OwnCloud- An Open Source Cloud

Owncloud holds the idea that everyone likes personal cloud services, like Apple’s iCloud, Google Music, and Dropbox. But, many of aren’t crazy about the fact that our files, music, and whatever are sitting on someone else’s servers without our control. OwnCloud is an open-source cloud program. You use it to set up your own cloud server for file-sharing, music-streaming, and calendar, contact, and bookmark sharing project. As a server program it’s not that easy to set up. OpenSUSE, with its Mirall installation program and desktop client makes it easier to set up your own personal ownCloud, but it’s still not a simple operation. That’s going to change.

According to ownCloud’s business crew, “OwnCloud offers the ease-of-use and cost effectiveness of Dropbox and box.net with a more secure, better managed offering that, because it’s open source, offers greater flexibility and no vendor lock in. This makes it perfect for business use. OwnCloud users can run file sync and share services on their own hardware and storage or use popular public hosting and storage offerings.” I’ve tried it myself and while setting it up is still mildly painful, once up ownCloud works well.

OwnCloud enables universal access to files through a Web browser or WebDAV. It also provides a platform to easily view and sync contacts, calendars and bookmarks across all devices and enables basic editing right on the Web. Programmers will be able to add features to it via its open application programming interface (API).

OwnCloud is going to become an easy to run and use personal, private cloud thanks to a new commercial company that’s going to take ownCloud from interesting open-source project to end-user friendly program. This new company will be headed by former SUSE/Novell executive Markus Rex. Rex, who I’ve known for years and is both a business and technology wizard, will serve as both CEO and CTO. Frank Karlitschek, founder of the ownCloud project, will be staying.

5 Most Expected Android Apps of 2012

We have already seen great Android apps.But 2012, which is just around the corner, has some great apps in store for the open-source mobile platform. From amazing 3D games to ports of popular apps from other platforms, these are applications that users have been waiting for a long time. Let us have a look on some of the most anticipated Android apps for 2012.

Instagram: Instagram, which started as a photo-sharing application, has quickly become an internet sensation. This app allows users to take photos, apply filters, and then share those photos on popular social-networking sites. Even though Instagram is available only on iOS, it has more than ten million users worldwide. So, there is very little doubt that there’s a huge chunk of Android users eagerly waiting for the day Instagram arrives in the Marketplace.
Keeping in mind the huge demand for Instagram on Android, the startup has already started working on an Android app. According to Techland, the company’s CEO Kevin Systrom has confirmed that the team is already working on an Android app.So, since the app is still a work in progress, we can expect it to arrive anytime in 2012. Till then, you’ll have to make do with popular Instagram alternatives like Streamzoo or Lightbox.

VLC Media Player for Android: VLC is perhaps the most popular open-source media application around. Its simplicity, and the sheer number of powerful features it comes packed with, have made it the best cross-platform media player around. Come 2012, the VLC team will be bringing the same experience to your Android phone. Even though not much is known about the in-progress app yet, one can expect it to top the Marketplace charts soon after its release. The VLC brand name already has a huge amount of following, making it one of the most awaited apps of 2012.The Android application, which is in heavy development, is still in pre-alpha stage; however, if you’re itching to get your hands on it, you can always try out the early builds from XDA forums.

Firefox 10: Firefox’s mobile version will also get an update next year. Slated for an early 2012 release, Firefox 10 will come out with a slew of interesting features. One of the major updates in this release will be the addition of support for the recently killed Adobe Flash Player. Also, the update adds some essential security features like an antimalware/phishing frontend and a safebrowsing frontend.
On the performance front, expect a faster and smoother Firefox, as the release will include support for hardware acceleration using OpenGL ES. Overall, Firefox 10 brings an important set of features – except for the annoying Flash of course – that might finally give the open-source browser a much needed boost on this platform.

