fidzu : OpenMoko

I did a video of tichy, my python applets manager, running on openmoko :



Once again the code for tichy can be retrieved from the subversion repository with this command :
svn checkout svn://svn.projects.openmoko.org/svnroot/tichy

It works fine on a desktop computer too. Parts of the program are in C, but I always provide python versions as well, so you don't need to compile anything to test it.

It is also very easy to extend tichy by adding new plugins

[Edit]: I put a copy of the video on youtube.

22 Jul 2008 3:24am GMT

There is a lot of speculation about the April Software Update (ASU). Is it a single image you install, or is it a line of development? Is it a rebranded Qtopia or something new? How's the sounds quality? What Wifi management tools will there be? Is there a package installer? What does it look like?

I thought I'd take some time today to hopefully answer those questions, and more importantly, show lots and lots of screenshots, because everyone likes screenshots. :)

When you first boot the Freerunner, the screen backlight fades in gradually to reveal the familiar orange and black Openmoko start splash. After a few seconds, the screen turns to the black with white scrolling text that just about every Linux user in the world is familiar with.

Then come the boots. As a bit of geek humor, probably chosen by Raster, there is a pair of boots on the boot screen. A green bar slides in and begins loading. A great example of the early stages can be found on this flash demo.

By default, the ASU image is set to a grid system application launcher.

For those uninterested in this view, there is a bit more unique take on it using the slider mode.

Atop the action at all stages of using the ASU is Illume, which essentially functions as the system tray and task bar. Here, you can launch the keyboard, launch the settings panel, enter the Enlightenment settings (note, this is slated for removal and doesn't directly affect the use of ASU), switch to a running application or close an open application.

Let me visually cover those things, in order. First, the keyboard:

The keyboard is a QWERTY like keyboard that has a dictionary lookup built in. To bring the keyboard down you tap the "qwerty" area of the Illume bar. To begun typing, simply hit a letter. To see a more complete list of words meeting your typed characters, click the white triangle on the keyboard. There is a shift key which displays upper case numbers. If you look, you'll see that some keys are missing. If you make a line on the keyboard going up or down the keymap changes to special characters (!,@./) and numbers, making the keyboard usable on a terminal. Though, in fairness, I didn't check to see if there are CTRL or ALT keys which might affect that use.

The settings panel is opened by clicking the wrench icon on the Illume slider. In here there are settings for all kinds of things. I won't go in depth with them all, the most "visible" is probably the option to set the slider or icon grid launcher modes.

The Enlightenment settings, as an E17 user would recognize, are kind of a "left over" from the development. These settings are planned to be removed, since the functionality of them is either irrelevant for Openmoko or will be absorbed into other applications.

One of the best features of the Freerunner, in my personal opinion, is the ability to utilize GPS without a non-free driver. Because of this, a basic GPS application has been included with the ASU. It's really very much a placeholder or prototype now, as the only thing it seems to do is display a map that can be zoomed or moved around and prompts that it fails to get a GPS fix. I'm not exactly sure of the name of this application, in all honesty. I'm used to calling it "Diversity" thought I've also heard the name "Splinter" tossed around and I'm not sure of what the distinction, if any, is.

The second big hardware change for the Freerunner was the inclusion of wifi. In order to connect to wireless networks, there is a program called "Campwifi" that once launched, probes for networks. While not viable in this shot, I have managed to connect to an open wifi access point "in range" of my apartment and been assigned an IP address. I personally have no experience with wifi at ALL aside from what I've gleaned from reading tutorials over the last few years so I'm not sure if some of the encryption and authentication schemes are implemented - with only one unsecured wifi AP within range of my apartment, it's not been an issue for me yet. Hopefully I'll be able to check that out more as I'm able to shift away from the 1973 and towards the Freerunner as my day-to-day phone.

Another nifty feature of the ASU is the Assassin package manager, a GUI front end to opkg. Once you launch Assassin, you're presented with a list of categories to choose from, and some of those categories contain items that can be installed. So far, there aren't too many packages listed. Certainly far less than show with an opkg -list. It leaves my mind to speculate as to how this is important - perhaps Assassin will present users with action based installs (Install US Maps for GPS) or be used for more than just software applications for things like ebooks and ringtones. With an open platform, the mind runs amok.

