MacMegasite

A group of iPhone developers will be releasing a new software tool today that will enable users to fully customize and control their iPhones. A Youtube video details what is possible with the tool.

The tool known as “Pwnage Tool” is currently a Mac OS X application that allows users to modify their iPhone’s bootloader to allow it to boot any software. In its native state, the iPhone bootloader is what prevents it from booting unauthorized (non Apple) firmware.

Once patched with this tool, the “pwned” iPhone will accept any software to boot, including modified iPhone firmware or alternative operating systems such as Linux. The demo video shows how a custom 1.1.4 firmware that already includes Jailbreaking and Unlocking can be easily loaded onto an iPhone. They also believe the modifications will support future firmware, such as iPhone 2.0, which is due for release in late June.

Early adopters should proceed with caution, of course. While the most common use will likely continue to be unlocking/jailbreaking, the tool opens up many possibilities:

Full independence from Apple’s vision on what the iPhone (and iPod Touch) can and cannot do.
….
You will eventually be able to backup your entire phone and restore to a state exactly the way you like it, restore straight to jailbroken state with installer, or even potentially install other OSes like linux (see iphonelinux.org) to your phone.
Update: Delayed until next week.

[via MacRumors]

One Laptop Per Child’s XO Laptop is an extremely rugged, energy efficient, low cost laptop designed to be used by children in developing countries. The only way most people in the US or Canada can get one is through the Give One Get One program, which ends on December 31. I got mine yesterday.

Late in the afternoon UPS delivered a surprisingly small and heavy box containing the laptop. There was no inner box and only a sheet telling me to go to http://www.laptop.org/en/laptop/start for setup instructions.

The laptop itself looks like a kid’s toy laptop, with a tough membrane keyboard that’s too small for adult hands. It would make a good first laptop for a kid in any country.

The OLPC laptop runs a Linux OS with a new graphical user interface called Sugar. It doesn’t have a hard drive, only 1GB of flash memory. A USB port and SD card slot are available for storage expansion.

The user interface has no windows. Only a single task is visible at a time. The home screen shows the active tasks in a circle surrounding the user icon, with other tasks shown at the bottom of the screen. The neighborhood screen lets you connect to a wireless network and shows other XO users present. Unfortunately the current OS version doesn’t support networks with WPA encryption, although that feature is supposed to be added in early 2008.

The built-in software includes several games and educational applications, a web browser, a painting program, audio & video recording, a few music applications, and a few introductory programming environments, including one that teaches Python.

All of the XO software is written in Python and in most applications you can hit Fn+Space to view the source code.

The screen can also be folded back, for use as an e-book reader.

The XO is a great laptop for elementary school kids and might be good as an internet appliance or e-book reader, but it has very little to offer most professionals.

August 21, 2007 — WESTLAKE VILLAGE, CA — MacTech Magazine announced today that its MacForge Mac open source project index now has over 45,000 projects. MacForge.net was created for not only the experienced open source user, but to introduce the Mac technical community to the wonderful array of projects available.

With the huge availability of open source out there, it can be difficult to find projects most relevant to the Mac. MacForge indexes open source projects that either have already been built for/tested on the Mac, or are likely to run on the Mac, without major porting work.

“MacForge was originally created out of necessity, but has quickly become popular among thousands of users looking for open source solutions on the Mac,” said Neil Ticktin, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief, MacTech Magazine. “And, we continue to work hard to keep the community aware of Mac open source projects.”

The site also features the ability to filter projects further, search, browse categories, and sort in a variety of different ways.

Originally created by MacVerse for MacTech, the site continues to evolve — so users are encouraged to communicate with the magazine on what it would like to see in the future. (letters at mactech.com) is a good place to let the magazine know what you think.

Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBB), a popular software C++ template library that simplifies the development of software applications running in parallel (key to any multicore computer), is now available as an open source project under the GNU General Public License version two (GPLv2) with the runtime exception. Intel TBB, as both an open source and fully supported commercial offering, makes parallelism more accessible for programmers and enables increased application performance on multi-core processors.

[list]
[*] Intel TBB is a C++ template library that adds parallel programming for C++ programmers. It uses generic programming to be efficient, but it has programmers express tasks instead of threads. This allows scalable programs at a fraction of the developer effort compared to C++ with threading packages.

