New versions of the Sid Player and the Module Player are now available via the AppStore. While Sid Player just received a minor update with some performance tweaks, Module Player received a major content and performance update. Here’s the changelog:

• Artwork: Module Player has a blueish tone now which leads to better identification if you also own Sid Player and Pokey Player.
• Performance: Database access has been completely rewritten for improved performance and less impact on the audio engine. It also helps with battery life.
• Database: Module Player now doubles the amount of available songs, we have added 70.000 songs in multiple new formats, such as 669, ABC, AMF, AMS, DBM, DMF, FAR, IT, J2B, MDL, MID, MT2, OKT, PSM, S3M, STM, ULT, UMX, WAV, and XM. The database has also been updated to incorporate new MOD songs uploaded since the last release.
• Authors & Songs: The number of songs per author is now being displayed next to the composer. Since there are so many song formats now, the type of song is shown next to the song title.
• Playlists: Double tapping on a song moves you into the author’s view where you can see all songs of said authors. You can shuffle any of the playlists now. The random playlist will come up with new titles on every query.
• Player: The currently played pattern and row is now shown. Release notes longer than the screen width are now presented in old-style scrolltext fashion. We also added a seek bar (#1 feature wish), so you can jump to your favourite parts of the songs. The Oscillator view has been rewritten in OpenGL for improved performance. If you still experience audio glitches, you can turn off the Oscillator in the settings.

I also finally took the time to work on an updated website for our team. Since I do not fancy direct HTML or CSS editing any more (I’m a big fan of frontends of all kinds), I did a small survey on website creation tools. I have settled down on Freeway Pro now, which is really amazing and allows me to realize my layout without having to care about the nitty details.

Update: Sid Player Pro has just been updated as well, receiving all the internal goodies from the Mod Player plus an update to HVSC.52+PSID

Just came back from FOSDEM 2010, which — after skipping the last incarnation — was a great inspiring and productive event. The Openmoko devroom we originally requested was declined, however thanks to the initiative of Serdar Dere, it turned out we could snatch a last minute 3 hours timeslot that was left open by the Xorg guys. Very shortly we prepared a schedule and managed to get a nice program which was very well received.

Due to the short notice, we could not manage to create a video recording infrastructure, so I’m afraid this year we can only provide the slides — which are a notoriously bad substitute for real talks though. We try to improve for next year — if we can get a devroom again. The pictures you are seeing are courtesy Dr. Nikolaus Schaller from Goldelico, btw. — thanks!

The FOSDEM team did certainly improve its organization over the last years, I was very pleased to see some of my criticism being taken into account. Apart from the lack of good coffee in Brussels (which the FOSDEM team probably is unguilty for), I can’t complain about anything. Even WiFi worked tremendously well on saturday. I still think due to the size of the ever growing interest in this conference that the ULB as location should seriously be reconsidered though. The special service transport on sunday to the main station is a great idea, folks — thanks a lot! Funnily enough, half of the ICE that took me to/from Frankfurt/Main to Brussels Zuid was filled with hackers, btw.

I have met some interesting people working on mobile devices, such as dcordes, leviathan, GNUtoo, cr2, larsc, heinervdm, etc. It’s great to see there is still momentum in real mobile FOSS architectures (i.e. something besides the Android, Maemo, or WebOS systems). I’m glad to tell you that this year we will see an exciting breakthrough in freesmartphone.org middleware supporting new platforms, i.e. progress on the HTC Dream and the Palm Pre is looking _very_ well. Stay tuned for more details appearing here soon.

I wish every conference would be like that. The only slightly disappointing thing was the cross-buildsystem-session in the embedded room. Just when I was expecting the discussion about the problems and potential collaboration to start, the time for the session was over. Rather than wasting time watching Andy Green telling us that our projects will die soon and we should all start using Fedora/Embedded now, we could have had some progress… Oh well, perhaps next year.

Sad to see that a lot of people are not getting it. The iPad is a revolutionary device — it is the manifestation of transit, the transit from the classical desktop paradigm over to the new wave of ubiquitous computing.

Applications like iWork for the iPad and the OmniGroup products are going to make a substantial difference. Software developers will now stop with overloading their apps with features (of which the typical user rarely uses more than 20%), but concentrate on streamlining the human computer interaction instead — hence improving productivity and… fun with computers!