More High Quality, Tegra-based Games: When it comes to the infamous Android-iOS battle, gaming has been an area where Apple has repeatedly outshone the open-source mobile platform. However, recently, when a little-known game called Shadowgun appeared in the Android Marketplace, all eyes suddenly turned to the untapped prowess of Tegra devices. Soon, many developers started working on games that will run on Tegra 3 tablets and phones. Though some of the games have already come out, many are still under heavy development. Included in this highly coveted list of games are big titles like GTA 3 10th anniversary edition, Max Payne, Lost Planet 2, and more. Not only will these games give gaming on Android a much needed boost, they’ll also take the iOS-Android battle to the next level.

Jolicloud: Jolicloud, the popular cloud-computing operating system is planning on an Android application. According to the service’s blog, Jolicloud will be available as an Android app in the ‘future’. And, even though there’s no confirmed date as to when the app will come out, one can easily expect it to come out in 2012.Jolicloud has received a huge following not only among netbook users, but also among Linux users who are looking for a cloud-based Ubuntu alternative. Bringing the web app to Android means that JoliOS users will be able to access their data from anywhere.

Apple’s lossless audio format goes open source

Apple made its lossless audio format open source this week, allowing for others to view and change the code for use in their own software and tools.

As Daring Fireball notes, the format–which goes by the name, Apple Lossless Audio Codec (or ALAC)–adopted the Apache license yesterday.

ALAC was first introduced to Apple’s
Mac OS X Core Audio framework in 2004, where most users saw it as part of iTunes 4.5. It let users rip a CD into smaller compressed files without reduction in quality. Still, the resulting files are considerably larger than the more ubiquitous MP3, AAC and WMA formats, which compress music tracks even further at the expense of lower fidelity.

It also rivals the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), another lossless codec, that’s been open and royalty-free from the start, but is not supported on Apple’s portable devices.

ALAC-formatted audio tracks can be played back on software and hardware that support it, which for Apple included things like iTunes and QuickTime, along with the company’s
iPod–and later iOS–products, and AirPort Express hardware through AirPlay.

As Ars Technica notes, it took developers about a year to reverse engineer the technology to add support for ALAC files in their own software. That includes audio playback software like VLC, Boxee, and TapeDeck, which are now able to make use of the official code.

Top 10 benefits of DRUPAL

Drupal is an open-source rich with several resources that make it incrediblybest alternative amongst all available open source CMS (content management systems) applications. It makes the mission of web application development so unproblematic and picturesque that you can build Drupal based lovely website on your own. You even don’t need to be professionally solid for web designing or development.

Below are the top 10 benefits of Drupal:

1. Drupal Is An Open Source: Being an open source means Drupal doesn’t requireany license for selling any kind of development work made in Drupal neither it needs any royalty. Anyone can get into to the source-code of an application or program designed in Drupal. It doesn’t confine any program from being used in a firm or personal use.

2. User Friendly Content Management System: Drupal doesn’t require any mechanical dexterity for coding (like html coding). If you are not usual with programming and coding, even then you can make a website in drupal without problems. If you have entry to the admin panel you can create any kind of transforms on your website by simply using a web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, etc.) without problems. You can even copy and paste matter from MsWord or any other text editor as it is. As soon as you become familier with it you will be able to handle every module and node according to your requirement.

3. Search Engine‘s Favourite: It is designed completely from the purpose of search engine crawling and ranking. It endows with the modules for title tag, meta description tag, meta keywords tag, head tag, etc. Where you can put in content and text optimized for search engines. You can even epitomize a dynamic URL of your website’s page as a static one. That is why search engines adore the websites created in Drupal.

4. Market Capture: Drupal has incarcerated a immense market in web development. You can see thousands of well knownand fashionable websites have been designed in drupal. Such as:The White House’s website, Britney Spears’ website, Popular Science website, etc.

