Three companies contracted by Nokia to improve the software base of 770 are joining the GNOME Foundation advisory board, Ziff Davis Media reports.
Last week, three embedded software companies contracted by Nokia to improve Gnome for use in the slightly delayed Nokia 770 Internet Tablet announced that they had joined the Gnome Foundation’s advisory board — these include Matthew Alum’s OpenedHand, Imendio, and Fluendo.
Matthew Alum’s OpenedHand is the developer of Matchbox and had been working with Nokia for quite a while, as this May 2005 press release points out.
Imendio issued a press release regarding joining GNOME Foundation board. Back in May 2005 Imendio had another press release describing the type of work they would for Nokia. As you can see, the small group of developers are an elite bunch:
The main areas in which Nokia has been assisted are:
Using a comprehensive graphics library is the key to building attractive and functional applications. Nokia has selected the graphics libraries originally designed for the GIMP called GTK+. These libraries are used for widget creation and general graphics management in all GNOME applications. Imendio has built a persistent, rich text capable, clipboard and corrected bugs in the libraries them selves.
To achieve a low-overhead and low-latency protocol with developer-friendly qualities Nokia uses D-BUS as an interprocess communication (IPC) mechanism. D-BUS is used to facilitate a standardized bus for communicating data between processes. Imendio’s work involved the implementation of several enhancements and improvements. Imendio has continued working with D-BUS integration in both GnomeVFS and GConf.
The virtual file system used by GNOME is called GnomeVFS. It is used to abstract and supply a uniform view of different file systems and equivalent data resources. Access to data via OBEX protocol has been implemented. Imendio has also added support for D-BUS as an internal IPC mechanism for GnomeVFS.
To store configuration data the platform uses the same model as GNOME. The GNOME configuration repository available to all applications is called GConf. To strive for a uniform IPC handler for all purposes, Nokia has added support for D-BUS as an internal IPC mechanism for GConf. Imendio realized this project.
Fluendo is an open source multimedia streaming company and, unlike other companies, Nokia 770 is not their exclusive commitment. They are the guys behind GStreamer on Nokia 770:
The GStreamer framework is a central part of the Nokia 770 internet tablet providing its multimedia processing and handling facilities. As the central multimedia component in the Maemo development platform on which the Nokia 770 is built GStreamer will enable developers to create all sorts of multimedia applications for this innovative device.