Once an application is selected, there's one big "Touch here to install" button which is very simple to figure out what to do. Once pressed, you're prompted again to confirm at which case the install begins and completes.

From the screenshots you can see I installed "openmoko-messages2", an application from the 2007.02 line that was based on GTK. At one point, when the switch to Qtopia was announced, there were a lot of GTK fans upset. It seemed to die down a little bit when it became clear that GTK would still be usable on the phone so I wanted to be sure I got a shot running a GTK application. It looks hideous because the GTK theme wasn't installed, but any GTK theme could be applied and hopefully there will be a matching one in the future. If there was any remaining doubt, GTK is alive and well within the ASU framework.

Finally, I'll show a few "glitches". Firstly, the video processing on the Freerunner is slower than the 1973 thanks to the Glamo. I found that after a while of using the device (and with over 40 screenshots, it was "a while") the transitions (Illume slides down, launched applications slide down) began getting choppy. I found reducing my frame rate to 10 fps helped this quite a bit but was still noticeable. Additionally, NONE of the Qtopia apps would launch in slider or grid mode. Setting the display variable I was able to launch Qtopia Media Player which complained about lack of Qcop and then segfaulted as I closed it. But you'll see that there are no screenshots of the Qtopia apps since they wouldn't launch "normally" for me.

You'll see below that occasionally applications crash. I've been shown the "Enlightenment crashed" white box a few times, and recovery happened. Every now and then, a half rendered Enlightenment window would pop up but not show me anything good. I had to use my tiny screwdriver stylus to close that box, my fingers are too big for that. Lastly, while earlier versions of the ASU had scrollbars, this version does not. However, when scrolling in certain areas, a distortion appears in the area where a scrollbar would be. These, luckily, appeared in screenshots.

The ASU, while certainly not usable as a daily phone, is certainly full of promise! I'll be tracking this closely and writing reviews as applications become more complete and the images become more functional.

22 Jul 2008 2:13am GMT

Openmoko dropped Gtk+? I hear a lot of people saying Openmoko dropped Gtk+ or that ASU will forbid to run their favorite Gtk+ or other X11 apps. So let us take a look.

The facts are that the ASU image has gtk+ installed, we even have a GPE application (gpe-scap) in the image, we have the OM2007.2 theme installed, we start the matchbox settings daemon so that Gtk+ application pick up the theme, fonts and sizes as used to from OM2007.2, gconfd is running as well. With our SDK people can write Gtk+ application, we are happy to include them in the community repository. Personally I wouldn't say that we dropped Gtk+. I'm a huge fan of GMAE (eds and various other technologies) and I hope we increase the use in future versions of our software stack(s).


Is everything fine then? Probably not. We have no API for external applications (be it Qt, Gtk+, EFL, FLTK...) to access the GSM functionality. We have some basic ad-hoc dbus interfaces to export some information but no complete API. The good thing is we know and this is where the Platform Initiative jumps in. So the issue will be solved but not for ASU.


In contrast to previous incarnations. We have an installer application. It is called assassin and it is using packagekit (another component from the GNOME universe). We have a community repository and the installer will help you to get your favorite apps installed (whatever language, toolkit or scm they use...). Currently only tangogps is contained but I hope we will offer more community software in the future.


So I'm quite happy with ASU. It will allow you/us to use the Freerunner as primary phone. You will be able to install any 3rd party application, we provide a graphical installer. So even when a lot of things are still missing, we don't have the bling bling we would like to have, we don't have the speed we would like to have. It is an important step for Openmoko. We will work on every single issue that annoys us engineers (boot speed, X performance, device management, bling bling....) and turn it into something we are proud of. Time will tell if we manage to do so.

happy hacking

21 Jul 2008 12:46pm GMT

Poky Linux distribution provides SDK for quite long time. From time to time I hear persons which complain about lack of libX or libY in toolchain tarballs. But there is a solution for them - Poky SDK can be expanded with packages.