5. High Elasticity: Modules in Drupal such as: user administration, publishing workflow, news aggregation, meta-data functionality, etc. are fully ready for all vital future requirements. Extra resources like blogs, forums, e-commerce and calendars can undoubtedly be put into action any time in the future. Additionally, multitudes of third party modules can be selected from to enlarge Drupal.

6. Amazing Themes: Whether it is personal interest or a big transnational website Drupal based themes are rage at the present time. Drupal presentsthousands thematic default website templates absolutely for free. Additionally, you can get thousands of paid and free templates with Drupal theme by doing a easy search online. You can even use up a modified one into Drupal theme.

7. Incredible Worth: Drupal adds ab Incredible Worth to your website with thousands of sections, modules, mambots, etc. You can make any mode of website with Drupal, there are no boundaries. You can make from a unfussy static website, personal homepage to firm website, dating website, weblog, Myspace-like website, all depends on your vision and requirement.

8. Basic Quality: Drupal endows with astonishing flexibility because of which it is extremely congruent with PHP, MySQL or PostgreSQL, etc. Its largeattuned ability with jQuery, LAMP, mature API libraries and complete choice of modules are swiftly making it a great requirement for the core functionality of a framework.

9. Cross-Browser Comparision: Drupal is also very much congruent with most of the all fashionable browsers like; Mozzila, IE, Chrome, Safari and many more. It allows a website’s design and functionality to perform in the same way on all the browsers.

10. Fantastic Support: This is an open-source CMS so you will get plentiful experienced and connoisseur Drupal themers and developers out there on the internet. They are always keen to assist youfrom installation to accomplishment of a module. So you are never going to stuck with Drupal.

Microsoft announces Open source based cloud services

We see press releases go by all the time and most of them deserve the yawn they get. But, one caught my interest yesterday. At the PASS Summit conference Microsoft Vice President Ted Kummert announced that Microsoft will be offering a big data solution based upon Hadoop as part of SQL Azure. From the Microsoft press release, “Kummert also announced new investments to help customers manage big data, including an Apache Hadoop-based distribution for Windows Server and Windows Azure and a strategic partnership with Hortonworks Inc.”

Clearly this is a major win for the early startup Hortonworks. Hortonworks is a spin out of Yahoo! and includes many of the core contributors to the Apache Hadoop distribution: Hortonwoks Taking Hadoop to Next Level.

This announcement is also a big win for the MapReduce processing model. First invented at Google and published in MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters. The Apache Hadoop distribution is an open source implementation of MapReduce. Hadoop is incredibly widely used with Yahoo! running more than 40,000 nodes of Hadoop with their biggest single cluster now at 4,500 servers. Facebook runs a 1,100 node cluster and a second 300 node cluster. Linked in runs many clusters including deployments of 1,200, 580, and 120 nodes. See the Hadoop Powered By Page for many more examples.

In the cloud, AWS began offering Elastic MapReduce back in early 2009 and has been expanding the features supported by this offering steadily over the last couple of years adding support for Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, and Cluster Compute instances (on a 10Gb non-oversubscribed network – MapReduces just loves high bandwidth inter-node connectivity)and support for more regions with EMR available in Northern Virginia, Northern California, Ireland, Singapore, and Tokyo.

Microsoft expects to have a pre-production (what they refer to as a "community technology Preview") version of a Hadoop service available by the “end of 2011”. This is interesting for a variety of reasons. First, its more evidence of the broad acceptance and applicability of the MapReduce model. What is even more surprising is that Microsoft has decided in this case to base their MapReduce offering upon open source Hadoop rather than the Microsoft internally developed MapReduce service called Cosmos which is used heavily by the Bing search and advertising teams. The What is Dryad blog entry provides a good description of Cosmos and some of the infrastructure build upon the Cosmos core including Dryad, DryadLINQ, and SCOPE.

As surprising as it is to see Microsoft planning to offer MapReduce based upon open source rather than upon the internally developed and heavily used Cosmos platform, it’s even more surprising that they hope to contribute changes back to the open source community saying “Microsoft will work closely with the Hadoop community and propose contributions back to the Apache Software Foundation and the Hadoop project.”

