Google realizes browsers can be portals to more than web pages: they’re home base for browsing, bookmarks and more. Building Chrome for Android (but only Android 4.0, a.k.a., Ice Cream Sandwich) brings that desktop experience down to a tiny ready-to-go package. Google also understands the mobile lifestyle, so Chrome for Android comes outfitted with a bunch of features that make moving from your desktop to your tablet or phone seamless. So, what are all these cool new features?

• Tabs: Not groundbreaking, but always appreciated. Google Chrome for Android features a more elegant tabbing system.
• Sign-in and Sync: Sign into Google Chrome on your Android device and suddenly your desktop favorites and personal settings get synchronized across.
• Get Up and Go: Once synchronized, users can choose to have their desktop Chrome tabs already loaded up and available on their Android phone. Pick up where you left off reading or researching without worrying about bookmarking or sending a list of links to your phone.
• Privacy: The infamous incognito mode is here in Chrome for Android, making it easy to ensure web browsing activity is conducted completely in private.

Google even produced a cute little video about it all:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Again, only Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich devices can test drive Chrome for Android, which, unsurprisingly, is in beta. But it is readily available on the Android Marketplace should you choose to download it. How Chrome on Android plays into Chrome OS in the future remains to be seen. I anticipate a lot of crossover, but I think Chrome OS will stick around.

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First, let me clarify what I mean about the choice of desktop environments available until a few years ago. By no means were GNOME 2 and KDE the only options, or the only serious ones; there have long been a huge range of interfaces for Linux beyond GNOME and KDE, many of them very stable and usable.

But until recent years virtually all mainstream distributions shipped with GNOME or KDE by default. Unless you were a power user interested in trying out obscure alternatives, GNOME or KDE was what you got when you decided to install Linux.

Now, however, the field has undeniably changed. KDE has lost the prominence it once held, and GNOME 2 has been deprecated in favor of GNOME Shell. What’s more, a variety of new projects have sprung up, many of them endorsed by major Linux distributions, for creating entirely novel desktop environments. The most prominent examples include Ubuntu’s Unity, Linux Mint’s Cinnamon and MATE, an effort to revive GNOME 2.

Compartmentalizing Open Source?

The open source ecosystem has never been short on different choices, and in that sense the rapid expansion in the number of desktop environments offered to users is unsurprising. Just as there always will be lots of Linux distributions to choose from, so always will there be plenty of desktop environments.

But given the extreme diversity of competing Linux interfaces that have popped up in only a couple of years’ time, and the complete failure of the community so far to coalesce around one or two leading ones, this may represent something more significant than the natural tendency of open source developers to fork projects. It’s a bit early to say definitively, but I wonder if we’re trending toward the fracturing of the world of desktop Linux itself into different poles that will never be as compatible as they once were.

Traditionally, one could run whichever Linux distribution one wanted and still be able to use all of the open source software out there. Most programs were installable on any Linux distribution, and KDE applications could run in GNOME, and vice versa, easily enough.

But with different distributions now clinging to their own individual desktop environments, which in some cases are being developed in-house rather than upstream, cross-distribution compatibility no longer may be such a sure thing. With Unity, GNOME Shell, Cinnamon and MATE diverging in such different directions, there may come a day when an application designed to run in one of those environments won’t work in any of the others.

Such compartmentalization of desktop Linux seems yet more likely given Ubuntu’s plans to adopt the Wayland server and the HUD interface. Don’t expect other distributions or desktop environments to rush to ensure compatibility with those changes. Nor is Canonical likely to make it any easier to install Unity on other distributions, another restriction on cross-distribution compatibility.

Would the open source channel fall apart if desktop Linux distributions grow more distant from one another, in technical as well as political terms? Certainly not, since there’s a lot more to open source than the Linux desktop. But a shift like this could be somewhat of a shock for users accustomed to the interchangeability that traditionally has been almost a given in the open source world.

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A gracious tip of the hat goes to Business Insider, which spread details about the alleged “internal rumor.” According to Business Insider’s sources, Arora “is thought to have been ‘agitating’ for a CEO role,” and Google may offer him this position instead of losing him to Yahoo!. With Motorola already laying off a considerable amount of staff, a top-level shakeup after a completed acquisition is likely to go smoothly, playing nicely into my predicted agenda, in which Google uses Motorola Mobility to build uniquely sexy and new Google phones.

