It is the first version of the software since the Symbian foundation announced that it had made its code open source in February.

The Foundation – which includes Nokia, Motorola and Samsung amongst others – gave away the code to developers for free in the hope that it would help speed up the pace of improvements. Any organisation or individual can now use and modify it.

The software in the N8 allows the phone to have multi-touch and multi-tasking, meaning more than one application can be open at any one time.

The device will be Nokia’s flagship smartphone. It can be plugged into home theatres and supports surround sound as well as high-quality video.

Social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, can be displayed on the home screen in a single application.

Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, said he was “stoked” that Nokia had chosen to use the operating system on its phone.

BBC News article

The Nokia N8 will ship in the third quarter of this year, 2010. Hopefully the improved software will bring advantages both for its end-users, and the software ‘app’ and web application developers.

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WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 also comes with a new default blog them called Twenty Ten which comes with custom background and header options built-in.

The official WordPress development blog gives the following information about what to expect in WordPress 3.0.

You Should Know:

• The custom menus system (Appearance > Menus) is not quite finished. In Beta 2, the layout will be different and a bunch of the functionality will be improved, but we didn’t want to hold things up for this one screen. You can play with making custom menus, and report bugs if you find them, but this is not how the final screen will look/work, so don’t get attached to it.
• The merge! Yes, WordPress and WordPress MU have merged. This does not mean that you can suddenly start adding a bunch of new blogs from within your regular WordPress Dashboard. If you’re interested in testing the Super Admin stuff associated with multiple sites, you’ll need some simple directions to get started.
• We’re still fiddling with a few small things in the UI, as we were focused on getting the more function-oriented code finished first. For example, we’re getting a new icon for the Super Admin section.

Things to test:

• Play with the new default theme, Twenty Ten, including the custom background and header options.
• Custom Post Type functionality has been beefed up. It’s really easy to add new types, so do that and see how it looks!
• WordPress MU users should test the multiple sites functionality to make sure nothing broke during the merge.

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WordPress is an open source blogging solution written in PHP and powered by a MySQL database backend. Code wise, it is entirely open source and licensed in entirety under the GNU General Public License (version 2), and as of typing this, it is used by over 200 million websites worldwide.

Design in WordPress has previously relied on contest to refresh the system’s administration section header, colour schemes and icon sets. This year however, the WordPress community are looking to heavily drive the concept of open source design, with a focus on many more design contests, a dedicated WordPress user interface design blog and significantly in the way of general communication about the direction the user interface is to take. To this end, there will be the new UI design blog, a newly created WordPress UI IRC channel (#wordpress-ui on Freenode) and a more noticeable mention of WordPress design on the official WordPress mailing lists.

If you’re interested in helping to design the new user interface for WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platforms out there, see the original open-source design article on the official WordPress blog.

If you want more information on how you can use WordPress for your own website, or would like to see how we can integrate a WordPress powered blog into your existing website, feel free to contact us right now!

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2. Mobile Web Development – Nokia OS goes open-source
3. Nokia releases first open-source Symbian device

Nokia is releasing their Symbian operating system, which includes the Symbian web browser, under an open source license. Symbian is the most popular smartphone operating system, and its total code base is valued at “billions of dollars”. The open sourcing of Symbian hopes to allow for a greater adoption of the operating system and a method by which to increase the evolution and innovations of the various features of Symbian OS, the Symbian web browser and all its integrated components.

From a web developer’s point of view, the open sourcing of mobile web browsers is fantastic. Open sourcing the mobile web browser in Nokia phones will enable it to be made to comply more accurately with web standards and can allow for increased performance and functionality, which may not be possible or financial viable in a closed-sourced proprietary licensing model.

More information regarding the Nokia OS moving to an open source software model can be found on the BBC website.

If you are interested in web design and development for mobile devices, feel free to browse our web design section or get it touch.

