PR releases

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.