Here at OSNews we believe that in many ways the future of computing is mobile. It's also a pretty exciting field, since it's been so dynamic over the past ten years, with platforms rising and falling, and no one vendor ever rising to dominate. But this "wild west" market can be a real source of anxiety for mobile-oriented software developers, who have to gamble on which platform to support, or go to the extra effort of placing multiple bets. Maybe it's not a huge problem for hobbyists or developers of simplistic apps, but as the devices get more powerful, it's enabling the development of more powerful apps. If only these developers could develop a sophisticated mobile app that could be deployed on all the major mobile platforms. Now they can. There's an open mobile framework called Rhodes that allows developers to write an app that will deploy on iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android.

While most people focus on Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org as being each other's competitors, there's a third player in this market: KOffice. While KOffice is obviously geared towards use on KDE, it's available for Windows, Mac OS X, and GNOME-based distributions as well, making it much more platform-independent than Microsoft's Office suite. Version 2.0.0 was released today, and comes with a whole boatload of improvements.

"EarCandy is a PulseAudio volume manager that automatically changes your sound depending on the current application using it. For instance if you listen to music and a Skype call comes in, the music will fade out (based on your settings) until it's turned off, and the skype sound will be the only one running. Or if you listen to music and then play a YouTube video, the music will be again turned off and you will only hear the sound of the YouTube video. The application doesn't have a fancy interface, it only does what it's supposed to, and does it well."

FreeBSD's jails technology received an interesting new feature. "Add hierarchical jails. A jail may further virtualize its environment by creating a child jail, which is visible to that jail and to any parent jails. Child jails may be restricted more than their parents, but never less. Jail names reflect this hierarchy, being MIB-style dot-separated strings."

The Genode project has released the version 9.05 of their operating-system framework. The highlights as detailed in the release notes are the support of the OKL4 kernel as base platform, the introduction of basic USB support, the integration of Qt4 into the main-line source tree, and 64-bit support.

The news has been out for a few hours already, but we were waiting for some official documentation and sources until we would publish it: Psystar, the Macintosh "clone" maker, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Apparently, the small company has a debt of USD 259000. The filing was made on a voluntary basis, and according to Psystar the financial troubles arise from the economic downturn.