We — the LaTe App-Developers — are embracing change and will create software for the iPad. Exciting times to live in!

Update: Matt Gemmel got it, see his blog post with great insight into the relevance of the iPad.

Update II: Joe Hewitt as well, see his blog post.

In-between coding FOSS middleware such as the freesmartphone.org software stack, my colleague and me are working on iPhone OS projects. After a bunch of retro players (Sid Player, Module Player, Pokey Player), we did a small fun game for christmas. Here’s the video of us playing it (sorry for the german voices… didn’t have time to do sub titles

Liar’s Dice is available on the App Store. Enjoy!

I just came back from the annual OpenEmbedded Developer Meeting (OEDEM) which happened to be in Cambridge, UK. It was a very productive meeting and we agreed on some important things to move OpenEmbedded forward as a whole. Please see the mailing lists for meeting minutes and summaries. We also elected a new board for the e.V. and despite the grief that led to me leaving the OE core team (which subsequently lead to the dissolving of it), I have volunteered (and been reelected) to serve a 2nd year as board member.

As written in a previous installment of this column, I have dedicated the lion’s share of 2009 to the reimplementation of the freesmartphone.org APIs in Vala. Please see the wiki for architectural details, as I don’t want to repeat this here. This is an overview of the current status:

fsousaged

fsousaged has been fully completed and is being used for quite a while now in distributions. All of the plugins are working:

• dbus_service: Implementation of resource handling as per org.freesmartphone.Usage.
• lowlevel_kernel26: Low level suspend/resume handling for Linux 2.6.
• lowlevel_openmoko: Low level suspend/resume handling for Openmoko Smartphones GTA01/GTA02.

fsodeviced

fsodeviced has been fully completed, but is not yet being used in any distributions. All of the plugins are working:

• accelerometer: generic accelerometer handling, needs one of the device-specific accelerometer plugins.
• accelerometer_lis302: lis 302 accelerometer support.
• alsa_audio: alsa audio PCM output and routing (scenario) support.
• kernel_idle: system idle notifications.
• kernel_input: system input handling.
• kernel_info: kernel information.
• kernel26_display: display class-device based brightness control.
• kernel26_rtc: realtime clock, wakeup alarm.
• kernel26_leds: LED class-device based brightness control.
• kernel26_powersupply: peripheral power supply control.
• openmoko_powercontrol: device-specific power supply controls for Openmoko devices.
• thinkpad_powercontrol: device-specific power supply controls for IBM Thinkpad devices.

fsotimed

fsotimed is about half-way complete compared to frameworkd. The working plugin is:

• alarm: DBus alarm service as per org.freesmartphone.Time.Alarm.

fsonetworkd

fsonetwork is done with the same level of functionality as in frameworkd. The working plugin is:

• sharing: internet connection sharing.

fsogsmd

fsogsmd has been on hold since end of April due to waiting for more Vala language features. When they finally appeared in September, I picked up where I left and furiosly worked on what i perceive as the prime subsystem of FSO

The basic infrastructure is more or less complete now and we cover about 50% of the DBus API as per org.freesmartphone.GSM.*, i.e. device info, sim access, network registration, sms, and call handling is working. All work has been done in a generic way, i.e. without taking any care of modem specifics yet — which is what will be my next task before I go on covering the missing API.

fsogpsd

I have added a skeleton of that to the repository and adapted some lower-level classes in libfsotransport to work both for fsogsmd and fsogpsd. I would have done more work, but I’m not keen on implementing the Gypsy API, since I think it’s not a particular good DBus API

fsopreferencesd / fsopimd / fsoeventsd

All these have not been started, not even been thinking much about ‘em. fsopreferencesd will probably have to wait until dconf / gvariant / gsettings have finally landed in glib. fsopimd is waiting for a redesign of the opimd API. fsoeventsd needs a new architecture, but I have to discuss this with the others before we can start cranking.

2010

will be a very interesting year for Linux on mobile devices, even more so for freesmartphone.org. Due to the lack of someone funding FSO, I will probably not find much time to work on FSO in 2010 — that’s why I’m so furiously working on getting most of it to a state where others can jump in before the end of this year.

