Haiku Theming System
Manette.be - January 26th, 2008

Hi all,

In the middle of the night (EU speaking) François “mmu_man” Revol wrote a post in his blog to tell us more about what exactly is the “themes” stuff he is actually working on. Recall, theming code first appeared in CVS during the last BeGeistert. Originally the code was developped for Zeta.

Basically: … “The Theme Manager is an addon-based desktop theme selector. It can selectively apply parts of a theme, create a new one based on the current configuration, add a screenshot to it. Currently, themes contain settings for ui colors, system fonts, background pictures, window decorator, deskbar position, screensaver, Terminal colors, font and size, sounds, and even the selected Winamp skin from CL-Amp and SoundPlay through a specific plugin.” …

So, you can do things like that:

For all the coders out there, the post contains plenty of information about code’s architecture, the BMessage and Add-On inners, information on how to write theme-compatible code or how to adapt yours.Some screenshots can be found here and there. Four sample themes are also provided.

Kudos to you François !

Category: News   -   3 Comments »

GoBe Thing Clarifications
Manette.be - January 23rd, 2008

OSnew’s writer Thom Holwerda posted today some clarification on the situation based on information he received from GoBe Software’s CEO himself:

• GoBe Software indeed has an agreement with the Indian company BLG for India and China;
• GoBe Software is not trying to acquire BeOS IP, maybe the Indian Company is but they don’t know about that;
• GoBe Productive is C++ and no Java port is ready or in current developpment at this stage. Porting GoBe to Linux/KDE then to OSX should be possible, though;

Read the details here.

PS: About the OpenJDK Haiku port, Bryan posted an update on his blog here.

Category: News   -   3 Comments »

GoBe software in the news
Manette.be - January 22nd, 2008

The story title is:

Born-again software firm dares Microsoft

It begins with:

“But first, flashback to 1997.

A group of techies writing applications for Apple Inc, founded a start-up called GoBeSoftware Inc.”

And you find this later in the text:

“Blue Lotus Software Solutions Pvt Ltd, the new company founded by a clutch of new investors and with equity participation by GoBe Corporation, has launched the product again from India.”

Read the whole thing here.

Source: www.beuser.de.

Category: News   -   2 Comments »

Haiku’s OpenJDK port accepted
Manette.be - January 22nd, 2008

A short but good one today:

Some days ago, the OpenJDK working group has voted to accept the port on the Haiku platform.

    The project was started almost a month ago by Bryan Varner and Andrew Bachmann developpers previously implied in the Java port under the BeUnited initiative.

Great news for our BEloved OS :-)

 source: http://www.haiku-os.pl/

Category: News   -   No Comments »

Watch youTube in BeOS
Stephen B. - January 20th, 2008

A little while ago, IsComputerOn posted about a very clever solution to allow BeOS users to watch youTube videos via Firefox and VLC. After following the a short set of instructions, you can simply browse to a video in youTube and it will then open up in VLC. It appears that this neat trick consists of a plugin that acts as a “fake” flash player and simply loads the FLV (Flash Video) file in VLC.

In some ways, this setup is preferrable to watching youTube OSes that do have up-to-date Flash players – for one, you can use the comprehensive VLC keyboard shortcuts, a feature that the normal youTube video player lacks.

The software and instructions are thanks to Andrea “xeD” Anzani, who is also one of the developers working to port Webkit to BeOS / Haiku.

Category: News   -   1 Comment »

FreePascal compiler, BFS and the Terminal
Manette.be - January 20th, 2008

“Goooood Morning Haiku” ;-)

I was checking my mails this morning to discover a great news for the community.

Indeed, Olivier Coursière posted about his success in compiling FreePascal IN Haiku ! He could do this after the (load of :-) patches and fixes brought by Axel to the BFS subsystem. Also commits related to Terminal probably helped too.
"Thanks to revision 23656 (thank you Axeld !), i am now able to compile the full freepascal source tree under Haiku !
Freepascal is not as complex as gcc. Nevertherless, i think it is a good step to the R1/alpha milestone as it is more than 100 MB of sources."

It seems we are getting closer to the Alpha Release Goal. Anyway recall that the Haiku Mind Set is “When it’s done”… and I think it is for the better.

Category: News   -   1 Comment »

Bluetooth and m68k
Manette.be - January 16th, 2008

Fast post today:

• Oliver Ruiz Dorantes updated his blog to update us on the bluetooth stack. He posted a screenshot of the debug tool he wrote and explains we will still need to wait a month before he provide something to test with.
• Francois Revol reached an important milestone of his Motorola 68k Haiku port. Indeed, he is now able to get to the Haiku boot menu as you can see here (in a emulator window). Another screenshot can be found here.

A nice day to you all !

Category: News   -   2 Comments »