Catching up on Recent News
Stephen B. - March 11th, 2007
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Archive for the ‘News’ Category Once again, I’ve fallen behind with updating BeOSNews. To help bring the site back up-to-date, here’s a quick summary of recent events in the BeOS world. The Haiku Project continues to move at an impressive pace and has shown no signs of slowing down in 2007. Several key members of the Haiku project recently participated in a GoogleTechTalk, giving an overview and demonstration of the HaikuOS. A video of the presentation is available online via Google video, naturally, and it contains a nice treat for long-time BeOS fans: a great introduction provided by JLG himself. Also related to Google, information has been posted regarding the Haiku Project’s drive to be included in the Google Summer of Code 2007 along with a list of potential projects. There has also been quite a bit of news lately related to ZETA – as spotted by ICO, version 1.5 is now available after being delayed by a few months for some final polishing work. The 1.5 update contains the usual collection of fixes and tweaks and one very significant addition: the new ZETA multi-user system. The new version is currently listed in the Magnussoft online shop, but it appears that only an upgrade to 1.5 is available. IsComputerOn also reported on the release of a new demo for ZETA: Robin Hood (as in the game featuring the archer from Sherwood Forest, not the webserver). In application news, a new version of Firefox was posted to BeBits at the end of last month, built from the latest stable sources. Bryan Varner has been doing some recent work on the Transmission BitTorrent client, as reported by HaikuNews and IsComputerOn. For the PodCast addicts out there, FunkyIdeaSoft recently posted a Light version of BePodder, their “media aggregation” app; the Light version is free of charge and disables a few features that are available in the paid version. And progress continues to be made in the development of the im_kit; Michael “slaad” Davidson has written a recent blog post detailing some fixes and updates to the GoogleTalk and Yahoo! protocols, while Bernd Korz recently posted about some of the ways in which the im_kit has been integrated into ZETA. Several sites which had been dormant are now being regularly-updated again; the Weekly Haiku recently began updating once more, along with unveiling a visual redesign. Over at HaikuNews, the database problems have been resolved and the site came back online with an interesting post from Chris Simmons, who announced that he is willing to pay for Haiku-related submissions to HaikuNews. And Tako Lansberger – of Studio-33 fame – has been updating his site at a break-neck pace recently, making Studio-33 one of the most frequently-updated sites in the BeOS / ZETA / Haiku community lately. And lastly, we would like to welcome a new website to the BeOS community – OsDrawer.net, a very slick / professional-looking site that’s powered by GForge (an open source fork of the software that runs SourceForge ). The site offers BeOS developers the same sort of helpful functionality that SourceForge provides to the general open source development community: code repositories, tools for managing the project, and various communication tools (mailing lists, forums, etc). Thanks to Andrea Bernardi for EMailing us about the new site – and sorry it took me so long to post about it. The people behind OsDrawer have obviously put a lot of work into the project and it looks like an excellent new resource for developers in the BeOS world.
Over on Studio-33, Tako Lansberger has written a mini-review of his first impressions with ZETA 1.5. The review has a nice collection of screenshots that show many of the new features and applications in ZETA 1.5 as well as his experiences installing and using the new version. There’s also some hands-on information about the new multi-user system included with 1.5. The post on Studio-33 appears to be the first review of 1.5 and Tako plans to write more once he has had a chance to spend some time using the new version.