Samsung Bada To enter Open source world in 2012

Samsung has announced that it plans to open its proprietary mobile operating system – Bada – to third party developers and device manufacturers in 2012, or in other words, make it an open-source platform, like Google’s Android operating system.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Samsung may have another trick up its sleeve to give Bada a boost: making the operating system open source. What the Journal posted is anything but a confirmation, however. It’s based on a tip from a “source close to the situation.”

The move could make sense, and it’s the kind of move that the high profile open source blog OStatic mused might be a good move for HTC to make. It’s probably an even better move for Samsung to make, since they already have their own OS to open source.

Doing so could help spark additional developer interest, and that’s a critical component of mobile OS success. With the iOS and Android app stores already teeming with quality apps and Windows Phone quickly catching up, Samsung could find the going tough if it can’t find a way to get outside developers to show Bada some love.

Open sourcing the OS could certainly help, but we’ll have to wait for someone in the company to confirm whether or not that’s in the cards.

Samsung, the world's largest technology company by revenue, is traditionally strongest in hardware development. By opening the Bada platform to external developers, Samsung is taking a similar route as Google, which allows software engineers outside the company to adapt and modify the source code for Android for free.
Samsung launched Bada in late 2009 and the platform is used on the company's cheaper smartphones in Europe and emerging markets. The company doesn't disclose sales figures for Bada and Android-based phones. According to market research firm Gartner, Bada was on 1.9% of smartphones sold in the second quarter, with just over two million units sold, while Android had a 43.4% market share, with 46.8 million units sold.

Other global handset makers such as Nokia have had challenges in growing the market for their own operating systems. Nokia, which sells phones using its Symbian operating software, opted to partner with Microsoft Corp. this year to make phones using the U.S. company's Windows software.
Analysts say Samsung has to increase support for alternative platforms in the high-end smartphone and tablet markets, at least in the short term, to lighten its heavy reliance on Android. Last week, Samsung unveiled its 11.6-inch tablet device powered by a new version of Microsoft's Windows software.

Best 9 useful open source web developer PHP editor

PHP formulates to as Hypertext Preprocessor. It mostly for the server s lettering form; which users create vigorously brought out interactive web pages.

PHP editors are mainly used by people who are working on Linux platform or by bloggers as well as webmaster too. These PHP editors are freely available and can be used by anyone for free to progress and performance improvement. There are many PHP editors out of which some of the best are as follows:


Syn – Open source text and code editor

It has scripts encoded and marked up. Syn is highly programmable text form. The program gives a neat way of open source texts. It supports active scripting which means you can extend the functionality with writing a script. It has many ways or features to check or replace. In addition syn supports projects, does multiple import/export features.

Bluefish PHP editor

It relates to producing dynamic formats. Provides many type of support for HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP, C, JavaScript, Java, SQL, Perl, ColdFusion, JSP, Python, Ruby and shell. It is available on most platforms such as Mac OS X, and Windows. It is developed using languages which are c or gtk. It has many options for creation of websites and other scripts.Features of this editor:

 1 Lightweight
 2  Fast
 3 A What You See Is What You Need interface
 4 Multiple document interface, easily opens 500+ documents
 5  Project support, enables you to work efficiently on multiple projects
 6 Multiple encodings support, can convert between different character sets, supports multibyte characters,  unicode, UTF8 etc.
7 Nice wizards for startup, tables, frames, and othe
8 User-customizable toolbar for quick access to often used functions
9 Fully featured image insert dialog
10 Complete translations in Brasilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Tamil. Some other languages are partially supported.
11 User customizable integration of many programs, including weblint, tidy, make, javac etc. etc.
12 Auto tag closing for HTML and XML documents
13 Escape functions for HTML and XML documents

