Collabora and Fluendo Release GStreamer SDK 2012.5 Amazon

Last week, Collabora and Fluendo jointly announced the release of an open source software development kit (SDK ) for GStreamer multimedia framework. The SDK aims at easing the integration of Gstreamer  into projects and provides a pre-built version of the framework which is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. GStreamer is used in many Linux applications such as media players (Rhythmbox, Banshee and Amarok),  video editors (PitiVi), and media centers such as XBMC among other applications. It’s also often the framework used to play videos on ARM platforms with implementations for OMAP 4/5 and devices compliant with the OpenMAX standard. Gstreamer website has also been updated and provides links to download GStreamer SDK and documentation on the home page. The new documentation looks pretty good with fives main sections: Instructions for installing the SDK on Linux (Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora), Windows or Mac OS. 11 basic and 2 advanced tutorials. […]

IAR Systems Releases Embedded Workbench for ARM Version 6.40

Earlier today, IAR Systems has announced the release of version 6.40 of Embedded Workbench for ARM. This new version introduces several new features, enhancements and optimizations. The enhancements include a new source browser and text editor, with functionality such as auto-completion, code folding, block selection, block indentation, bracket matching, and zooming. Word/paragraph navigation have also been improved. IAR Systems also enhanced the compiler with improvements to the stack usage analysis functionality that provides calculations of the maximum stack depth for each call graph root and new features such as support for C++ source code and  recursion. A new linker directive check can be used to calculate the stack usage at link time to verify that the used stack space does not exceed the allocated memory. The inline assembler has also been improved and expanded with a large number of new operand constraints and modifiers. In a previous post “Green Hills […]

Experienced Qt4 Mobile Developer? Get A Free Nokia N9 / N950 Smartphone

Quim Gil, in charge of developers relation at Nokia, announced on Maemo.org, that Nokia is currently looking for experienced Qt developers willing to port or develop apps running on top of Qt 5 before its finally release in August/September 2012 and will provide a Nokia N9 or N950 smartphones (running Meego) to selected developers. The goals of this device program are as follows: Testing Qt 5 itself and providing feedback while it’s alpha/beta. Testing the Qt 5 libraries for the Nokia N9. Developers feedback for port from Qt 4 to Qt 5, whether is was easy, a nightmare… and comments on difficulties experienced, Qt Creator and the documentation. Testing new Qt 5 features such as Qt Quick 2, textures, transitions, graphics / video effects, raw OpenGL ES stuff, post-Mobility APIs, the new Qt WebKit, JSON DB, ongoing R&D on PhoneGap own JQuery based experiments, etc… This new device program has […]

Github Releases GitHub for Windows Client

Github has announced the release of Github for Windows, a client that makes it easy to use Github in Windows XP, Vista, 7 and the upcoming Windows 8. To get started, download GitHub for Windows. After the first part of the installation procedure, it will go through 2 eye raising steps: 1- Restart your computer, 2- Start Internet Explorer automatically (to complete the installation). Then you’ll just need to enter our credentials (or register) to get started with Github. It will automatically scan your local git repositories and ask you if you want to add then to Github. It will also show your Github repository as shown below. If you want to clone other people Github repositories, you’ll need to go to github.com, select a repository and click on “Clone in Windows” button (See below) This will start cloning the repo in C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\GitHub directory (default) and show […]

Getting Ubuntu armel/armhf Rootfs in Ubuntu 12.04

I’ve recently upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 and this is a great operating system. However, if you do some arm development and expect to be able to install cross libraries (armel/armhf) or easily generate an arm rootfs using the tools you’ve been used to, you’ll be disappointed. In Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric), I used xapt and dpkg-cross to retrieve armel libraries, but it’s broken for Ubuntu 12.04, at least on my system. I’ve been told to switch to multiarch because this will be how it’s done from now on. But I soon discovered this is work in progress as quite a few packages are not multiarched yet including python. Ubuntu developers also decided to remove rootstock (which makes sense since xapt/dpkg-cross will be deprecated), so if you want to generate a rootfs the “gool ol’” way (which won’t be supported much longer), you’d have to install an Oneric chroot to run rootstock, […]

Build Your Phone Android Distro with CyanogenMod Compiler 0.4 GUI (Cmc-pygtk) for Ubuntu

Lithid, a member of XDA Developers Forum, has recently released the 4th version of a GUI tool (Cmc-pygtk) to build Android for a given smartphone as long as it is supported by CM. The CyanogenMod Compiler is supported by Ubuntu 10.04 32/64-bit and greater, and you can either download a deb file or build it yourself by following the instructions below: Install dependencies:

Clone the source tree:

Generate a gpg key:

Delete the changelog or dpkg will use lithid key instead.:

Edit the EMAIL field in the Makefile and replace it with the one used to generated the gpg key. Build it for your version of Ubuntu. For Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit:

And install it:

Before using CyanogenMod Compiler (CMC) is installed, you need to install google repo tool:

Now that everything is setup, you can run CyanogenMod Compiler: cmc A disclaimer message telling […]

Detect Mobile Devices with WURFL in Websites and Mobile Apps

When designing a mobile application or webpage, you may want to know exactly to know what devices access your site or run your application for example to differentiate automatically between desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones and provide a user interface which is appropriate for a given screen size. This can be achieved with WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource FiLe), a Device Description Repository (DDR). This software component maps HTTP Request headers to the profile of the HTTP client (Desktop, Mobile Device, Tablet, etc.) and provides a description of the capability of the device that made the request. WURFL repository is an xml file (wurfl.xml – Direct links to version 2.3.1:  wurfl-2.3.1.zip or wurfl-2.3.1.xml.tar) containing the definition of thousand of devices which can be access using the WURFL APIs.  Several large Internet companies such as Facebook and Google are using WURFL, and ScientiaMobile, the company behind WURFL, claims that it is the […]

Xamarin Ported Android to C#. Results: Massive Performance Improvements over Dalvik

Xamarin has been providing Mono, a C# framework that can work on Linux for some years, and more recently they have also launched Mono for Android and iOS so that you can write or re-use existing C# application on the most common samrtphone platforms. But their latest project “XobotOS Research Project” goes much further, as they have entirely re-written Android Dalvik engine based on Java with C#. Considering the million of lines of code in Android, they have found a tool to automatize the Java to C# conversion. This tool is an Eclipse plugin called is Sharpen, and Xamarin has made further improvements to Sharpen which are available on Github. They already have ported Android 2.x and Android 4.0 to C#. If you wonder why they would do that, look at the “benchmarks” below showing Mono vs. Dalvik implementation of Android for binary tree, jovian and hashtags. Since the company […]

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