Once again, I’ve fallen behind with updating BeOSNews. To help bring the site back up-to-date, here’s a quick summary of recent events in the BeOS world. The Haiku Project continues to move at an impressive pace and has shown no signs of slowing down in 2007. Several key members of the Haiku project recently participated in a GoogleTechTalk, giving an overview and demonstration of the HaikuOS. A video of the presentation is available online via Google video, naturally, and it contains a nice treat for long-time BeOS fans: a great introduction provided by JLG himself. Also related to Google, information has been posted regarding the Haiku Project’s drive to be included in the Google Summer of Code 2007 along with a list of potential projects. There has also been quite a bit of news lately related to ZETA – as spotted by ICO, version 1.5 is now available after being delayed by a few months for some final polishing work. The 1.5 update contains the usual collection of fixes and tweaks and one very significant addition: the new ZETA multi-user system. The new version is currently listed in the Magnussoft online shop, but it appears that only an upgrade to 1.5 is available. IsComputerOn also reported on the release of a new demo for ZETA: Robin Hood (as in the game featuring the archer from Sherwood Forest, not the webserver). In application news, a new version of Firefox was posted to BeBits at the end of last month, built from the latest stable sources. Bryan Varner has been doing some recent work on the Transmission BitTorrent client, as reported by HaikuNews and IsComputerOn. For the PodCast addicts out there, FunkyIdeaSoft recently posted a Light version of BePodder, their “media aggregation” app; the Light version is free of charge and disables a few features that are available in the paid version. And progress continues to be made in the development of the im_kit; Michael “slaad” Davidson has written a recent blog post detailing some fixes and updates to the GoogleTalk and Yahoo! protocols, while Bernd Korz recently posted about some of the ways in which the im_kit has been integrated into ZETA. Several sites which had been dormant are now being regularly-updated again; the Weekly Haiku recently began updating once more, along with unveiling a visual redesign. Over at HaikuNews, the database problems have been resolved and the site came back online with an interesting post from Chris Simmons, who announced that he is willing to pay for Haiku-related submissions to HaikuNews. And Tako Lansberger – of Studio-33 fame – has been updating his site at a break-neck pace recently, making Studio-33 one of the most frequently-updated sites in the BeOS / ZETA / Haiku community lately. And lastly, we would like to welcome a new website to the BeOS community – OsDrawer.net, a very slick / professional-looking site that’s powered by GForge (an open source fork of the software that runs SourceForge ). The site offers BeOS developers the same sort of helpful functionality that SourceForge provides to the general open source development community: code repositories, tools for managing the project, and various communication tools (mailing lists, forums, etc). Thanks to Andrea Bernardi for EMailing us about the new site – and sorry it took me so long to post about it. The people behind OsDrawer have obviously put a lot of work into the project and it looks like an excellent new resource for developers in the BeOS world.
Spotted over on OSNews, The Register has chosen to celebrate the release of Windows Vista by publishing an article on the history of BeOS (yes, the connection escapes me as well). There’s nothing in the article that should be news to most BeOS users (and certainly not to anyone who owns a copy of the BeOS Bible) – but it has sparked a fairly lively discussion in the OSNews comments. There are some great comments from folks like Ynop Talton, the mmu_man, Jonas Kirilla, and quite a few others. All-in-all, some interesting conversation and opinions from some of the BeOS’ community’s most dedicated developers/users – along with my usual smartass ramblings, of course.
…sort of. This is just a quick post to apologize for the long absence of new content and to relay a quick update. The hardware in my normally-faithful BeOS PC finally gave up the ghost 2 weeks ago, after threatening to for some time. Dealing with some nutty deadlines at work, I hadn’t had time to properly deal with the problems and just crossed my fingers, hoping things would keep running just a *little bit longer* – no such luck. On the plus side, I’m now back up and running sweet, sweet R5 again (nothing makes me appreciate it as much as being such with Windows and OS X for two weeks), my beloved dual P3 having been replaced with an AthlonXP. It’s actually been something of a step backwards in terms of responsiveness/”teh snappy(tm),” but the extra heat will be nice this time of year. Stay tuned for a return to something (hopefully) resembling regular updates!
DaaT, of IsComputerOn fame, has spotted an interesting recent post on Bernd Korz’s blog about native DVD playback in ZETA. In the post, Bernd mentions that a developer has recently ported several pieces of software related to DVD playback and he includes a screenshot of the ZETA MediaPlayer application playing a DVD. I asked Bernd if the DVD support was added to MediaPlayer itself – or at the media_kit level – and his response was was that it was implemented “in the good old BeOS way.” Besides allowing DVD playback without the need for VLC, this could potentially allow ZETA users to rip DVD video and encode it in XviD/DivX, without any additional software.
This past weekend, Orlando, Florida was the site of the 3rd WalterCon, the April Fools joke that has turned into an annual Haiku conference. Details are popping up around the web – post-WalterCon articles have appeared on HaikuNews, IsComputerOn, and OSNews; there is also an extensive photo gallery on the WalterCon website. This year’s WalterCon also received some attention from outside the usual BeOS / Haiku community. Most notably, Jem Matzan of The Jem Report dropped by WalterCon and he has posted a great article about the Con on his site. In addition to providing a nice summary for those of us who couldn’t go, Jem has also written one of the most fair and accurate BeOS-related articles that I’ve seen from someone who doesn’t use the OS.
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