 PHPEdit


PHP Edit was developed by the French company WaterProof SARL. It is works with the help of Delphi and computes in Microsoft Windows operating system, and is designed primarily for the PHP language, and even  supports many languages such as CSS, HTML, JavaScript, INI, PHPEditScript, XML,etc. it contains all type of tools to work out for your wishes. Features of this editor :
1 It offers multiple tools like breakpoints,watches,profiler,configuration assistant that help in easy debuuging of our projects.
2 It has advanced code editor.
3 It offers various tools for code generation
4 It supports many languages.
5 It provides deployment on remote servers with FTP and SFTP
6 It provides SQL / Database support

 HTML-Kit – full-featured editor


This is a type of HTML editor. Mostly supported within Microsoft windows. Mostly used for creating, checking and validating forms or scripts built within languages such as XML, HTML. HTML kit is available at a certain cost to the users. Experts can save time spent on using integrated developed things. This gives controlling features of many languages such as html, Ajax, xml, and others. There is much software which is being handled upon by it.Features of ths editor are :

1 It has Project features.
2 It provides clean installation with portability
3 It provides with navigation of tags and scripts
4 Hiding of lines can be done with code folding
5 Paste plus provides formatting feature
6 It provides incremental Search and Go


 PHP Coder

PHP coder is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) primarily designed for PHP programmers. Through joins of the PHP interpreter and official documentation, even local servers can be tested through this coder and it really saves precious time for the users. When scripts written within languages such as xml or others, coloring effects can be brought upon the snippet form in to beatify to make the user have easiest way to read in. except from other features provided above, it can bring upon nice forms relatively.

Win32Pad


It is a type of pads where added on filters can be done according to users choice. Many types of functionalities are been missing within WordPad; and it provides such functions. Editor is mostly installed and can be used easily. Files can be put on it through the within folders. Even here are some types of functions produced and enhances users with it. It is free within browsers.Features of this are:

 1 Filesize is limited to the available memory. (not 64k)
 2 Recent Files list.
 3 32k executable size. (C & win32 api)
 4 Auto-indent & Tab Size (2..8) support.
 5 Standard toolbar and statusbar. (You can show/hide each)
 6 Supports WIN (default) and UNIX file formats (read/write).
 7 Line Numbers.
 8 File change notification.
 9 Find/Replace
10 Goto Line # (Under Search Menu)
11 Revert feature. (Re-read the file from disk)
12 Full Intellimouse support.(Tested on Win95/98/NT4.0/2000)
13 Shows current location, # of lines and editing mode (Insert/Overwrite).
14 Open files by Dropping them from Windows Explorer.
15  Minimize Win32Pad to the System Tray.

 Komodo Edit – cross platform editor

This is a mixture of lot of platforms and with several languages for editing’s and other related technologies like that of asynchronous java and xml. It also includes PHP, Python, Ruby and Tcl. provides support for snippets for the browser part which include JavaScript, CSS, HTML and XML. The background snippet form even has certain features which can check codes and catch the errors within the lines if present. Mostly Mac OS X and Linux software support this software. XPI extensions allow the user to create his own types of plugins related to browsers.Features of this editor:

1 Multi-language editor
2 Standard editing features
3 Syntax checking
4 Multilingual Input Method Editor support
5 Code folding
6 Muti-document editing

 Context Editor


This endow with graphical supports for the developing controller context trees and the description of data flowing between as passages through certain web entities. This is used to construct good forms of context matters. It really comprises of two parts: the first area is an edition area where it relates to the beginning of contexts and other matters. This context editing can replace and even make deletion within the context areas.

 PHP Designer

This comprises of a free Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for editing PHP for the learners as well those trained users. It is consider bringing upon such works which enhances in removing errors, analysis and bringing on applications and search engines through by the PHP and other web languages. This tool is a productive tool as it saves out time for the users. This tool really pertains to as gaining access to its functions, variables, and other related functioned tabs. This tool been brought up is increasingly in demands for the learners and well trainees.