Apart from that, I hope we can get FSOSHRCON’10 happening very early in 2010 and uplevel kernel support for some of the more interesting semi-open devices such as the Palm Pre, Nokia N900, and the HTC family. FSO would be more than happy to add device-specific support for this hardware once the kernel is up to par.

Cheers!

After bringing the Sid Player (and its siblings Pro and Lite) into the AppStore, we just delivered a new production, the Module Player (and its sibling Lite). The market-situation will be quite different this time, as there are already two other Module Players. We believe we have the highest quality play routine though and a proven user interface. 70000 mods at your fingertips! See the video for a short demo:

As mentioned, the freesmartphone.org team and community has taken the challenge to put the FSO stack on the Palm Pre which is out next month. The goal is to manage a voice call with the FSO stack within four weeks.

The idea behind this is a very important one. With only the Openmoko FreeRunner as a platform, the FSO stack is doomed into oblivion sooner or later, since its a very limited hardware platform — in quantity, but considering the closed alternatives also in quality. Hence, we need to proof that FSO can run on current, competitive hardware — to embrace companies that want to adopt FSO in their niche.

The Palm Pre is currently our major hope — all other hardware being either too closed (yes, this includes the Nokia N900) or already outdated.

Let me announce the 3rd piece of broken hardware in 3 months. This is definitely too much First my Dreambox 7025, then a Denon AV receiver, and now my Linux workstation decided to die. It looks like (hopefully) just the PSU is to blame though — doesn’t react to incoming power any more.

As if I had time for such things *sigh* …

Update: It looks like there was a power surge during a thunderstorm. My Dreambox and AppleTV halted as well… aaargh

Update 2: A new PSU brings the workstation back to live *phew*. Dreambox and AppleTV did not have permanent damages either.

We just released the following statement to various mailing lists:

Braunschweig, Germany, 2009-07-29. For immediate release.

The freesmartphone.org core-team founds a BGB company to facilitate the further development of free and open source middleware for Linux-based mobile systems: “Lauer, Lübbe, Schmidt, Willmann, freesmartphone.org GbR”.

The core-team members of the freesmartphone.org project today announced the founding of a legal entity offering consulting, training, and implementation services around the freesmartphone.org middleware platform, also known as FSO.

“We now have a single point of contact for both commercial and non-commercial parties who want to use our services to create compelling solutions. This is of interest for groups or individuals creating new devices or freeing existing devices (”anti-vendor-ports”) and who decided to incorporate the FSO middleware”, says Dr. Michael Lauer, founder of the FSO project. “If you care about the further development of this platform or if you need guidance for tailoring or customizing the FSO middleware, contact us via E-Mail at coreteam@freesmartphone.org”.

With todays’ smartphones evolving into ubiquituous companions, a gap has emerged between widely used FOSS components like the Linux kernel and core system libraries on one side, and end-user applications on the other side. The lack of a complete free mobile software stack hinders innovation and leads to reinventing proprietary solutions for services middleware.

FSO’s mission is to close this gap by designing and developing solid middleware for mobile systems in an open fashion; this refers to not only publishing source code under open source licenses, but also to sharing the whole design and development process with the community and giving both commercial and non-commercial entities a way to co-drive and steer the process.

Built on top of the Linux kernel, FSO implements high level services for mobile application development, accessible via the DBus interprocess communication standard. Leveraging the FSO APIs allows the developer to concentrate on solving application domain problems, such as business logic and presentation of data, without having to worry about the device specifics and low level details, such as how to access resources, telephony, location awareness, data storage, etc.

About freesmartphone.org: Previously funded by Openmoko Inc, freesmartphone.org is a collaboration platform for open source and open discussion software projects working on interoperability and shared technology for Linux-based smartphones. freesmartphone.org operates on the services layer (middleware) and offers APIs and reference implementations that support modern interconnected mobile devices. To provide reference solutions, freesmartphone.org works closely together with various device-specific communities such as the Openmoko, OpenEZX, and HTC-Linux groups. The FSO team honours and bases on specifications and software created by the freedesktop.org community.

This means you can hire us (or donate money), if you want to support the FSO middleware development.

After the sudden death of my Dreambox 7025, the new OE-based device in the living room is a Dreambox 8000 — simply the best set top box money can buy these days. Yes, it’s quite expensive, but the hardware is fully loaded (heck, there’s even WiFi) and the freedom to install what you want is invaluable.