Installation

This is described in Poky Handbook already:

The meta-toolchain and meta-toolchain-sdk targets (see the images section) build tarballs which contain toolchains and libraries suitable for application development outside Poky. These unpack into the /usr/local/poky directory and contain a setup script, e.g. /usr/local/poky/eabi-glibc/arm/environment-setup which can be sourced to initialise a suitable environment. After sourcing this, the compiler, QEMU scripts, QEMU binary, a special version of pkgconfig and other useful utilities are added to the PATH. Variables to assist pkgconfig and autotools are also set so that, for example, configure can find pre-generated test results for tests which need target hardware to run.

Using the toolchain with autotool enabled packages is straightforward, just pass the appropriate host option to configure e.g. "./configure -host=arm-poky-linux-gnueabi". For other projects it is usually a case of ensuring the cross tools are used e.g. CC=arm-poky-linux-gnueabi-gcc and LD=arm-poky-linux-gnueabi-ld.

Extending SDK

So you want to build GTK+ based application but "configure" tells you that you miss GTK+ headers? In normal systems you would install development packages. Same is with Poky SDK, but due to fact that there are no repositories for Poky a bit more work is needed.

You will need contents of "tmp/deploy/ipk/" from other developer or from local Poky build. I have them from local build and they are stored in "/home/hrw/devel/OH/poky/trunk/build/tmp/deploy/ipk" directory.

Next step is editing opkg configuration file (stored in /usr/local/poky/eabi-glibc/arm/arm-poky-linux-gnueabi/etc/opkg.conf) to add feeds locations. With my packages it looks like this:

arch all 1
arch any 6
arch noarch 11
arch arm 16
arch armv4 21
arch armv4t 26
arch armv5te 31
arch qemuarm 36
src oe-all file:/home/hrw/devel/OH/poky/trunk/build/tmp/deploy/ipk/all
src oe-armv5te file:/home/hrw/devel/OH/poky/trunk/build/tmp/deploy/ipk/armv5te

Now it is time to install those missing headers: opkg-target update will update list of available packages and opkg-target install gtk+-dev install required headers.

Building software

Hello world

First something really simple: helloworld.c. Run arm-poky-linux-gnueabi-gcc hello.c -o hello. Result will be ARM binary:

14:14 hrw@home:$ file hello hello: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.14, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped 

Autoconf based application

I took Tasks 0.13 as an example as it use some libraries not present in standard toolchain. After unpacking and starting ./configure --host=arm-poky-linux-gnueabi I got message that GTK+ headers are missing so I installed them with opkg-target install gtk+-dev (like it is described).

After next "configure" call there was message about missing "libecal" which is part of "eds-dbus" so opkg-target install eds-dbus-dev solved problem.

Finally "configure" does not give any errors and make call built application:

14:19 hrw@home:tasks-0.13$ file src/gtk/tasks
src/gtk/tasks: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.14, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped

Summary

As you see Poky SDK is not limited to default set of packages but can be extended with additional ones. OK, someone needs to build them first but imagine situation when company has 10 developers - one has Poky build tree which he use to generate packages which can be used by rest of team without spending precious time on building.

BTW - It is not limited to Poky SDK. Other OpenEmbedded based systems should be more or less capable of doing such things.

---

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17 Jul 2008 2:17pm GMT

Loic Lemur came over to CC yesterday and we shot fun video about Seesmic adding CC licensing. Loic sat on Joi's fixie from Mission Bicycle and I sat on my wife's cruiser for this one:

The interface looks super-awesome. Great jobs guys and thanks for supporting the commons!

Loic and I at CC

From Joi's site…I need to get one of those Yukata's to wear around the house. I have some awesome shoes that Lu's mom got me from Beijing (they look like stereotypical kung-fu shoe no joke):

News of Seesmic + CC startles me at 5AM

16 Jul 2008 10:43pm GMT

This keyboard is great; it's a roll-up rubber affair that can be used underwater and was designed for hazardous environments. We had a batch specially made for us by Hela with a USB mini-b connector for use on the FreeRunner without any adapters. I've just updated the instructions on the wiki, it's all much simpler than we were previously led to believe. We shall be releasing a "push button" application that switches between modes from the application menu.

