Hasta La Gadget!

GitHub is an exceptionally popular open-source community where any developer can find code for pretty much anything. But there’s a problem—some of that code contains extremely offensive racist, sexist, and homophobic, language. More »

While it’s not quite up to the level of RIM’s Port-a-Thon events, Canonical plans to have a dozen “core apps” ready to go for Ubuntu Phone when it hits shelves. The apps will be included on the phone, and aim to give users the foundation they’ve come to expect in handset software offerings. Developers who are interested in participating need to hit up Canonical’s site for mock-up designs.

The dozen apps include four social apps: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as an RSS reader. The remaining eight are your standard smartphone applications, such as calculator, an email client, calendar, alarm clock, file manager,and even a terminal. The 12 final apps will end up shipping with the phone, and will be in addition other core apps are aren’t part of the project.

Developers interested in participating need to request access to the MyBalsamiq website, where the current designs for the app are available, and where developers can add their own designs for viewing and comments. Mock-up designs can be uploaded, but according to OMG Ubuntu, final designs aren’t wanted.

Says Canonical, “As part of the core apps project we want to encourage our community to create and submit designs that can be used as food for thought when our community builds the apps.” Before jumping into the mix, however, developers will need to check out the project’s guidelines for designs, which can be found on the Ubuntu wiki website here. The final set of guidelines aren’t available yet, but a list of suggestions are available.

[via OMG Ubuntu]

Canonical seeks developers for 12 core Ubuntu Phone apps is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Mozilla said it won’t be launching its own hardware to run the in-development Firefox OS when it’s finished, but the company has just announced a “Developer Preview Phone” for putting the OS through its paces. It’s not quite the same as the mystery device we saw sporting Firefox OS at CES, but its specs seem almost as basic. The handset will feature a 3.5-inch HVGA touchscreen and 3-megapixel camera on the outside, with a 1GHz Snapdragon S1 CPU, half a gig of RAM, 4GB of microSD-expandable storage and WiFi, 2G and 3G antennae inside. Sure, that processor isn’t a beast, but an 800MHz S1 does just fine in the Lumia 610. A 1580mAh battery will keep the carrier-unlocked phone running, and Mozilla is promising OTA updates to Firefox OS to keep devs, well, up to date. At the moment, we have no idea how much the phone will cost, but the first units are expected to be available next month.

The developer handset is called the Keon, according to creator Geekphone’s website, and while not mentioned in the Mozilla Hacks blog post, it appears to have a more powerful cousin called the Peak. It’s got a 4.3-inch qHD screen, 8-megapixel back-facing camera (with flash) and 2-megapixel shooter round the front. A 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 CPU and larger 1800mAh battery are within, but storage, RAM and connectivity specs are the same as the smaller Keon. Mozilla may not be formally promoting this as its own dev handset, but it was still included in the picture which accompanied the announcement (see above: the Keon is in orange, the Peak in white). We’re getting in contact with Mozilla to clarify, and will update you when we hear back.

Update: Mozilla has confirmed that both the Keon and Peak are official developer devices.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Source: Mozilla, Geeksphone

It might seem like a crazy stunt that you would never think anyone would pull off, but it officially happened. A developer at an undisclosed “critical infrastructure company” was caught outsourcing his job to China for less than one-fifth of his six-figure salary. From there, the developer could sit back and relax.

A 2012 case study from Verizon brought forth the story of the sneaky developer. Only known as “Bob”, he worked at the unnamed company for a quite a long time, and was earning “several hundred thousand dollars a year.” Plus, he received excellent performance reviews along the way, noting that he was one of the best devs at the company, and that his code was very well-written.

However, Bob’s code wasn’t actually his code, but rather the job of Chinese workers whom Bob paid around $50,000 a year (which says that Bob was being paid around $250,000 a year). Instead, Bob surfed Reddit, watched cat videos, browsed eBay, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and then sent an email to management at the end of the day summarizing that day’s work (of the Chinese workers, that is).

Here’s where Verizon comes into play. The anonymous company asked Verizon for help in understanding some abnormal activity that the company discovered in its VPN logs, most notably a near-constant connection from Shenyang, China that used Bob’s login information. After taking a look inside Bob’s computer, Verizon found hundreds of invoices from a Chinese consulting firm in Shenyang that Bob used to get his work done for him. Needless to say, Bob is now unemployed.

Image via Flickr

Developer fired for outsourcing job to China is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Google has begun courting developers hoping to cook up apps for its Glass wearable headset, kicking off a series of Developer Update videos, but frustrating many with its decision to make the Foundry program US-only. Billed as introducing the Mirror API which Glass uses to bridge its wearable with web apps, the new video touches briefly on what languages the headset will play nicely with, as well as highlighting the upcoming developer events in New York and San Francisco. It’s that US focus which has many coders annoyed, however, given the appetite for Glass elsewhere in the world.

According to the Glass Developer Relations team, the Mirror API works with RESTful Web Services. That means coders who have already created software for other Google products should be able to dive right in; “you can develop with whatever tools, or languages, are your favorite, whether that be PHP, or Python, or even Java” team member Jenny Murphy says.

Exact details on the Mirror API are still in short supply, however, though one thing is clear upfront: developers from outside the US aren’t particularly welcome at this stage. That’s presumably down to regulatory and safety hurdles in the Project Glass Explorer Edition headsets themselves – Google has previously cited that limitation as the reason why the $1,500 early-access wearables were offered only to coders in the US back at Google I/O 2012 – which prevents the search company from offering a physical platform on which non-US developers could test their new wares.

Nonetheless, with wearable technology tipped to grow significantly in the next five years – one research firm predicted a huge surge in the segment earlier today – it remains a disappointing decision by Google, and one which potentially leaves US-based developers with an unexpected advantage over their international counterparts. The Glass team will presumably be following up with more on Mirror and other app details as 2013 goes on, but without equal hardware access the fear is a disappointing repeat of the insularity of other products like Google TV, which have failed to gain any traction outside of the US.

[Thanks Al Sutton!]

Google Glass team developer outreach leaves international coders sour is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.