It’s been a busy year! Since ACCESS joined the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board last year, and began participating in planning for the GNOME Mobile and Embedded Initiative at GUADEC 2006, a lot of things have been happening.

• ACCESS released the “Hiker Projectâ€? as an open source project in February
• “GNOME Mobileâ€? had its official roll out at the Embedded Linux Conference in San Jose in April, with ACCESS representatives participating
• The Linux Phone Standards Forum released an initial set of core “Enablerâ€? API specifications
• ACCESS participated in the Fourth Desktop Architects Meeting, and led the Mobile “Birds of a Featherâ€? session
• ACCESS’ Director of Open Source Technologies, David “Leftyâ€? Schlesinger, presented on Hiker at the Ottawa Linux Symposium and at GUADEC 2007

Some highlights:

GUADEC 2007

GUADEC (the GNOME Users’ and Developers’ European Conference) was held in Birmingham, England this year, and attracted over 600 attendees. ACCESS was proud to be a silver sponsor of the conference this year, as well as to have been selected to present on the Hiker Project at the conference.

There was a lot of interest in Hiker—the talk was well-attended, and we could have easily gone into the next presentation slot answering questions if we hadn’t finally cut things off to clear the room for the next speaker. In the GNOME Mobile meeting, we began looking at incorporating Hiker into the next regular GNOME release. GNOME 2.20 is intended to be the first attempt at a “mobile ready� version of the GNOME platform.

In addition to the regular GNOME Foundation general meeting, and the meeting of the Foundation’s advisory board, there were a number of other useful and exciting presentations and workshops, highlighting efforts such as OpenedHand’s “Clutter� library for developing rich user experience on top of GTK, Bluetooth integration into GNOME, the PulseAudio project, and some work on exmap to turn it into a useful tool for performance analysis on mobile devices, among many, many others. Ari Jaaksi of Nokia’s Open Source Software Office gave the opening keynote, on using open source in real-world product development, and Doc Searls gave a thoughtful final keynote speech on how the language we use to discuss things defines how we conceptualize those things and who controls them.

We’re looking forward to GUADEC 2008 in Istanbul!

ACCESS to Host BlueZ Developers Meeting

ACCESS Systems Europe will be the host of the next BlueZ Developers’ Conference, to be held at ACCESS’ offices in Montpellier, France, from 12 through 14 September. ACCESS engineers have been participants in the BlueZ project for some time now, contributing bug fixes and working on features like the A2DP advanced audio profile.

The agenda for this, the third BlueZ conference, includes integration of Bluetooth 2.1 into the BlueZ stack, getting support for the headset/handsfree and A2DP profiles upstream, and working on Bluetooth-related GTK widgets.

LinuxWorld San Francisco

ACCESS is going to be hosting a Developer Day at LinuxWorld in San Francisco on Tuesday, August 7th.

Since the ACCESS Linux Platform is built on top of standard GNOME technologies like GTK+, Gstreamer, BlueZ and the like, programming for the ACCESS Linux Platform is going to be very familiar. There are additional APIs to take advantage of some of the unique aspects of the platform, but a regular GTK application will port over cleanly. We’re going to be showing some of that at the show, as well as giving some talks on topics like writing “Orange-compatible� applications, as well as hand-on workshops with our Eclipse-based tool suites, and much more. More information is available at http://www.access-company.com/developers/events/linuxworld/index.html

Linux Phone Standards Forum Releases Specifications

The Linux Phone Standards Forum (www.lipsforum.org) is a consortium of carriers, hardware manufacturers and software developers working together on standardizing application development on telephony devices to increase the adoption of Linux and other open source technologies on cellular phones and similar devices. ACCESS, a founding member, is on the Forum’s Board of Directors and ACCESS employees have been significant contributors to the work being done by the Forum.

LiPS released a number of specifications this past June, including the Architectural Reference Model, Address Book and Voice Call Enabler, and User Interface Services (Widget sets, Key Navigation and Text Input Method APIs– based on GTK). Before the end of this year, additional specifications will be released, including Telephony, Messaging, Calendar, IM, Presence and additional User Interface Services API specifications.

So, we’ve had a lot going on, but there’s more coming. LinuxWorld is in August, ACCESS is sponsoring the Open Source in Mobile 2007 conference in Madrid, Spain, in September—and there’s going to be a significant developer orientation there this year, too—the GNOME Summit is in October…

ACCESS is a major participant in open source activities from the community level to the consortium level. Our belief that the benefits we derive from working with open source are proportional to our direct involvement in, and support of, the open source community is a key to our success. For more information on specific community activities, or for questions related to ACCESS and open source software, please contact David “Lefty� Schlesinger, Director of Open Source Technologies,<>.