[*] Intel TBB provides an abstraction for parallelism that avoids the low level programming inherent in the direct use of threading packages such as p-threads or Windows threads.

[*] Intel TBB extends C++ for parallelism in an easy to use and efficient manner. It is designed to work with any C++ compiler thus simplifying development on applications for multi-core systems.

[*] Intel TBB facilitates scalable performance in a way that works across a variety of machines for today, and readies programs for tomorrow. It detects the number of cores on the hardware platform and makes the necessary adjustments as more cores are added to allow software to adapt. Thus, more effectively taking advantage of multi-core hardware.

[*] Intel TBB is a proven solution and currently is being used on a wide variety of C++ applications, particularly ones where the notion of getting scalable performance is important. This covers multiple application segments such as digital content creation, animation, financial services, electronic design and automation and design simulation.
[/list]
Intel continues to support the commercial version of Intel Threading Building Blocks 2.0, which is available for $299. This product includes one year of technical support, upgrades and new releases. The commercial version of Intel TBB is also included with the recently launched Intel® C++ Compiler Professional Editions 10.0. More information on Threading Building Blocks is available at [URL]www.threadingbuildingblocks.org[/URL].

A startup in Alameda, Calif. plans to release a kind of holy software grail the third or fourth week of June. Lina said its dual-licensed Lina virtual Linux machine will run more or less normal Linux applications under Windows, Mac, or Linux, with a look and feel native to each platform.

As with Java, Lina users will first install a VM specific to their platform, after which they can run binaries compiled not for their particular OS, but for the VM, which aims to hide OS-specific characteristics from the application. Lina comprises a platform-specific application that virtualizes the host PC’s x86 processor… A lightly modified Linux kernel (2.6.19, for now) runs on top of the VM. Under the Linux kernel is a filesystem with standard Linux libraries modified to map resources such as library, filesystem, and system calls to analogous resources on the host platform.

The VM is essentially a Linux environment that supports standard C/C++ applications, or even perl and python, if their respective interpreters are installed. CTO Nile Geisinger explained, “You have to compile binaries specifically for Lina, but it’s fairly trivial, no different than compiling binaries for SuSE or Red Hat.”

In the big picture, the goal is really to bring the huge world of open source software to the masses, said Geisinger, explaining, “We work in an office park with dozens of companies, and we’re the only Linux users. Everyday, we are motivated to bring all the fantastic open source applications to the rest of the world.”

Open source developers will be able to use Lina for free, while commercial developers will pay an as-yet undecided licensing fee, the idea goes.

For more information, visit openlina.com.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project is asking software coders to develop free, open-source educational computer games for the XO laptop, continuing its push toward a September launch date.

OLPC on Thursday offered a laptop prize for software teams who create new games during a three-day “[URL=http://hackronym.com/olpc/gamejam/]game jam[/URL]” scheduled to begin June 8 on the campus of Olin College, an engineering school in Needham, Massachusetts.

By increasing the software available for the XO, OLPC hopes to encourage governments of developing countries to order more laptops, pushing the group to its sales goal of 3 million units by May 30. OLPC had collected 2.5 million orders by late April, but needed to boost sales enough to order bulk computer parts and stick to the manufacturing schedule.

An OLPC spokesman was sanguine about the goal, calling the date an arbitrary deadline that could also be affected by software and hardware changes as developers put the finishing touches on the beta version of the XO laptop, according to an e-mail from OLPC’s public relations agency.

However, production has already slipped from an original date in July, and could be set back further by spiraling prices. Last month, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said the price of the “hundred-dollar laptop” had risen to US$175.

Negroponte also says that his nonprofit effort is being hurt by well-funded competition from Intel Corp.’s Classmate PC, also a low-budget, power-efficient PC designed as an educational tool for children in developing countries.

The game-making contest marks a new effort by OLPC to increase momentum for the XO.

“The purpose of the game jam is getting people together to hack for a couple of days. Hopefully this will be the first of many,” said SJ Klein, OLPC’s director of content.

XO users already have their choice of certain games in the Pygames library of open-source applications written in the Python programming language, and the XO’s eToys application that allows children to create their own basic media and games, he said.

But in the game jam, developers could create new types of games that rely on features of the XO’s design such as mesh networking between nearby users, an integrated still or video camera, and a tablet mode for mobile gaming.

