BePodder Released
Stephen B. - April 22nd, 2006
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Announced a few months back, a demo of BePodder 1.0 was recently posted to BeBits by a group of developers under the name Funky Idea Software. Described as a “media aggregator” by its developers, BePodder primarily functions as a client for podcasts and video podcasts/videoblogs – it also supports standard newsfeed protocols like RSS. Not only has Funky Idea Soft provided the first podcast client for BeOS / ZETA, they have also pledged to donate 20% of all profits from sales of the full version to the Haiku Project. I’ll try to post some impressions once I get some free time to play around with the demo.
April 14th saw the release of BeBits updates to three of the Mozilla-based software packages which are actively maintained for BeOS / ZETA. A development build of Firefox was posted with the usual tweaks and optimizations – it’s also the first official BeOS release to contain the new “Places” menu. Despite the ominous-sounding new “Minefield” codename, the new Firefox build works great for me so far and solves a few stability problems I had encountered. Seamonkey, the former Mozilla Suite, was updated as well – it includes fixes to the spellchecking support and reading/importing NetPositive bookmarks. And lastly, the mozilla-based calendar application Sunbird was posted to BeBits – its first “public” release on BeOS.
There was a wonderful piece of news reported by HaikuNews and ICO last week: thanks to the work of some folks from the BeZilla project, the Firefox browser can now be run on the Haiku OS. A screenshot posted on the BeZilla blog shows Firefox viewing some documentation files locally, while another screenshot linked to by ICO shows Firefox viewing OSNews.com in Haiku. A big milestone on the road to “suitablity for public consumption,” and it really helps to drive home how far Haiku has come.
Erstwhile, wayward BeOSNews editor Stephen B. was recently seen posting cheeky comments at OSNews. Can an update of BeOSNews be far behind? Tidbits: * BeDoper – XBOX360 to run BeIA says Sakoman, YellowTAB hit by Codename Shortage
First reported by HaikuNews and ZetaNews, it looks like BeGroovy have sorted out their server problems and are back online. It’s great to see them and ICO back – there had been a decided lack of both grooviness and sheep in my daily reading of late.
During my recent shameful neglect of this site, BeBits updates continued to come in at a nice and steady pace. For a brief summary of some of the most interesting recent postings, read on.
On the off chance anyone hasn’t seen it already, there’s a great 8-page preview of ZETA 1.2 over at IsComputerOn. It looks like yellowTAB have made quite a few impressive changes in the forthcoming update and I have a strong suspicion that it will be the version which finally persuades me to give yT my money. There’s way too much good stuff in DaaT’s preview to summarize it all, but some of the highlights include: a new “info server” settings panel which gives control over many of the info_popper’s settings, SATA support for the 3 major chipsets, an onscreen display that gives feedback on volume changes/workspace changes/etc, an XviD encoder/deocder for the media kit, and built in settings for keyboard shortcuts (looks handy for those who don’t need all the functionality of SpicyKeys). The preview’s many screenshots also show some aesthetic tweaks to ZETA – the new buttons look much nicer in my opinion.
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