Developer Software

The mobile operating system Symbian has been completely open-sourced, comfortably within the two-year time frame set for the migration project in 2008.

On Thursday, the Symbian Foundation--the not-for-profit industry group set up by Nokia and other manufacturers to open up and give away the OS--said all Symbian source code, comprising 108 packages, was now available for free under the Eclipse license and other open-source licenses.

According to the foundation, the transition of the Symbian code from proprietary to open source marks the largest such migration in software history.

Read more of "Symbian fully open-sourced ahead of schedule" at … Read more

Microsoft researcher Matt MacLaurin came up for the idea for Kodu in his kitchen in the fall of 2006, noticing the way his three-year-old daughter watched her mom browse away on Facebook. MacLaurin saw how different computing is now than when he was a kid. While his Commodore Pet was like a lump of clay that he could mold by writing software in Basic, his daughter's generation is using computers whose functions are already set in stone.

So he set about creating a new developer language that would appeal to the current generation of kids. He settled on one … Read more

A bug in Facebook's software appeared late Tuesday that caused some iPhone apps using the service to crash instantly, according to developers that spoke with CNET.

The bug was originally thought to be with Facebook's application programming interface, which enabled developers to publish feed stories into their apps. Facebook reminded developers on Monday that the old APIs would be turned off on Tuesday, a plan that had been in the works since last October.

Chris Diskin of Nodconcept, makers of Emoti (iTunes Link), an iPhone app that enables users to post status messages on Facebook with custom emoticons, … Read more

The beta of Office 2010, expected this week, is now available to developers who are part of Microsoft's MSDN and TechNet developer programs.

Members of the public are also expected to get access to the beta this month, with the announcement likely to come on Wednesday as Office executive Kurt Del Bene gives his keynote speech at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

As noted by ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft has already set up public Web pages for downloading the beta, although clicking on the download links returns a message that the beta is not yet … Read more

With a project called Closure Tools, Google plans on Thursday to start helping developers who aspire to match the company's proficiency in creating Web sites and Web applications.

Google is a strong proponent of using JavaScript to write Web-based programs, part of its Web-centric ethos. Indeed, the company has pushed the language to its limits with services such as Gmail and Google Docs, and it developed its Chrome browser in part to enable JavaScript programs to run faster.

But writing, debugging, and optimizing heavy-duty JavaScript can be difficult--in part because a given JavaScript program sometimes works differently on different … Read more

Despite increasingly better software, blogging on phones is still a real pain compared with doing it on a regular computer. However, credit is due to WordPress, which has gone to great lengths to make the latest version of its iPhone app much better for users to both create and manage their blogs on a small screen (and without a keyboard).

Besides a new look, one of the biggest changes is that the app remembers exactly what you were doing between sessions, so that if you quit it, or get a phone call, it will take you right back to the … Read more

With all the hubbub about Snow Leopard and Windows 7, there's another operating system out there you may not have noticed that's getting a significant update: Ubuntu Linux.

Ubuntu backer Canonical plans to release its "Karmic Koala" version on Thursday, and both the desktop and server versions of the open-source operating system take significant steps toward cloud computing. The concept of moving work away from the computer in front of you and into the network does have some merit, but cloud computing is today's fashionable buzzword, and Canonical Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth is sensitive to its overuse.

"What frustrates me is the term 'cloud' has come to mean anything with an Internet connection, including some stuff that really looks familiar like internal IT," said Shuttleworth in an interview. It's fair to say that in Ubuntu's case, though, it's not a stretch.

Built into the server version of Ubuntu 9.10 is Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, technology built atop the Eucalyptus software package. Amazon Web Services (AWS), a collection of computing infrastructure accessible over the Net on a pay-as-you-go basis, is among today's most significant cloud-computing efforts, and Eucalyptus implements many of its functions so companies can build their own "private clouds" using the same services.

And in the desktop version of Ubuntu, the cloud connection is a service called Ubuntu One, which lets Ubuntu users synchronize files stored on different machines and back them up on the central service. Storage space of 2GB is free, and 50GB costs $10 per month.

The Ubuntu software itself is free; Canonical sells Ubuntu support services. … Read more

In an attempt to make its blogs more mobile-friendly, Wordpress has launched two themes that will automatically be displayed when a Wordpress.com blog is accessed from a cell phone, the company announced Tuesday.

The type of mobile phone a user employs dictates what the different blogs will look like, the company said in a blog post. A modified version of WPtouch will be displayed on phones with "modern Web browsers like those on the iPhone and Android phones," the company wrote. A second, unnamed theme from an old version of Wordpress Mobile Edition will be displayed on … Read more

Opera Unite was going to change the Web, according to the hype from the Norwegian browser maker. Despite only being available for a number of months in a beta separate from the main Opera build--and the Internet looking more or less like the same place in the aftermath--the release of Opera 10.10 beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux indicates that Unite is about to become a standard Opera feature.

Unite is basically a peer-to-peer system designed through the browser, but its API allows users to create feature-rich apps using only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. By default, Unite comes with … Read more