If Arora’s CEO appointment comes to pass, it’s worth wondering how fast Motorola Mobility will start building and producing pure-Google phones with hardware and software integration. I would set a target somewhere inside the first half of 2013. It’s also worth asking whether Google would proudly proclaim these phones were “built by Motorola Mobility” or try and hide that fact. Plus, the fate of many Motorola-branded items (Droid, Xyboard, etc.) is unknown. It may not be finically viable for Motorola to continue to build Motorola-brand phones alongside Google’s elite phones. But one thing is certain: it’s definitely not all about the patents. Will Google build the first true super-slick Android device that really outshines the iPhone? I’m hopeful, and I think it’ll be coming soon.

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ownCloud, Inc.

Since 2010, ownCloud has existed as an open source project for developing cloud-based storage infrastructure. But the commercial component, announced late 2011 with former SUSE exec Markus Rex serving as CEO and CTO, added a new direction.

ownCloud 3.0

This week, the commercial side of ownCloud gained focus with the release of version 3.0 of the ownCloud software. The new release introduces several innovative new features, including:

• Editing of cloud-hosted text files via the browser. Support for other types of documents, such as .docx and ODT, is promised in future releases.
• Application Store for installing third-party applications and add-ons. As of today there are only three apps available, but it seems logical to assume ownCloud plans to develop this repository as a revenue stream.
• Photo-gallery application. The open source world may finally have a real answer to flickr.

Other new functionality, as well as enhancements engineered by the ownCloud community, are detailed in the press release.

Several of the features listed above are novel not just to ownCloud, but also to the world of open source cloud software as a whole. No other open source project — and perhaps no organization in the proprietary ecosystem, either — is bringing innovation to the cloud as rapidly as ownCloud.

Nor is any other project so quickly expanding the functionality of cloud-based infrastructures beyond the basics of cloud-based file storage à la Dropbox. ownCloud is now about much more than just hosting files — it’s building a complete set of tools for accessing and managing data without ever leaving the cloud.

Of course, ownCloud, Inc. remains very young, and the open source code on which it’s founded also hasn’t been around for too long. Whether both ventures will succeed in the long run remains to be seen. But they certainly appear to be off to a great start, and the open source channel is better off because of it.

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If you’re shopping around for a tablet with a different twist, the Spark might be the right tool for the job. It’s far from being the show-stopping powerhouse of other tablets its size, as it comes outfitted with a 1GHz CPU and 512MB of RAM. But it features a 7-inch capacitive multitouch display and a micro SD card slot. It’s also not running Android, but rather, KDE Plasma Active. The whole package runs $265 US.

So why would anyone buy it? For starters, you’d be supporting the KDE Plasma Active community, because proceeds from this tablet will go right back into the KDE Plasma Active community for continuing development of the mobile platform. Plus, KDE is providing source code and public release that users and developers would have to wait for with Google and Android. KDE is aligned with the true open source ethos, and more importantly, the Spark tablet is a developmental haven with zero locks, blocks or restrictions on it.

Supporting KDE Plasma Active also will help legitimatize and popularize the growing base of non-Android open source mobile operating systems. I suspect mobile operating systems could become the standard OS of choice in the future as desktop operating systems slowly fade away from everyday use.

If you’re anxious to buy one, you’ll have to wait. The Spark is set to ship soon, but there’s no official date. If you want deeper developmental details, be sure to check out the full  Spark tablet announcement.

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We’ve covered Ubuntu branding — the artwork and names associated with the operating system — a number of times in the past. By and large, Canonical consistently has impressed me over the last few years for holding its own when it comes to developing a coherent and attractive Ubuntu brand.

This is particularly true when measured by the standards of the open source channel, where some projects lack any real branding at all (the MATE desktop is an example, although maybe not a fair one since it’s a new endeavor) and others are just, well, ugly (as much as I love Debian, it’s hard not to see a flushing toilet in its coarse, choppy logo). This poor branding isn’t too surprising, since open source developers tend to have much less time and money to pay professional designers than their equivalents in the proprietary world, but it’s still a reality.