“There aren’t too many games right now that take advantage of mesh style networking,” said Klein, referring to the XO’s ability to use Wi-Fi to communicate with other users up to a kilometer away, and display them as icons on its Sugar interface. “There are networked games, sure, but they aren’t sensitive to the ability to display the presence of other users depending on where they are in relation to you, or to pop up on the screen when they are close enough.”

Beyond creating games that teach specific tasks like counting or reading, OLPC hopes the contest will produce templates that allow kids to build their own games, according to OLPC’s development guidelines.

In keeping with the group’s decision to use an open-source Linux OS in the XO computer, OLPC will release all games created at the weekend-long event under the open-source GNU General Public License, and post them on SourceForge.

For more information about OLPC, visit http://laptop.org/.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — April 26, 2007 — Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced plans to release source code for Adobe® Flex™ as open source. This initiative will let developers worldwide participate in the growth of the industry’s most advanced framework for building cross-operating system rich Internet applications (RIAs) for the Web and enabling new Apollo applications for the desktop. The open source Flex SDK and documentation will be available under the Mozilla Public License (MPL).

Available since June 2006, the free Adobe Flex SDK includes the technologies developers need to build effective Flex applications, including the MXML™ compiler and the ActionScript™ 3.0 libraries that make up the popular Flex framework. Together, these elements provide the modern, standards-based language and programming model used by leading businesses such as BMC Software, eBay, salesforce.com, Scrapblog, and Samsung to create RIAs deployed on the ubiquitous Adobe Flash® Player.

“Open source has been pivotal to the rapid growth of Alfresco, and it’s great to see Adobe take a similar approach to Flex technology,” said John Newton, CTO of Alfresco. “We’ve been very interested in using the Flex SDK to put a more usable and engaging face on enterprise content management, and this move by Adobe makes that all the more attractive.”

This announcement expands on Adobe’s commitment to open technology initiatives, including the contribution of source code for the ActionScript Virtual Machine to the Mozilla Foundation under the Tamarin project, the use of the open source WebKit engine in the “Apollo” project, and the release of the full PDF 1.7 specification for ISO standardization. By committing to releasing Flex source code to developers as open source, Adobe is embracing collaboration with the worldwide developer community and enabling other open source projects to take full advantage of the powerful capabilities of the Flex framework.

“Open source co-creation is a powerful way to build a strong development community,” said James Governor, Founder of RedMonk. “Adobe’s decision to open source the Flex SDK is a radical move which should attract a new class of developer to the platform.”

Using the MPL for open sourcing Flex will allow full and free access to source code. Developers will be able to freely download, extend, and contribute to the source code for the Flex compiler, components and application framework. Adobe also will continue to make the Flex SDK and other Flex products available under their existing commercial licenses, allowing both new and existing partners and customers to choose the license terms that best suit their requirements.

“The definition and evolution of Flex has been influenced by our incredibly talented developer community from day one,” said David Mendels, senior vice president, Enterprise and Developer Business Unit at Adobe. “The decision to open source Flex was a completely natural next step. I am incredibly excited to deeply collaborate with the developer community on Flex, and further fuel its momentum and innovation.”

The open source licensing of Flex is part of an initiative to engage the community in the creation of Flex technology. Starting this summer with the pre-release versions of the next release of the Flex product line, code named “Moxie,” Adobe will post daily software builds of the Flex SDK on a public download site with a public bug database. The release of open source Flex under the MPL will occur in conjunction with the final release of Moxie, currently scheduled for the second half of 2007.

For more information on the terms of the MPL and how to contribute to the open source Flex initiative, please visit www.adobe.com/go/opensourceflex or Adobe Labs.

Santa Clara, California, USA – Planamesa Software and the NeoOffice.org community are proud to introduce NeoOffice 2.1, a significantly-enhanced version of the Mac OS X-native version of the OpenOffice.org office suite that includes Microsoft Office-compatible word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database applications.

“This release is the culmination of many thousands of volunteer hours,” said Patrick Luby, CEO and Chief Engineer of NeoOffice.org. “As a result of this tremendous effort, we are introducing a major new version of a very stable, full-featured office suite for Mac OS X that supports dozens of languages.”

NeoOffice 2.1 is available today as a free download from the NeoOffice website at http://download.neooffice.org/neojava/.