The keyboard works much better than I was expecting, both mechanically and within the Openmoko environment. I've successfully used it draped over a rubbish covered desk and expect that it will work very well in the field. As far as software goes, it does a lot. Not only do all the keys do what you'd expect, but you can do simple, yet wonderful, things, such as use the up and down arrows to navigate through the installed software tab. Nothing, however, beats using the terminal with a real keyboard.

This keyboard will undergo site trials soon and will likely be made available as part of OA produced digital solutions based upon the Openmoko platform.

16 Jul 2008 2:49pm GMT

I'm stoked about the latest OpenMoko release and looking forward to getting my hands on the latest freerunner released last week. Over on the CC blog, Tim "thwang-roflcon" Hwang, blogged about the effects of releasing the OpenMoko case plans under CC BY-SA license. Enjoy!

Great news coming out recently that our good friends over at the awesome open source mobile phone project OpenMoko have been seeing rapid success with releasing their CAD design files for the FreeRunner phone under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license. Their open design approach has spurred adoption, becoming the basis for the Dash Express car navigation device, and a popular platform for other projects such as the Debian-based WEphone. It's gaining a lot of traction, and it looks like we'll be able to look forward to even more successes on the open design front in the near future. Might have to pick one up for myself…

This follows in the line of similar recent adoption successes seen by other businesses taking the strategy of making their CAD files open to the public like the award-winning OpenBook project that makes designs for their laptop available for anyone to use. We're hoping that these examples set the stage for companies to take up the business opportunities available in CCing their product schematics.

11 Jul 2008 5:33am GMT

Geez, how did I not blog this yet! We released the CC Metrics Project this week to open up the data so that anyone can help figure out how many CC licensed pieces of media are out in the world. CC has put a new number at 130 million, but I personally, as in a personal capacity, think this number is very very low! If Flickr has 70 Million CC licensed photos, then combine the rest of the cc licensed objects in the web, is the lower bound really only 130 million items?

Please help CC figure out a more accurate number please! There are tools, scrubbed apache logs, and more to help sort things out. If you don't have time to help with this project, then please write a story about this project, shoot me an email for an interview, or help by blogging more about this project.

CC BizDev Intern Tim "thwang" Hwang, Mr FabBitches himself, aka Lucas Barton (The Power Glove, its so badddd), wrote on the CC blog about this:

Tim Hwang, Business Development Intern here. Along with Jon Phillips and many others, we've been hard at work behind the scenes and excited to announce today that we've officially launched the Creative Commons Metrics Project!

Recently, there's been a growing academic interest in understanding how CC adoption is changing the creative landscape worldwide. Metrics is a wiki-project designed to bring together existing efforts and encourage collaboration on this emerging field of research.

You can read more details about the project on our Press Releases page, and can visit the project directly to browse what we've gathered so far (and contribute!).

(image: Giorgos Cheliotis' chart of global CC adoption and permissiveness - learn more about his amazing work at the Participatory Media Lab)

Here is the blog post draft I never released from the CC blog since I went on vacation to Yosemite with my parents on a fake vacation last 6 days:

We are on a roll with releases! Last week we successfully launched the Case Studies project which "explores and adds noteworthy global Creative Commons stories" (translation: an open wiki-based way for anyone to add and edit case studies about Creative Commons integration). This week, we are releasing the Metrics project.

Often, businesses, press, and people ask us CC folk, "How many CC licensed objects are there out there there?" Our response in the past varied in some accounts and then the solution struck us: release privacy scrubbed apache logs free of copyright, any tools we have used to scrape the web or find linkbacks from Google and Yahoo, and encourage people who are smarter than us (researchers and scholars around the world), to do research on this data to help everyone accurately understand how Creative Commons licensing is spreading globally.