A Look Back in Time

Canonical may have gotten good at Ubuntu branding in recent years, but that wasn’t always so. To get an idea of just how remarkably the face of Ubuntu has evolved over the years, it’s illuminating to take a look at snapshots of the Ubuntu homepage from different points in time, courtesy of archive.org.

Here’s what ubuntu.com looked like in October 2004, back when the operating system officially made its debut. That was a while ago, and the Web in general was less pretty back then. But besides the Ubuntu logo and the highly questionable screenshot, there’s no real content here at all that approaches branding:

Here’s the homepage again in February 2007, by which time it had greatly improved in the aesthetics department but still lacked an elegant logo or distinctive font or color scheme:

And here it is today, when the design is so consistent that even Chinese characters look right at home:

Ubuntu Brand Guidelines

Even good branding is only worth anything if the people representing the project — which in the open source world often means third-party users as much as those directly affiliated with development — deploy it. For that reason, Canonical has launched a new website, design.ubuntu.com, offering “Ubuntu Brand Guidelines” conceived “so we can all communicate Ubuntu with the same precision we use to make it.” It explains how different groups of people should use the Ubuntu name and artwork in various contexts to keep the Ubuntu message consistent.

On the surface, these “guidelines” may sound a bit Orwellian, and I’m sure some users out there will decry the site as the latest endeavor by dictator Shuttleworth to impose a unilateral vision on the rest of the community. But that’s a separate debate, and regardless of whether one agrees with the way Canonical has chosen to communicate its branding values to Ubuntu users and third-party developers, the company deserves credit for taking this issue seriously in an ecosystem where few other projects do.

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9. What’s In Store for Virtualization: VMware, like Red Hat, has now launched a virtualization marketplace for partners and customers. Here’s what’s at stake, reports The VAR Guy.

8. Cloud Services — Who You Gotta Know: Each week, Talkin’ Cloud pinpoints five cloud computing experts you need to know. It’s part of our ongoing Talkin’ Cloud 200 report. And it’s catching on with readers. Take a look.

7. Real Magic or Total Illusion?: MSPmentor explains why the Gartner Magic Quadrant may sometimes miss the mark — especially in the managed services market.

6. Branching Out: Level Platforms, as expected, has launched help desk and NOC (network operations center) services — setting up a potential showdown with Continuum (formerly Zenith RMM) and the NetEnrich/N-able relationship.

5. Cloud Partner Count: Microsoft has 42,000 cloud partners but it’s difficult for Talkin’ Cloud to pin down how many of those cloud partners are actually engaged with Office 365 and other Microsoft cloud services. Here’s the analysis.

4. IBM Counters Google Docs: Yes, IBM is preparing a so-called IBM Docs to counter Microsoft Office 365 and Google Docs. But IBM will likely focus on a much more targeted opportunities. Here’s why, according to Talkin’ Cloud.

3. Why Mobile Device Management Is So Darn Hot: To get the answer, just look at Apple’s latest sales data for iPads and iPhones, suggested MSPmentor.

2. Now This Is a Jailbreak: The VAR Guy’s David Courbanou describes how jailbreak hackers continue to up their gain in the world of Apple iOS.

1. Dell’s Overlooked Move: When Dell announced a closer SUSE Linux partnership, most pundits overlooked the most interesting part of the deal. It involves SUSE Studio, which channel partners can use to rapidly build software appliances atop Dell servers and Linux. Here’s the story.

That’s all for now. Time for The VAR Guy to disappear for the weekend — unless some good rumors float into his inbox…

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As Shuttleworth — who formerly served as Canonical CEO until resigning that role in late-2009 to focus on the design and development of Ubuntu — noted on his blog, menus have been a central feature of pretty much every graphical user interface that’s existed since the 1970s. Declaring, “We can do much better,” Shuttleworth has boldly proposed a new interface concept, the Head-Up Display (or HUD for short), which theoretically could make interacting with the computer faster and more intuitive.

Specifically, the idea is to replace menus with pop-ups where users invoke a particular action simply by entering a few keystrokes or speaking a few words. Here’s a video of the concept in action:

Novel Idea?

I wouldn’t call the idea behind HUD totally new. In a lot of ways it’s comparable to Zeitgeist, which does for file system hierarchies what Shuttleworth wants to do for menu interfaces: help users find information without having to remember exactly where it’s (often arbitrarily) located. And there are plenty of tools already in existence — such as Synapse, the Unity dash and the GNOME Shell overlay — that build on Zeitgeist or similar technologies to provide functionality pretty similar to what Shuttleworth envisions.

