Haiku: Quake3, MediaPlayer, and Podcast Numero Deux
Stephen B. - May 30th, 2006
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The Haiku Project has been making significant strides lately, IsComputerOn have reported on two great new developments. First off, DaaT reports that the Haiku version of Be’s venerable MediaPlayer application is nearing completion; at this point, it is able to run under Haiku and playback most common media formats. Secondly, some good news for BeOS gaming fans – the recent work on OpenGL for Haiku (reported on in the last Weekly Haiku summary) has paid off, it’s now possible to run beautiful sight. There’s also a piece over on HaikuNews about Haiku Podcast part deux (now available). Sikosis, the star and producer, put out a call for members of the community to record and upload soundbites for inclusion in the podcast. The deadline for submissions has already passed, but perhaps Jason and I will record something for the next episode. Not many people know this about Jason, but in addition to being a BeOS humourist, he is also an accomplished rapper and death metaller… uh, death metallurgist?
It’s been a while since I last posted a summary of Weekly Haiku updates and lots of work has been done in the meantime. Some improvements have been made to configuration menus in terms of font sensitivity; BMessage Version 4 is now complete – in a nutshell, it’s faster, more stable, and stays crunchier in milk; there has been work done to improve speed and compatibility of Kernel Ports (low low level interprocess communication mechanism); and lastly Haiku HDD images now include the libraries libGL and mp4_reader – great news for Quake and AAC fans. On a related note, the webmaster of Weekly Haiku has posted that he’s won’t be able to make regular updates for the next month or so, due to a busy university schedule. He’s put out a call for any volunteers who are interested in posting updates on the site, so if you follow the Haiku SVN logs and are willing to write a brief summary, head over and volunteer. Thanks for a great resource, Danny – continue to post your summaries, and I will continue to summarize them even further.
As HaikuNews also noted, the German BeOS software respository BeZip.de has been offline for the past month or so. A whois lookup shows that the domain is still registered (with the status “connect”, which I’m not familiar with) and bezip.de responds to DNS lookups, but the actual IP it’s hosted on isn’t responding to ping requests. So, in a nutshell:
Thanks to Mr. X for sending in an EMail about this
This past week community member Karl vom Dorff unveiled HaikuBounties.org, a code bounty site for Haiku development. Code bounties are a simple idea: people put money into a fund for a specific project/feature, and the developer who fullfils the request gets to claim the money. Karl has setup three bounties so far: one for a native Haiku networking stack, one for a USB stack, and a general fund. And while the site was first launched only a few days ago, over $700 has already been donated.
ZetaJournal has recently posted some information on an interesting-looking new application called ProjectConceptor. Details are sparse at the moment, but it appears to be flowcharting/diagramming software which is similar in concept to OmniGraffle in OS X. The ProjectConceptor website mentions that it’s an open source project (MIT license) and that additional developers are welcome. The source code can be obtained via their berliOS page and an Alpha / development build is also available.
BePodder has only been available for a few days and already we have BeOS-related content to use it with. Phil ‘Sikosis’ Greenway has setup a Haiku Podcast blog and last Saturday he posted the first episode. The podcast features some general info on Haiku, a brief roundup of recent Haiku news, and a BeBits app of the month spotlight. It’s supposed to be the first Haiku podcast of many and the format seems like it would be a good fit to be broadcast on BeOSRadio as well. On a very tenuously-related note, there’s now a BeOSNews RSS feed available. The feed has actually been around since the site started, it just wasn’t linked on the index page.
A reader with the handle “datatec” wrote in yesterday with a reminder that Google’s Summer of Code 2006 is just around the corner. It doesn’t appear that there were any BeOS / ZETA-related projects featured in last year’s SoC, so hopefully some of the community’s developers and development projects will be involved this year. For those not familiar with the Summer of Code, it’s a program created by Google to fund student developers working on open source software, taking place for three months each year. More information can be found in the Google Summer of Code FAQ.
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