Re: Initial draft of GNOME Mobile annual report article

["Stormy Peters" <stormy gnome org>]

This year has been eventful in the GNOME Mobile world, to say the least. We have seen new adoption of the GNOME platform in mobile and embedded devices, and increasing momentum from GNOME Mobile participants. We have seen new releases of core GNOME Mobile technologies, and the appearance on the landscape of some high-quality components which will be without doubt valuable additions to the platform. But we have also seen some high profile decisions to move away from GNOME technologies towards alternatives.

Instead of the "But ...", In addition, we've seen some growth in other mobile technologies. While we had hoped everyone would use GNOME Mobile, we are happy to see the industry and the market place grow. As more and more people use mobile technologies in unique ways we are confident they will see the value of free and open source software solutions like GNOME Mobile and will join our growing community of vendors.

The year started with a bang, as LiPS, the Linux Phone Standards group, an industry group which aimed to define a set of

Did LiPS have anything to do with GNOME Mobile? If it does, we should state that up front. If not, we could start out with something like "Some of the alternative solutions are already moving towards GNOME Mobile. For example, ..."

standard interfaces for mobile phone application development, folded up shop and joined forces with the LiMo foundation. LiMo aims to provide a reference platform of Linux for mobile phone manufacturers. Several components of the GNOME Mobile platform, including GTK+ and GStreamer, have been included as required components of the LiMo R2 platform. This is a great boost to the platform,

as it enables them to ... (or as it will bring xyz technology to more users), i.e. why is it a boost?

and we should start seeing the first R2 phones in early 2009.

Moblin, the mobile Linux edition from Intel which targets netbooks and other small form computers, had its second release this

Should call out what GNOME Mobile technologies Moblin uses.

year, and with it, a significant announcement - Intel had agreed to acquire OpenedHand, specialists in mobile free software application development, and developers of Matchbook, Poky Linux, Clutter and Pimlico. Ubuntu Mobile and Ubuntu Netbook

and in the core group of GNOME mobile (or just state that they have worked on many of the GNOME Mobile tecnologies.

Edition also had releases this year. Under economic pressure, the OLPC project was forced into a change of direction, and the

I either wouldn't mention that they were forced into a change of direction or I'd say what it was. "The OLPC project is now shipping also with non open source software solutions. After the announcement it was apparent that Sugar had widespread support which enabled the ..."

charismatic Walter Bender, former CTO of OLPC, spun off Sugar Labs as a new non-profit to develop the innovative Sugar user interface built on top of the GNOME platform.

These events have brought with them several new participants in GNOME Mobile, and we have seen representatives from Azingo, Motorola, Purple Labs, Canonical, Sugar Labs and LiMo contributing on various GNOME forums this year, alongside long-time contributors.

like ... (list the long-time contributors here).

Maybe had subheadings or bold words like Clutter, Tracker, etc.

The prize for star software newcomer of the year goes to Clutter, which has taken the GNOME and GNOME Mobile worlds by storm since its initial releases in 2007. Clutter is a library for creating fast, visually rich and animated graphical user interfaces. It uses OpenGL or OpenGL ES for rendering, but gives the developer a really simple API to use. With integration of some cool stuff like the Box2D physics engine, Clutter has been making waves with impressive demos of iPhone-like functionality. Clutter is now included in the latest Maemo platform, in moblin v2 and in Ubuntu Mobile, and work is underway to enable further integration into the GNOME platform.

There are many candidates for runner-up. Tracker has come of age this year, making its way into the Maemo platform. 

Tracker is an object store and file indexer which stores metadata about files and other objects like emails, and allows fast retrieval. GeoClue, a library which makes supporting geolocalisation in your application easy, has made an appearance in a released device, the Garmin Nüvi 860, and looks set to become a more integrated part of the GNOME platform soon.