Work on this project has been inspired by the great work by Giorgos Cheliotos and the Participatory Media Lab in Singapore.

A chart showing latest CC license usage we can stand by comfortably

So, if you look at the project website, you see information useful for getting, processing and visualizing CC license usage globally.

Ok, so I trailed off on finishing that post. If this interests you please do join CC communication channels and help CC make better estimates and research about usage that will help all.

11 Jul 2008 5:25am GMT

10 Jul 2008 4:32pm GMT

The first unboxing pictures of a retail FreeRunner? I was told I wasn't a real geek unless I did this:

Beautiful

10 Jul 2008 12:47pm GMT

Since I made my purchase of the Neo1973 back in January, I have been doing almost daily reviews of the Openmoko software and posting those reviews to the device owner's mailing list as well as contributing the reviews to the Wiki.

To continue this, Openmoko Inc. has provided me with a Freerunner sample before they even go on sale to developers. Developers and early adopters don't have to wait too much longer now since mass production has begun. As soon as the distribution centers have product to ship, the Openmoko.com store will begin offering the devices for $399 USD (or a 10-pack at $3,690 as part of the reseller system).

For those unfamiliar, the single biggest feature improvement for most people is Wifi capability though the addition of accellerometers opens some creative (and sometimes goofy) avenues to explore. For Free Software enthusiasts, Openmoko has eliminated the need for a non-free GPS device driver so Freerunner users can now make use of GPS features without comprimising the integrity of their devices.

Below, you can see a detailed selection if images I took as I unpacked my new Freerunner.

Unlike the Neo1973 shipping, the Freerunner is less "geeky" and more chic. As a geek, I liked the clamshell of the 1973's packaging, but I had to appreciate the almost jewlery-like feeling I got from opening the Freerunner's case. My wife loved the Freerunner inset in dense foam, and the clean simple presentation of the device first and foremost. The user sees the device they purchased first, rather than fumbling around with manuals and accessories.

The Freerunner doesn't come without accessories, however.

Tucked underneath the dense foam are several useful accessories, including my personal favorite the AC wall charger. It should be noted that this is a pre-release sample so may not even be indicative of what the developers get. I think it is 100% certain that the AC adapter is included though, which eliminates the Linux PC tether almost required to use a Neo1973. In addition, there are two adapters for international electrical sockets, a 512 MB microSD card, a black headset, a USB cable and a LASER/LED/Pen Stylus.

After unpacking the box, I took several more photos which can be seen in my Openmoko Image Gallery but I'll try to find the best ones.

On the right side of the Freerunner you have at the top the AUX button, a headphone jack and a speaker port. On the left side of the device there's a spot to connect an external GPS antenna. Below that is a mini-USB port with the POWER button directly below with a speaker port at the bottom.

For users of the Neo1973, there are two signifigant visible differences. First, the band around the sides is now black, a change I personally like quite a bit but it entirely cosmetic and predicated on personal preference. If you look carefully, you can see that the AUX and POWER buttons are transluent on the Freerunner. This is because the Freerunner has incorporated 3 colored LED's into the hardware to provide traditional visual cues that many people expect in a mobile device. Blink to indicate an unread message or notify of missed calls, or indicate hardware status like "Connected to a Bluetooth device".

A non-visual change affects the USB port. Though limited to USB 1.1 speeds, the Freerunner's USB port is capable of host-mode operation, opening the door to allow the Freerunner to do things like read USB thumb drives (or privacy keys!). There's some apprehension about how this would affect total battery life, but the possibility exists if the user would like to take advantage of it.

Another noticable difference for users of the Neo1973 is the microSD card and SIM card slots. On the Neo, both cards have a slide-lock system which holds the cards in place. On the Freerunner, only the SIM card is slide lock. The microSD slot has an "arm" on each side that needs to be lifted up and to secure, needs simply to be pressed back in. For me, I had to lift each arm individually in order to insert the microSD card. While not hard at all to use, I was expecting a slide-lock, even after being warned. :) I can say with certainty that the Freerunner's parts are a bit sturdier than the Neo's which is great. I'm a rather large guy with big fingers, so not having to deal with thin delicate metal was nice. The SIM card latches firmly on the Freerunner and stays put.

