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