Mobile NewsForge runs a story on Matthew Allum, the developer of Matchbox Window Manager, whose project caught the attention of Nokia and made it into the Nokia 770 Internet tablet. According to the article, the Opened Hand company that Matthew founded is currently working on Matchbox that’s integrated into Maemo and Nokia 770. They list quite a few services on their Web site, even though the NewsForge article seems to imply that involvement with Nokia is the only business deal that Opened Hand currently has.
Looks like Nokia was quite secretive about the device development:
Allum didn’t know exactly what Nokia’s plans for Matchbox were until recently. “In the last year, it became apparent that they were going to make something rather than just pooling ideas,” Allum says. The relationship between Nokia and Allum extends beyond his work on the window manager. “It got to the point where I could suggest new modules and they’d say, ‘go for it.’” Nokia has provided enough work to OpenedHand that it now employs four full-time developers, and it is hiring more. Allum is glad for the opportunity to talk about the project, which has been veiled in secrecy for the two and a half years he’s been working on it with Nokia in Helsinki. “I’m under a whole lot of NDAs,” he says. These days, Allum is tweaking and optimizing Matchbox, though “it got to the point where it was what they needed.” He is working on more upcoming projects with Nokia, but isn’t at liberty to elaborate on what those are.
[…] 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. […]
Pingback by Nokia 770 :: Nokia 770 gives more power to Gnome 10.18.05 @ 12:38 am