[Imendio Announce] Imendio AB announces cooperation with Nokia

[Mikael Hallendal]

Imendio AB announces cooperation with Nokia
Wed May 25 15:45:00 CEST 2005
Imendio AB brings skills and deep understanding of the GNOME platform  
to the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet due to be released by Nokia. Nokia’s  
product creation process for high-end devices is complemented with  
Imendio’s programming expertise. This will result in a platform  
developed with the corporate strength of Nokia in conjunction with  
the help from the proven reliability and quality of the code provided  
by Imendio.

Imendio AB has been involved in several projects related to this high- 
end consumer product. The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet is due to be  
released by Nokia later this year. Imendio was contacted on account  
of the solid reputation of its developers. This especially applies to  
the thorough understanding of GNOME and GNOME related technologies.  
The cooperation has resulted in a now long-standing relationship  
dating back to December 2003.

During the period of this time Nokia has contributed several projects  
to the Open Source community. This has been partially possible thanks  
to the experience of Imendio’s developers. Imendio with its long  
understanding of Open Source software and the GNOME community has  
helped ease the process of adapting and releasing these contributions.

The main areas in which Nokia has been assisted are:

Using a comprehensive graphics library is the key to building  
attractive and functional applications. Nokia has selected the  
graphics libraries originally designed for the GIMP called GTK+.  
These libraries are used for widget creation and general graphics  
management in all GNOME applications. Imendio has built a persistent,  
rich text capable, clipboard and corrected bugs in the libraries them  
selves.

To achieve a low-overhead and low-latency protocol with developer- 
friendly qualities Nokia uses D-BUS as an interprocess communication  
(IPC) mechanism. D-BUS is used to facilitate a standardized bus for  
communicating data between processes. Imendio’s work involved the  
implementation of several enhancements and improvements. Imendio has  
continued working with D-BUS integration in both GnomeVFS and GConf.

The virtual file system used by GNOME is called GnomeVFS. It is used  
to abstract and supply a uniform view of different file systems and  
equivalent data resources. Access to data via OBEX protocol has been  
implemented. Imendio has also added support for D-BUS as an internal  
IPC mechanism for GnomeVFS.

To store configuration data the platform uses the same model as  
GNOME. The GNOME configuration repository available to all  
applications is called GConf. To strive for a uniform IPC handler for  
all purposes, Nokia has added support for D-BUS as an internal IPC  
mechanism for GConf. Imendio realized this project.

About Imendio:
An expert company in software development that provides skills  
refined and enhanced by a long running involvement in the open  
software development sector. The work done by Imendio has been  
focused on Linux based applications, but Imendio’s goal is to offer  
operating system independent solutions. Imendio is a small European  
company with a core of elite developer profiles. Thanks to great  
insight into the work done by the different participants in the open  
source community Imendio attracts and hires developers based on the  
code they’ve produced. This careful recruitment process has resulted  
in a team ready to face any application development needs.

Media enquiries:

Imendio AB
John Laerum
Tel. +46706960408
press at imendio.com
www.imendio.com

Note to editors:

http://www.maemo.org/ - Nokia 770 Internet Tablet Development Platform

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Imendio AB, http://www.imendio.com