What’s novel about HUD, of course, is that it would replace window menus entirely. That’s a wildly radical step, and one that represents a huge ambition for Shuttleworth and Canonical.

The incorporation of support for voice commands, which Shuttleworth emphasized as an eventual goal, also sets HUD apart from most existing tools that fall into the same category. It’s a great “natural next step,” as Shuttleworth put it, although given the relative paucity of solid voice-recognition technologies in the open source world, I’m a bit skeptical that this part of the HUD roadmap will be implemented very soon.

Thinking of the Users

Canonical touched off plenty of nerves about two years ago when it moved the window buttons in Ubuntu to the left by default. And the introduction of Unity engendered long and ongoing controversy. I’m therefore left wondering how users will react to this latest idea for radically revamping a central part of the Ubuntu interface.

Since Canonical — regardless of whether it deserved it — has already earned ill will among some users for earlier UI changes, it probably faces an uphill battle with HUD. People will be suspicious of the new tool before they even try it.

On the other hand, the fact that Canonical is pushing forward with this idea is an indicator that it’s not worried what dissenters think. It has prioritized innovation over keeping happy as many users as possible, a stance that could be interpreted as arrogance, but also could mean enough people are continuing to download Ubuntu so it doesn’t matter.

After all, Canonical is the only party with reliable means of determining just how many people continue to use Ubuntu despite all the loud controversy over Unity. Maybe it will turn out that those upset over the interface changes are just a vocal minority, and Ubuntu’s innovative interface features will become the envy of the Linux world.

Or maybe HUD will prove an ill-conceived idea and drive yet more users to alternative Linux distributions. Time — a lot of it, because as Shuttleworth admits most of the code for HUD hasn’t even been written yet — will tell.

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First up is the release of Enyo 2.0, the cross-plaform development toolkit the open source community can use, expand on and build into to develop software for webOS, iOS, Android and the web in general. That’s available today, including the source code. Open-sourcing this SDK brings with it tons of potential for Enyo to become quite extensible.

But the crown jewel, so to speak, is the source code for webOS. HP is rolling this out in an unusual fashion by releasing individual elements of the OS at a time. According to the release:

Over the first half of the year, HP will make individual elements of webOS source code available – from core applications like Mail and Calendar to its Linux kernel – until the full code base is contributed to the open source community by September.

In September, the whole thing is slated to go live, with Open webOS version 1.0 hitting the open source community for all. A developer build will be released in August 2012. But why the staggered release? Apparently it has to do with “… making the platform’s source code available under an open source license.” Stretching the release out over a half-year’s time will give those in the development community some time to look at what they’re working with and plan accordingly for a final implementation of webOS on hardware. It also will give HP time to ensure the transition from proprietary to open source technology goes as smoothly as possible.

Could this be the smartest move HP has made with webOS? Maybe, if developers flock to it and hardware manufacturers find it appealing to adopt. But realistically, we might not see non-HP webOS products until 2013, in which case, this slow rollout might actually hurt HP. Alas, like so many things in the IT industry, we’ll just have to wait.

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A tip of the hat goes to TechWeekEurope.co.uk, which appears to be the source of all the buzz. According to its report, “IBM executives demonstrated their smart business applications running on HTC smartphones and tablets.” And HTC has chose IBM because it “see(s) IBM as the gold standard for enterprise partnership.”

The relationship between the two companies is more than superficial, too, since HTC spent considerable time ensuring IBM’s business software runs smoothly on HTC devices while also being super secure. HTC sees an enhanced level of Android security as the last hurdle for businesses that instead have been adopting Apple technology when high security needs are a factor. HTC also has made strides to cater to the enterprise experience by including “active stylus” along applications “developed with enterprises in mind,” according to TechWeekEurope.uk report.

I’m not surprised HTC has taken to building out its enterprise presence. Out of many Android phone makers, HTC always seemed focused on building a quality experience and many people seem to enjoy its replacement GUI for Android. In the short term, this relationship could be good for IBM VARs who are working a mobile device management angle.