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Version 1.4 is the latest inception of the highly popular lightweight cross browser JavaScript framework. The new version features many new additions and speed improvements over 1.3.

jQuery was developed in 2006 by John Resig and since launch has been adopted by many large companies such as Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Digg and many more. The mantra behind jQuery is “write less, do more” With a wide range of easy DOM manipulation calls and user interface effects jQuery is an attractive option for developers looking to make applications more intuitive, user friendly and feature rich.

So whats new in 1.4?

Aside from all the new additions and improvements one of my favourite new functions is .delay(). Delay provides us with the functionality to delay execution of subsequent items in the queue.

For example we can fade out and fade in an element with a second delay.

jQuery not only allows us to delay on effects we can also apply delays to custom queues.

One of many new updates is the addition to pass event data to the function .live(). This gives developers much more flexibility to capture events. From form submission, focus changes, clicks and custom events.

The example below shows how to smooth scroll on all anchor tag elements using live to capture the click event data.

According to BuiltWith.com’s statistics jQuery is running on one in five websites on the internet. Not surprising considering the adaptability of the framework.

14 days of jQuery is still running and you can find more information via the below links.

http://jquery.com/
http://jquery14.com/

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Systems such as Linux to often seen to be only for the most geeky or technical minded of people, whilst Windows or Mac are heavily promoted as being used for everyday, family orientated purposes. This can be as complex as managing home finances and budgets with a spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Excel or the more simple managing of your family and friend’s photographs with some kind of photo album software.

Linux systems, such as Ubuntu, have plenty of tools available for spreadsheets and budgeting and the more complex home productivity. For budgeting, there are spreadsheet application such as Gnumeric Spreadsheet, KSpread and the more well known OpenOffice.org spreadsheet application, Calc. This is all very well and good, but what about the simpler, nicer and frankly muchc more things in life like grabbing, tweaking and showing off your friends and family photographs. Well, there are certainly quite a variety of Linux photo album applications available out there. In case you are thinking of moving to Linux, or are just curious about the available Linux based photo management applications, I have put a few details about the best of the bunch below.

F-Spot

First up is F-Spot. F-Spot is one of the top open-source Linux photo albums. It allows you to import your photos from anywhere – your camera, your phone, a CD, DVD, USB drive or even images you pull from the Internet. Take a look at the screenshot of F-Spot below.

As you can see from the screenshot, this is an imported picture I took from our office window. Down the left hand side, the view is set to ‘Metadata’ showing all the details which are sneakily embedded in your image files by your camera. As you can see from this information, this photograph was taken with my fantastic Nokia N97 phone’s camera, and even gives advanced photography details such as Exposure Time and ISO Speed Ratings.

But F-Spot is not just about these details, it also lets you perform special effects on all your photos, such as cropping, red-eye reduction, desaturation, sepia toning and much more. It also stores a clever history of all changes made in F-Spot so any accidental mess ups can easily by reverted with only a click or two. Of course, F-Spot is a photo album tool, and does indeed allow to you manage entire albums of photos, give them captions, rate them, tag them as favourites, organise by name, date and much more.

Overall F-Spot is a very comprehensive tool, which is both easy to use and comes with a great set of features. It also ships with the very popular Ubuntu Linux distribution.

digiKam

Next up is digiKam, which is a professional, open-source photo album management tool. It is primarily designed for the KDE Desktop Environment, but works in essentially all Linux systems. A screenshot of digiKam running on my Ubuntu system is shown below.

digiKam is quite a clever photo album management tool, and offers the vast majority of features present in F-Spot. It also allows for filtering by ratings, file types and has a comprehensive pop-out image editor which allows for additional manipulation of photos and the applying of special effects. Renaming of your images in application, searching, adding of captions, ratings and tags and sorting by the physical location photos were taken (via a geolocation service) are also some of the many cleverly supported features.

digiKam is, in my opinion, a more professional photo management suite, but its range of features is of such magnitude that it may daunt the non-professional. However, for those wishing to make perfect albums and manage their photographs with intricate details and changes, it is a perfect choice.