Once the device was reassembled, I took it over to my PC and plugged up the USB cable. Having been told that one of the engineering goals was to allow the Freerunner to power on with USB power only, I decided to try it. I held down the POWER button a bit longer than the Neo1973 requires and immediately noticed a wonderful difference. On the Neo1973 the screen simply illuminates, going from off to bright instantly, but on the Freerunner, the screen "warms up" by fading. This little touch goes a long way to giving the feel that the device is in fact being polished and prepared for a mass market release.

I did notice, however, that the battery indicator showed an almost full battery immediately. This was fine, but it means I'm still not sure what the Freerunner is capable of doing power wise via USB. The critical thing for me is that the device could boot via USB and a dead battery to allow fast charge mode instead of having to wait an hour like you do with a "sleeping" Neo1973. Time will certainly tell on this one.

Soon I will begin evaluating the ASU (April Software Update) which is the beginning of the new Openmoko software stack which incorporated applications from Qtopia while expanding on them and supporting a whole range of software applications, including some promising things in development for Openmoko.

As I have time to use this new software and come up with review criteria, I will begin writing daily (or so) software reviews similar to the ones I've done before. In addition, I plan to continue to track the progress of the ASU as it's adapted to run on the Neo1973.

09 Jul 2008 6:20pm GMT

All the "news" provided in this post is available elsewhere. I am, however, keen to help disseminate it as far and as wide as possible, not least because I am particularly excited about the potentials of such work; more than anything, these screen shots show the potential of the FreeRunner to Archaeology and related disciplines.

TangoGPS

TangoGPS now displays more background imagery in addition to the OpenStreetMap.org data it displays by default; free aerial photographs from OpenAerialMap.org and relief data from Maps-For-Free.com. Looks great:



GvSIG Mobile

GvSIG Mobile will now display shape files and OpenStreetMap data on the FreeRunner:





Check out the project pages for both; development is rapid and exciting.

08 Jul 2008 4:01pm GMT

Just a quick update. On Friday, July June 21, 2008, the server that hosts this website suffered a drive failure. As the techs went in to hot swap and rebuild the drive, the master drive also failed resulting in complete data loss.

Being my personal site, I hadn't been making backups regularly so I lost about 3 months worth of stuff, including the Freerunner review and the Photo tour of the ASU.

I decided at that point that my website sucks. :) I currently use Jaws CMS which is decently good but not great. The reason I chose to use it, though, was because I like pictures and all of the other blogs suck at managing pictures the way I want them - taggable and on my server. Flickr is probably the closest, but I didn't want to be limited to their storage space, service changes and stuff. Jaws lets me put images in multiple albums without duplicating the images, so I used it.

Unfortunately, the AJAX in the admin interface causes conflicts and sometimes I have to reload a page. The search system suck badly, sometimes matching falsely and not displaying matches. But the ugliest part, frankly, is the RSS feed. When I'm editing an article, it auto-saves to draft mode, but for some stupid reason, it actually posts to the RSS feed, so if my article is long (and unless this is your first visit to my site, you know I post long posts often. I actually meant "quick update" and I'm on 250 words.) it actually syndicates a half finished, often broken, blog post which may or may not be updated later.

Because of this, I'm actually writing this blog post in OpenOffice.org Writer which I'll cut and paste into the CMS. Jaws CMS does a remarkably poor job in all of helping me manage my content so I'm ditching it.

I've been trying to teach myself Python, but at work I deal primarily with PHP so I can't really sit down and just hack. I decided to take this opportunity (the drive failure, if you've already forgotten) to force myself to resolve two issues - my site that sucks and my laziness preventing me from exploring Python.

I've decided to try, at the least, to redo my site using Python, and more specifically, using the Django framework which Debian actually packages. :) This means that my normal few-times per week content won't be posted even though there's some infringement of liberty or some advance in Openmoko's progress or something else worth chatting about. Frankly, I'm lazy, and the less content I need to transfer, the happier I am. So this may be my last blog post for "a while" as I learn Django and ask questions and devote my spare time to that for a bit.