NeoOffice 2.1 provides compatibility with Microsoft Office and offers a robust feature set common to all major office suites, including the ability to track changes as a document is forwarded from one user to another. NeoOffice can export to many formats such as PDF, HTML, Flash, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Its native file format is the open, XML-based, ISO standard OpenDocument, freeing users’ documents from vendor lock-in, a frequent complaint against proprietary office suites.

NeoOffice 2.1 also offers localized user interfaces in nearly sixty languages and supports text entry in Roman and non-Roman scripts, including South Asian, East Asian, right-to-left and complex text layout scripts. This has allowed individuals and organizations across the globe—from schools to non-profits to corporations—to adopt NeoOffice as their primary office suite.

“We’ve leveraged OpenOffice.org’s amazing internationalization efforts, which makes NeoOffice a great solution for Mac OS X users all around the world,” said Ed Peterlin, CTO and Chief Visionary of NeoOffice.org.

“When I started the NeoOffice project, there really was no viable alternative to Microsoft’s Mac version of Office,” noted Luby. “There were other Mac word processors, but few that included spreadsheet and presentation support. The cross-platform OpenOffice.org suite incorporated all three and featured strong compatibility with Microsoft Office documents. So creating a native Mac OS X version of OpenOffice.org seemed like a good idea.”

Based on the latest stable OpenOffice.org codebase, NeoOffice 2.1 offers extensive integration with Mac OS X. Key Macintosh features include a native menu bar, the “blue button” widgets characteristic of the Mac OS X “Aqua” look, use of the Mac OS X printing system, full clipboard support, drag-and-drop, Mac “command” key shortcuts, mouse scrolling, integration with major Mac email clients, and native support for Mac fonts. NeoOffice also ships with a plugin for Spotlight, the Mac OS X search function, that allows contents of NeoOffice documents to be indexed and found by Spotlight. NeoOffice 2.1 is compatible with Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later and runs natively on Intel-based Macintoshes.

“NeoOffice 2.1 is a standalone, double-clickable Mac application and does not require additional X11 software,” said Peterlin. “Our goal is to make NeoOffice 100% indistinguishable from any other Macintosh application in look-and-feel. Version 2.1 is another major milestone on that road.”
Supports Office 2007 Word Documents and Excel Macros

Unlike all current versions of Microsoft Office for Mac, NeoOffice 2.1 allows Mac users to read and write Microsoft Office 2007 (OpenXML) Word documents. Also, due to Microsoft’s announcement that the next version of Microsoft Office for Mac will no longer include support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros, NeoOffice 2.1 is now one of the only ongoing solutions for Mac users who use VBA macros in their Excel documents. Support for OpenXML Excel and PowerPoint documents is planned in the future.

Support for interoperability with Microsoft Office 2007 Word documents and VBA, as well as the Solver-like module in NeoOffice’s spreadsheet, is drawn from the ooo-build project, a branch of OpenOffice.org that includes several features which Sun has not yet integrated into the main OpenOffice.org code. Spearheaded by Novell, ooo-build is a collaboration between many individuals and vendors, including major Linux distributors. NeoOffice.org is proud to be cooperating with the ooo-build project to help make important features like OpenXML and VBA macro support available for all Mac owners. “It’s great to have NeoOffice making their work available under the JCA to OpenOffice.org via ooo-build and building on our substantial investment here. I’m excited about working with them going forward,” said Michael Meeks, Distinguished Engineer, Novell.
Improved Mac OS X Intel and Aqua Support

NeoOffice 2.1 is the only complete Macintosh office suite (with word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications) that runs natively on Intel-based Macs. Other office suites either lack a key application, run under the Rosetta emulator on Intel Macs, or require the separate X11 environment.

During the year-long effort to ensure NeoOffice would run just as well on Intel Macs as on PowerPC-based Macs, the NeoOffice team was also hard at work improving the application’s look and feel. “After three years of development and fixing bugs, the foundations of NeoOffice were finally in place,” Peterlin said. “NeoOffice had proved itself stable and useful and was deserving of the fit and finish of a true Mac application.” As a result of those efforts, NeoOffice 2.1 now includes near-complete Aqua widget support and a brand-new community-produced icon set called Akua.
Open Source Development

NeoOffice uses the open source development model to leverage the resources of a global community of volunteer programmers, users and testers.