Bigger picture on the mobile landscape? Android is maturing, mobile operating systems are becoming more sophisticated and their place in the world is becoming less special and more standard. Be on the lookout for similar strategies between big-name vendors and mobile device makers. We already have Microsoft and Nokia, Google and Motorola and, more recently, Samsung and Intel, although their partnership is not Android-related. Instead, I have a hunch Intel and Samsung are considering building a robust alternative to Android with Tizen.

I suspect we’ll learn more about the evolution of the mobile scene when Mobile World Congress 2012 kicks off in February.

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To be clear, I don’t use Microsoft Office exclusively. I process my words in LibreOffice whenever possible, since it runs natively and has a lot of features that I miss in MS Office. I especially like the autocomplete functionality and built-in support for exporting to PDF.

Thanks to the wonders of the Wine emulator (actually, Wine is not an emulator, but we’ll call it one for simplicity’s sake), however, I can run Microsoft Office — in my case, Office 2003, since that was the last copy I bought — just as easily as LibreOffice on my Ubuntu system. As a result, I’ve had it installed for years and keep it updated regularly.

LibreOffice and Microsoft Office Compatibility

And that’s a good thing, because there have been many days when having Microsoft Office so readily accessible has been vitally important for doing my job — usually because I’ve found myself in situations where LibreOffice has been unable to handle Microsoft Office files correctly.

In general, as most of its followers know, LibreOffice can open Word, Excel and Powerpoint files pretty well. It also can save data in those formats without problems most of the time. But occasionally — especially when the documents involved have complicated content such as comments or embedded files — LibreOffice just doesn’t cut it. In other words, it’s good, but it’s not perfect.

In most cases, that would be fine. I’ve been using computers long enough at this point to know there’s no such thing as perfection in the world of software. All the same, the problems with LibreOffice become untenable when they involve sharing files with other people for whom I do need things to be perfect. In my professional life, I can’t send Word files to others and just keep my fingers crossed that they’re not going to see a mash-up of jumbled nonsense when they try to open the file. So instead, I have to use my own copy of Microsoft Office to make sure things look alright before passing the data on.

The root of the problem, of course, is not the fault of the LibreOffice developers or the open source community. It stems from Microsoft’s clinging to proprietary file formats, or obfuscating its implementation of those which ostensibly are open. It all boils down to Redmond being nasty and evil.

But while that may be an excuse, it’s not a solution. Nor is it realistic — at least outside of the universe of the Church of Emacs — to refuse to deal in file formats that LibreOffice cannot read and write natively. An unfortunate fact of life is that the vast, vast majority of humanity opens and saves its documents in Microsoft Office formats, and will probably continue to do so for a long time to come.

Because of these things, I wonder whether LibreOffice will ever be a truly complete replacement for Microsoft Office — and, by extension, if Linux will meet the needs of general computer users as well as proprietary platforms. It’s not that I don’t want it to — I certainly do — but even if it’s unfair, I can’t foresee the total disappearance of compatibility issues in LibreOffice to the point that people who need to do real work in a Microsoft-dominated world will be able to ditch Microsoft Office entirely.

Of course, cloud-based office productivity holds promise for resolving this dilemma by making Microsoft Office and LibreOffice alike obsolete. But the cloud revolution seems to be coming more slowly than promised. Until it achieves its full effect, I’ll have to keep a launcher for Word in my Wine menu, sad as that makes me.

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For channel partners, the Dell-SUSE relationship is worth watching. It has been about a year since Attachmate acquired Novell and SUSE Linux. In recent months, SUSE — essentially a division of Attachmate — has scored multiple wins with Dell. First came a cloud computing relationship between Dell and SUSE, which involves VMware. Now comes the SUSE-Dell OEM agreement.

Smart SUSE Move

Keep a close eye on SUSE Studio, one of the best gifts Novell executives offered the Linux community before selling the company to Attachmate.

Generally speaking, SUSE Studio has allowed third-party ISVs (independent software vendors) to rapidly build application stacks on SUSE Linux. Most of the chatter around SUSE Studio has involved so-called software appliances, which can ease application deployments for channel partners and customers.

No doubt, Dell has relationships with multiple Linux distributions — including SUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Canonical Ubuntu. But SUSE apparently is the “first Linux vendor” in the Dell OEM Technology Partner program.

Sort of makes you wonder: Is something deeper brewing between Dell and SUSE? Hmmm…

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