In the mean time, this site will remain up, with some broken articles. :)

04 Jul 2008 2:13pm GMT

Just committed shader support to clutter-gst. When your card supports it and gstreamer decides it's the format to use (often it picks rgb over yuv, I've no idea why this is), YUV decoding will now be handled by a pixel shader instead of the CPU. This should give a reasonable boost when it gets used (in terms of CPU use).

Even more interesting in my eyes, is the YV12 shader I've also committed. Normally YV12 hardware-assisted decoding would be done with 8-bit textures and multi-texturing. This is also the sensible way to do it, mind, and I do realise that... But also committed, is a YV12 shader that will decode YV12 uploaded into a 24-bit rgb texture. I've not seen a shader that does this before, probably because it's an insane thing to do, but if you build clutter-gst with USE_YV12_SHADER defined, YV12 decoding will be handled by the graphics card, using a single rgb texture. Note that this shader is completely untuned, however, and very experimental.

The win here is that not only are you offloading a lot of work from the CPU (most videos tend to be stored in YV12 format), but you're also halving the texture upload (YV12 has quarter-resolution chroma). I imagine I'll get back to this after guadec and implement it in the correct way. Patches welcome of course.

04 Jul 2008 1:38pm GMT

The last few weeks I have been working on a python applets manager for OpenMoko cell phone.

The idea is to be able to very easily develop applications in python. Each application can define a set of services and request for a given services. So if for example I write a text editor, other applications that need a text text editor will be able to use it, even if they don't know about this particular text editor.

The code can be downloaded from the subversion server :

svn checkout svn://svn.projects.openmoko.org/svnroot/tichy

It can work directly on a desktop computer, or on the open moko (See the README file for more informations)

It uses Mickey freesmartphone Framework

Here are some screen shots :

04 Jul 2008 10:29am GMT

千呼萬喚始出來，第一個開放式的行動通訊平臺 Openmoko 今天正式展開第二代手機產品 Neo FreeRunner 的線上銷售。Openmoko 的官方新聞稿已經發佈在這裡了 [Openmoko Declares Independence for the Mobile Phone]，特別選在獨立紀念日開放 Neo FreeRunner 訂購，正意味著 Openmoko 將在手機市場裡「獨立」走出自己的路，Openmoko 在行動通訊界做了一個革新，這個革新代表的是手機終於獲得真正的自由。

與之前銷售 Neo1973 不同的地方是，Openmoko 這次除了透過線上直銷外，在印度、德國、法國與英國的朋友也能向當地代理商購買 Neo FreeRunner。

距離上次 Openmoko 推出第一代產品 Neo1973 已經過了好長一段時間了，這些日子裡，行動通訊產業發生了許多大事，像是開放手機平臺（如 Android）概念的興起，以及觸控螢幕手機（如 iPhone）的流行，都讓大家有一種耳目一新的感覺。

Openmoko 呢？

這段時間，Openmoko 除了面臨外在的挑戰外，內部也有很大的調整與改變，但不管怎麼樣，我們相信結果是好的，社群開發者也更積極參與 Openmoko 平臺的開發，而且我們也看到了 Openmoko 更進一步將 Neo 手機的機構設計以 CC 授權公開了。許多革新的做法，不斷讓大家看到這個開源手機專案的獨特之處。

Openmoko 還有一個與過去不同的地方。現在的 Openmoko 特別著重學校教育，在 Openmoko 新版的網站上可以看到有一個 [University] 的頁面，Openmoko 特別關心學校方面的研究計畫，不管是軟體或是設計，都能向 Openmoko 公司或是 Openmoko 社群取得一些幫助。過去 Openmoko 在台灣也與多所大學有所接觸，許多老師與同學對於使用 Neo 手機來製作專題都表達高度興趣，目前也有一些小成績，下學期希望能夠和大家分享這些同學的研究成果。

04 Jul 2008 3:42am GMT