Some idle searching on youTube for “Haiku OS” turned up a very interesting video demonstration of a prototype for user-editable GUIs. It’s apparently based on something called the “Auckland Layout Model (ALM),” which allows WYSIWIG editing of a GUI without the need for recompiling – or any access to the applications source code, for that matter.

Based on the video, it looks like an incredibly powerful way to customize a GUI – as well as being a clever extension of the heavily-modular approach taken by BeOS and Haiku. The video can be viewed below, but sadly not in BeOS (although there are numerous sites like keepvid.com that will allow you to download the video as an FLV file, which the BeOS version of VLC can handle).

UPDATE: Thanks to “Humdinger” for posting a comment with a link to an AVI version of the video, along with links to another Haiku-related project that’s being worked on by the same group of people:

Here’s the video as XVID:
http://aucklandlayout.sourceforge.net/videos/alm-editor.avi

For the other project of Auckland University, Stack&Tile of windows, there’s also a video:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~lutteroth/videos/stack-and-tile.avi
There are already patches for it available which have been been updated several times since:
http://www.freelists.org/post/haiku-development/Stack-Tile-for-Haiku

• A new post in Oliver’s blog tells us that progress has been made on the bluetooth preference app.
• Candidates for the Haikuware’s Feb. 1st Thank You Award are now known. Please read ahead here and vote for your Hero :-)
• On the Polish Haiku-OS.pl site you can read that mmu_man has just fixed the last thing that prevented cd booting.  Don’t ask me how to test it, the only thing I know is that you need rev. 28965+. Also it is a good thing for the alpha release.
• Altough not started yet, Google Summer of Code 2009 is being anticipated and prepared as you can read on the haiku mailing-list.  things like flyers and tests for applicants are being discussed.

As 0033 and Manette have been doing a great job keeping the site’s content up-to-date, I’ve been doing a bit of playing around with behind-the-scenes stuff. First, a little background: one thing I’ve always disliked about blogging applications is that their handling of comments tends to fragment reader discussion more than (E.g.) a forum or a newsgroup. And even when there’s a lively discussion attached to a post, it usually dies out when that post gets pushed off the frontpage by newer items – rather than when people lose interest in the discussion.

Enter my rather hacked-together solution: an “All Comments” page that displays a forum-like index of recent comments, grouped by post. There are still a few missing pieces – mainly timezone options (everything is in Atlantic Time right now, aka GMT-4) and the ability for readers to create a new thread (a la a real forum). But it’s close enough to make live at this point and add it to the navigation links on the lefthand side.

If anyone is interested in the technical details, read on.

Ever wanted to get your hands on a piece of true Be history? Check out this ebay add! Cameron Mac Millan, once a employe at Be inc., is selling a very rare BeBox prototype that was saved from the scrapheap. This BeBox machine was build before Be switched to PPC and runs on two AT&T Hobbit processors.

The computer is said to run fine although you will have to connect it to your own monitor, mouse and keyboard as they are not included. It does have a modem and video card on-board. Extra cool is the San Jose Sharks hockey team logo (see below) filling in the space for the final BeOS logo…

At the moment of posting this bidding starts at $511,-. There’s five days left to place a bid for this fourteen year old 58th BeBox build by Be inc.

Like last year, François Revol will represent Haiku at the Fosdem conference held in Brussels on February 7 & 8. Fosdem is a non-commercial event with as main goal to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet. François, accompanied by BeOSFrance’s webmaster Rémi Grumeau, Ithamar Idemar and others will man a stand to promote Haiku. Together with Syllable, ReactOS and various Linux stands, Haiku is in good company and I’m sure that this will attract just the right audience.

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After some poking around the always active Karl von Dorf (Haikuware) has found someone willing to start hacking at the remaining bugs that are blocking Haiku from releasing Alpha 1. Karl created a Haiku dev. project on getafreelancer.com and to his surprise found a developer who offered to contribute on Haiku development. Obviously, there have been numerous people who exitedly volunteerd to contribute from whom we we’ve never heard again so we’ll have to wait and see, I’de say, let’s inaugurate this guy! Read more here.

The UK based Linux magazine ‘Linux Format’ (not so) recently featured a nice article on Haiku, now available as .pdf. In the article the author tries to find out if Haiku is or can be a viable alternative as operating system and if it can compete with Linux in the future. Additionaly there is some background information on BeOS and why and how the openBeOS project started. The article concludes with a short step-by-step tutorial on to get Haiku running in a virtual machine on Linux.

Overall the article, written by Graham Morrison, is mildly positive. The well known troubles are covered, on of the first things Graham runs into is that the pre-alpha releases don’t didn’t include a webbrowser. He also notes the total lack of productivity software. Most impressive is Haiku’s speed and responsiveness.

Some quotes:

…Why, when Linux is such a powerful and fully featured operating system, would someone choose to run an arguably inferior, less popular alternative? The answer is because we can.

…Sure enough, a single click reveals an Xfce-like cluster of menus, one of which is labelled ‘Applications’. This would hide the web browser – if one were installed. Instead, it lists a dozen or so technical demos, none of which add any functionality to the desktop.

…Unfortunately, there’s very little productivity software available, which is Haiku’s biggest problem at the moment.

…A recent port of AbiWord and Firefox is all you’d need for most small office environments, and you’d be able to install Haiku on virtually any spare machine in the office. It would also feel quicker than most other operating systems, Linux included, and the limitations in the desktop environment wouldn’t be important.

All in all the article is fair and good looking with a couple of nice screenshots. Some of the problems the author ran into might be caused by the fact that he was testing Haiku in a virtual machine instead of on real hardware. The conclusion of the article ends with the words: This is the computer desktop we should always have had!

Get the four page (.pdf) article form here, thanks to haiku-os.it for the link.

The bounty-poll mentioned below closed today with 175 votes. The final results can be viewed here.

Byfar the most popular potential bounty is the wireless network stack implementation, winning the poll with almost 34%. This is a huge task though and the bounty needs some more funds. Currently there is around $ 750,- available, and in case the failed macbook bounty is stopped those funds will be transferred to the new bounty, that is if no one wants a refund.

Regarding a wireless bounty, Ithamar and Fredrik Holmqvist were looking into wireless, and Urias McCollough reported on Haiku’s website that Ithamar “would like to work on porting FreeBSD’s wireless stack where Fredrik Holmqvist left off”.

The Haiku alpha bugs came in second, as mentioned by Karl this might not be valid option for a bounty. The bugs are being worked on but cannot be resolved by a single person, especially not by someone who’s not in the Haiku core development team.

The Flash support bounty ended third, this bounty is already open with a funds pool of around $ 425,- as with the wireless network bounty, this bounty needs some donations. If in these times of crisis you happen to have some pocketchange, this is the moment to donate!