Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Where would we be without Facebook as we forge into 2013? If Skype is the grande dame of app-based telephony, Facebook is the head honcho of social networking. Facebook Messenger lets you social network fast with its app-based interface. It's proprietary, which we don't love, and it has a few kinks -- but they're likely to be ironed out in due course.

Recent moves by VMware have caused "uncertainty in the Vert.x community", as the company has staked its claim on the project. When Vert.x, the asynchronous framework for Java and other JVM based languages, was launched in May 2012, Tim Fox, a VMware employee and project lead, described the project as "a community project sponsored by VMware".

Turns out maps matter. That's always been the case for me. I'm a map freak. I own hundreds of paper maps in various specialties, plus many atlases, books on geography, geology and other geo-obsessions. But I'm no longer an edge case, because maps are proving to be essential on smartphones, which today approaches a billion or more people. Digital maps on phones are now among the core portfolio of smartphone apps, alongside voice, text, calendar and contacts. What could be more mobile about a phone than a map to help the user look things up and get around?

Programming languages are living phenomena: They're born, the lucky ones that don't die in infancy live sometimes long, fruitful lives, and then inevitably enter a period of decline. Unlike real life, the decline can last many, many years as the presence of large legacy codebases means practiced hands must tend the code for decades. The more popular the language once was, the longer this period of decline will be.

Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 5.9 has landed with some cloudy love from Microsoft. The latest version of the Linux distro, released Tuesday, introduces drivers for Microsoft’s closed-source Hyper-V hypervisor rival to VMware’s vSphere. The inclusion of Microsoft’s drivers means improved interoperability and manageability for RHEL 5.9 when running as a guest on top of Windows Servers using Hyper-V.

The Inkscape vector graphics editor is approaching its next milestone release, version 0.49. As always, the update rolls together a wealth of new tools and features. This development cycle is relatively light on large-scale additions, but there is a long list of small usability enhancements that will add up to a smoother design experience for most users. The project just released a bugfix to the stable 0.48 series, and although Inkscape is decidedly a "released when ready" application, the murmuring is that Inkscape 0.49 could hit virtual shelves as soon as January 2013. In the meantime, there are fairly stable nightly builds available from the trunk for those who wish to experiment.

For all of you free and open source creative tool fans out there, plenty of exciting developments happened over the past year—and there's some pretty awesome new things in the pipeline for 2013 as well! Here's a sampling of the good news..

Nokia chief exec Stephen Elop has sparked speculation about his company's commitment to its partnership with Microsoft and Windows Phone. Asked flat out by Spanish daily El Pais if Nokia will produce Android devices, Elop replied "today we are engaged and satisfied with Microsoft, but anything is possible" - an eye-catching ambivalent answer.

Sam Spilsbury, lead developer of the Compiz window manager, has written a blog post declaring that he does not see much of a future in porting the project to the Wayland architecture. The developer says he is disillusioned with what he calls fragmentation in the open source community, referring to the many compositing engines available under the current X11 implementation. He thinks that porting Compiz to Wayland would be too much work with only little gain for end users.

Firefox’s new JavaScript compiler, IonMonkey, makes Web apps and games perform up to 25 percent faster. To see how exciting Firefox makes playing games or using apps on the Web, check out BananaBread, a fun 3D Web game created by the Mozilla Developer Network and powered exclusively by HTML5, WebGL and JavaScript.

The end of 2012 is here and over time I think it will be considered a revolutionary moment for open education and open source. A tipping point. A seismic shift. The world has not seen this type of revolution since the early 1400s and the arrival of the printing press.

We're back! It's 2013 and we have three more profiles to share with you in our 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks series. We'll be introducing another series a little later in the year that we hope can further help to illustrate the inspiring community of individuals that build Linux. If you have ideas and/or feedback on these kinds of series, please let us know in the comments section.

More than two years after the previous version, the developers of the open source multi-player shooter Cube 2: Sauerbraten have provided a new major release. The latest version is code-named the "Collect Edition" and includes 45 new maps as well as three new game modes called "collect", "insta collect" and "efficiency collect".

FFmpeg, the cross platform audio-video decode and encode library and tools, has seen a new major release in the form of version 1.1, code-named "Fire Flower". The new release includes an Opus encoder using libopus, 24-bit FLAC encoding, and decoders for various Silicon Graphics formats.

As we welcome in a new year that many are saying will finally be “the year of the Linux desktop,” we want to take a look at some of the up-and-coming Linux distros for 2013. The mainstream tech media has already covered distro giants like Mint and Ubuntu in great depth and breadth, so we won’t reiterate what you’ve already heard a kazillion times. Read on to learn about some newer distros that we expect to continue rising in popularity, maybe even to the level of stardom, over the year.

The Linux community may not exactly be known for its glitzy launch events, but last week saw one the likes of which has rarely -- if ever -- been seen in these parts before. Splashier even than the blogosphere's New Year's Eve festivities, most agreed, the Ubuntu for phones announcement on Wednesday might well have been a Cupertino production, so loud were the trumpets and fanfare.

In its latest release, e(fx)clipse's version number has been bumped from 0.1.1, as released in September 2012, to 0.8.0 to reflect the IDE for JavaFX's maturity and stability. The system provides an Eclipse-based development environment, tools, and runtime for JavaFX 2.x and later as a framework for building rich client applications.

I spoke with John Nicols at MakerPlane about their passionate team of contributors from all over the world who are designing and building a full-sized two seat Light Sport Aircraft. Their mission is to "create innovative and game-changing aircraft, avionics and related systems and the transformational manufacturing processes to build them."

Could one radio be all you ever need for data, cellular calls, wifi and more? Software defined radio holds that promise. Andrew Back looks at how free software is one of the enablers in helping to put the technology into the hands of consumers.

In surprising news from jolly old England, Canonical announces that Ubuntu has developed an Ubuntu for smartphones and tablets. We'll be able to switch out Android for Ubuntu on many existing devices. The company also hopes that manufactures will ship devices with it pre-installed.