Picasa

Although not open-source, Picasa is an excellent family orientated image editing tool from a big brand name who you might just have heard of – Google. It is very much aimed at being simple to use, whilst still provided a nice range of features.

Along with being user friendly, many of the features have the same aim and are targeting at having fun with your photos. For example, the above screenshot shows Google Picasa 3.0 allowing you to create a collage from an album of photos in many different styles. It is hardly limited to collages however, allowing you to create gift CDs to send to friends, ordering online prints, creating slide-showing and more more in the way of fun and funky features. Picasa is defintely the way to go if you wish be the easily creative and produce stunning creative elements with very little effort.

Although fantastic functionality and feature wise, for those who are dedicated to open-source software, Picasa is proprietary and indeed, not a native Linux application but is instead a custom build of the Windows version running under Wine (a Windows compatibility layer for Linux). Although this works very well in most cases and it very fast in terms of performance, sometimes even outstripped the Windows version of Picasa, some users do report issues running Picasa for Linux. However, these issues do seem to be few, far between and usually quite simple to resolve.

I hope this quick little guide gives you some good advice on the best of the best in Linux photo album software, regardless of whether you are switching to Linux, looking for an alternative to an application you already use or just stumbled upon this article and have had your curiosity spiked.

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Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management stated; “…With Google Chrome OS, we’ve made computing faster, easier and safer than ever before. While we still have a long way to go, we are excited by the progress we have made so far and look forward to developing the technology in the open with the help of the open source community. We want it to be like a TV – turn it on and it’s booted up…”

Although this statement was quite puzzling, seeing how they’re keeping it open source; “…As a consumer, you can’t go download Chrome OS, you will have to go and buy a Chrome OS device…” but as ever I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

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Having been a tester of Ubuntu 9.10 during its development, I can tell you that Ubuntu 9.10 will feature the following upon its release.

• E-mail and Chat Features – Ubuntu 9.10 will feature a built-in instant messenging client, Empathy, which can connect to many of the most popular instant messaging services, including Yahoo, Gmail (Google Talk), MSN (Windows Live), Jabber, AOL, QQ and many more. In addition to instant messaging, the latest version of the e-mail and personal information management program, Evolution, is included. Evolution can manage your contacts, e-mail, schedule, tasks and memos – all for free.

• Internet – Ubuntu 9.10 ships will the very latest version of Mozilla Firefox, which is much faster and excellent for browsing modern websites and web applications which are heavy on dynamic client-side content, such as Javascript. Complex web pages such as Facebook, Google Maps and others will load and work lightning fast.

• Music and videos – Music and videos are managed with ease in Ubuntu 9.10. Simply plug in your iPod, PSP, MP3 or MP4 player and use the built-in media player, Rhytmbox, to download, store, buy and play your music collection. Ubuntu 9.10 can play many video formats with no problems and anything it can not play it will offer to download and install the required codecs automatically, and for free.

• Office and productivity – Word processing, spreadsheets or presentations can all be handled by the latest version of OpenOffice.org which is including in the latest version of Ubuntu. OpenOffice is compatible with all other office applications including, but not limited to, Microsoft Office.

• Store, share and synchronise – Ubuntu 9.10 features integrated ‘Ubuntu One’ service, which allows you to easily and seamlessly synchronise your contacts, notes, files and folders between all your Ubuntu computers. Even if you are on a computer running Mac or Windows you can still access all your files online, meaning you’ll never be at computer without your files.

• Software centre – The brand new software centre for this version of Ubuntu allows you to download and install thousands of free and open-source applications automatically with only 2 or 3 clicks.

• Gaming – Linux-based systems are generally not well known for their gaming prowess. However, Ubuntu 9.10 ships with the ability to download over 400 fun games directly from the built-in software centre. All these games are still completely free and installable with only a few clicks.

This latest version of Ubuntu provides advantages for both business workstations and home user desktops. Although not mentioned in this article so far, for enterprises and small home/offices, the server edition of Ubuntu 9.10 is also released tomorrow alongside the desktop edition.

For more information about Ubuntu, visit the official Ubuntu website.

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