“My goal was to create a self-supporting, volunteer-based project to build an office suite for Mac OS X,” said Luby. “I felt that if people really wanted an application like NeoOffice, they would help by reporting bugs, answering support questions, and maybe even making donations.”

“As the user base has grown and become more involved, NeoOffice has benefited and improved accordingly,” Luby added. “It is the combined contributions of our users and donors that have made NeoOffice what it is today, and together we can continue to make great Mac software.”
Availability

Released as free, open source software under the GNU General Public License, NeoOffice 2.1 is available now at http://download.neooffice.org/neojava/. Users are encouraged to download and freely distribute the software. Development of the application is ongoing by volunteer programmers, beta-testers, artists and writers. Interested parties are invited to visit http://trinity.neooffice.org/ for more information about helping with the project.

Homepage: http://www.neooffice.org/
Community: http://trinity.neooffice.org/
Download: http://download.neooffice.org/neojava/download.php
Screenshots: http://neowiki.neooffice.org/index.php/NeoOffice_Screenshots

Planamesa Software is a small software development company located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its founder, Patrick Luby, has spent more than a decade working as a software developer in a variety of commercial and open source projects including OpenOffice.org and Apache Tomcat using the C, C++ and Java programming languages on a variety of operating systems such as Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows.

NeoOffice.org is home for the NeoOffice open-source community and features news, downloads, FAQs, discussion forums, a bug reporting system and more for NeoOffice developers and end users. NeoOffice’s “Aquafication” and other development is ongoing, and interested parties are invited to help with all aspects of the project.

To learn more about OpenOffice.org, visit http://www.openoffice.org/.

Beginning with Ubuntu 7.04 (“Feisty Fawn”, to be released in April 2007), the PowerPC edition of Ubuntu will no longer be officially supported. The PowerPC software itself and supporting infrastructure will continue to be available, and supported by a community team. However, support for Intel Macs has been added in this release.

Full text of announcement:

The Ubuntu Technical Board has decided to reclassify PowerPC as an unofficial architecture, rather than a fully supported architecture, for Ubuntu 7.04 and subsequent releases. This means that packages and ISO images will continue to be produced, but releases will not be delayed due to problems which are specific to PowerPC, and the quality of the PowerPC release itself will depend very much on the extent to which members of the Ubuntu community drive PowerPC testing and bug fixes.

The rationale for this decision has been recorded in the PowerPC Review document at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCReview, which was derived from a discussion at our developer summit in November. The conversation has continued, and for some time we have pursued a number of sources for funding to continue the official testing and support for the architecture. Unfortunately those resources have not been obtained, and we can not make the necessary commitments to continue official support for this architecture.

A team of PowerPC users and developers has been formed at https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-powerpc and will be the focus of efforts to keep Ubuntu’s PowerPC support at high quality. We welcome wider participation in that team, and if developers devote some additional time to the work then there is no reason that Ubuntu on PowerPC should not continue to deliver high quality releases.

It is possible that PowerPC will once again become a fully supported architecture in the future, if the resources needed to guarantee its quality are found. The architecture is certainly gaining large numbers of users in embedded and console devices, and there are many reasons to continue to work with the platform. These uses are outside of the core Ubuntu mandate, however, so resources cannot be diverted from our server and desktop efforts just to address their needs.

Existing Ubuntu PowerPC releases will continue to be maintained for the duration of their supported life cycles, including Ubuntu 6.06 LTS which will be supported on PowerPC servers until 2011.

Democracy Player version 0.9.5 has been officially released, introducing a host of new improvements and enhancements since the 0.9.2 release back in November of 2006. Here are some of the highlights of the new release:

[list]
[*] Simpler, more minimal interface
[*] New ‘Share’ menu on each item allows user to email a video or post to VideoBomb, del.icio.us, Digg, or Reddit
[*] VLC 0.8.6 on Windows version that powers Democracy has been upgraded with improved Flash video support
[*] Video downloads are now stored in folders by channel for better organization
[*] New pause and resume download functions
[*] Improved BitTorrent performace
[*] Drop-down menu feature for auto-download for individual channels
[*] Automatic thumbnail generation on OS X for videos lacking thumbnails
[/list]
The application is immediately available in all PC, Mac, and Linux flavors. Read more about it and keep up with the latest news at the Democracy blog.