The year brought other new device releases. Nokia brought out a WiMax edition of its N810 personal internet tablet. Bug Labs

Should probably say what BUG is.

released a new version of the BUG, with GNOME Mobile-based Poky Linux at its heart. And showing that GNOME in devices does not necessarily mean small devices, French company Supersonic Imagine brought a GNOME-based breast cancer scanner, the Aixplorer, to market. It's applications like this that bring home the potential power of a completely free software platform.

The software platform has not stood still either.

This sentence seemed a bit strange to me since I thought the whole article was about software. (I know we were just talking about devices ...)
 

This year, everyone benefited from the work which was done by Tommi Komulainen and others in the Nokia team in getting

This is the first mention of an individual. I think we should either go back and add individual names to OH, Intel, and others or take it out here.

their performance fixes, and a major new feature input method, released in the standard GTK+ release. Nokia has also been pushing to get work which was done in Hildon integrated into GTK+ where it is useful. During the year, Tommi left Nokia, and joined Litl, a new company which is working on GNOME based mobile applications (we think) - among the work which Litl have released this year is Gjs (Geejees), GNOME _javascript_ bindings. This work should enable easlier integration of web-based content into GNOME. Bob Murphy of ACCESS tuned in at a distance during GUADEC to show off some work that he and his team have been doing with dynamically readjusting the GNOME desktop with XRandr in mobile devices with an accereometer, and he is working to get that work integrated into GTK+ soon.

The GNOME Mobile participants are still feeling their way around, 

In spite of its progress, GNOME Mobile is still a relatively new group and participants are still working on the best way to collaborate and co-ordinate efforts in mobile-related work in the GNOME platform.

and wondering how best to co-ordinate efforts in mobile-related work in the GNOME platform. We have had several meetings this year - in Austin, Texas during the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, during GUADEC in Istanbul, and again at the Boston Summit in October - and myself, Stormy Peters and Paul Cooper have been talking regularly with participants to try to figure out how we can get high quality development and co-operation, focused on mobile and embedded platforms.

We have made great progress in the past couple of years, and the value of the platform has proven itself. GNOME has been good at attacking problems from top to bottom, and addressing problems at every level of the platform from the kernel through Xorg right up to the user interface. To address the specific needs of mobile applications in terms of performance, power management and memory usage, all of the GNOME Mobile participants will need to apply this same thinking to the GNOME stack.

Can we put our goal/vision/mission statement here that we worked out as a group?

Using existing GNOME technologies, GNOME Mobile is a project to make GNOME technologies effective for mobile devices.  GNOME Mobile provides the infrastructure for discussing the needs of mobile technologies and making changes to GNOME technologies in order to support mobile solutions. GNOME Mobile members include individuals working on GNOME technologies to companies providing mobile solutions built on GNOME technologies.

Roll on 2009.

On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 4:52 AM, Luc Pionchon <luc pionchon nokia com> wrote:

On Fri, 2008-12-26 at 20:50 +0100, ext Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi all,

Hi Dave,

>
> I just wrote a first draft of the GNOME Mobile annual report article -
> it's available in the wiki at
> http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/AnnualReport2008/GnomeMobile
>
> When you put it all together, it certainly has been an eventful year.
>
> I would appreciate participants here having a look, correcting any
> errors/omissions, and adding any suggestions you might have to the top.
> I'll be on vacation until January 4th, but I'm sure I'll have time to
> integrate any suggestions after the holidays.

"Successes in mobile: Hildon moving upstream"

I cannot understand what this means. As far as I know, Hildon did not
make any progress on the GNOME side since early 2008 (Feb~). I would
remove the statement.



"This year, everyone benefited from the work which was done by Tommi
Komulainen and others in the Nokia team in getting their performance
fixes, (...)"

About "performance fixes" at Nokia, you certainly want to credit Xan
Lopez.

(for accuracy, the work was mostly done during 2006-2007, I guess you
mean the benefits started to show in 2008, right?)



Cheers,
Luc

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