DIY Drones, a company co-founded by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, does exactly what you might expect.

The current industry darling appears to be Arduino, which describes itself as a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. Based on a simple microcontroller board, Arduino is being used as the basis for an increasing number of more specialised open source hardware projects. The result is that the company behind the project has now shipped over 150, 000 units.

Further proof that it is no longer just amateur fun and games: BugLabs, whose Lego-style, open hardware platform previously featured as our gadget of the month, has recently raised $16million in venture capital. According to reports in Business Week, the company is now doing business with Pitney Bowes, Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), Orange, Antenna Software and Human Rights Watch. In addition, the ‘Bug’ is also being used as a device prototyping platform by management consultants Accenture.

Interesting Links:
Limor & Torrone’s Foo Camp (video)
Top 40 Arduino-based projects
Source Force for hardware
Buglabs in Business Week

The competition, designed to highlight the new Linux User & Developer community forum has been a great success. Thanks to all those that have taken part and thanks to to GreenReader.co.uk for offering such a  fantastic prize.

The PocketBook 360 is unlike other readers in that it’s been designed to be as compact and portable as possible. It comes with a hard-cover to protect its 5″ 800×600 resolution screen and boasts a battery capable of lasting for three weeks when used for three hours per day.

See you on the forum!

Linux User & Developer, one of the nation’s favourite Linux and Open Source publications, is now part of the award winning Imagine Publishing family. Readers can subscribe and save more than 30% and receive our exclusive money back guarantee – click here to find out more.

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“Our commitment to ship SUSE MeeGo further extends our position as the leading OS vendor in the desktop Linux market,” said Guy Lunardi, director of Client Preloads at Novell.  “Novell is passionate about providing users with a better computing experience and MeeGo will deliver on that promise.  Our experience as the leading commercial provider of desktop Linux* environments — from thin clients, to workstations, through netbooks, notebooks and desktop devices — puts us in a great position to deliver SUSE MeeGo to a broad base of original equipment and device manufacturers.”

As you may be aware, SUSE MeeGo actually builds on an already longstanding relationship between Novell and Intel, which initially encouraged OEMs and ODMs to adopt Moblin. That initial effort was met with reasonable success with partners including Samsung and MSI having already shipped netbooks and other mobile devices with Moblin on board. Here’s hoping they can go even further with MeeGo, a project we at Linux User & Developer have high hopes for during the next round of technology and design refreshes.

“Novell’s support of MeeGo only further establishes their commitment to enhancing the mobile Linux experience,” said Doug Fisher, vice president of the Software and Services Group and general manager of the Systems Software Division at Intel Corporation. “SUSE MeeGo together with Intel(R) Atom(TM) processor-based platforms will provide consumers choice for Linux operating systems on netbooks and emerging mobile devices.”

Those of you keen to get your first taste of SUSE MeeGO 1.0, will need get on the next plane to Taipei since Novell are showcasing the OS at COMPUTEX as we speak…

Do you share our enthusiasm for MeeGo, or do more netbook and mobile OSs only risk fragmenting the embedded Linux ecosystem? Let us know your thoughts below or discuss it further in the Linux User forum…

Linux User & Developer, one of the nation’s favourite Linux and Open Source publications, is now part of the award winning Imagine Publishing family. Readers can subscribe and save more than 30% and receive our exclusive money back guarantee – click here to find out more.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter or get your first digital copy of the magazine for iPhone and iPad free – just search for ‘Linux User’ on the app store now!

If you didn’t pre-order an iPad and are planning to get one from an Apple Store in the UK this weekend, you’ll have to be quick. iCreate has heard on the grapevine that each store will only be holding 70 iPads, and that not all resellers will stock them. So, be quick or be sorry. The first tutorial will be out shortly on iCreateMagazine.com…

It’s the most recent in a long line of accolades for the new science and technology magazine including record sales and another short list nomination for the PPA awards in June. The Maggies is a national poll voted on by the general public to celebrate and award the best magazine covers of the past year.

The issue three cover has seen off stiff competition and made it to a shortlist of five due to the visually striking x-ray image that backs up the main message of the magazine “The magazine that feeds minds”.

If you are one of the ever-growing readership of How It Works or if you just like this cover, please show your support by voting now at http://www.themaggies.co.uk .

To find out more about How It Works or to subscribe, visit www.howitworksdaily.com

Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry blog (via Gamesindustry.biz) considers this move to be a “pre-emptive strike” by Sony protecting themselves from possible cracked games being created and distributed in the future. It’s likely Sony consider George Hotz’s exploit which allowed read/write access to the console via a Linux install as proof of concept.
“In taking such a measure to counter the hack, the logical conclusion is that Sony wants to the limit overall number of PS3s out there potentially capable of running copied games – an extraordinary pre-emptive strike against the possibility of piracy,” wrote Digital Foundry Director, Richard Leadbetter.

Firmware 3.21 will be released this coming Thursday and though it wont be mandatory, a failure to update will inhibit certain popular features including playing games and movies that take advantage of the new firmware.

What do you think of Sony’s planned update? Are they wise to crack down in this way? Is it right to deny end users of functionality that drove their original purchasing decision? Let us know your view in the comments thread below…

I was minding my own business enjoying the excellent new iPod ‘drag on and drag off’ functionality of Rhythmbox (though I’m wondering quite how long Apple’s going to let that one play out) and I accidentally clicked the Ubuntu One Music Store button…

It’s up and running! Well, in beta form at least for the time being. I had a quick look through the store and picked out an album I’ve been meaning to buy for some time…

I immediately went to purchase it, by clicking the checkout and signed in to my Ubuntu One account. Although it threw a wobbly when I refused to add my Lucid beta 1 desktop to my One account, I re-ran the purchasing process and it took me straight to billing. Thanks to Rhythmbox and Ubuntu, iTunes – and very probably my Windows dual boot – won’t be darkening my desktop again.

You’ll have to excuse me while download it and put it on my iPod ready for the ride home tonight…