Progress on Haiku Webkit-based Browser
Stephen B. - June 22nd, 2009

Last Friday, an update was posted with details of the progress that Ryan Leavengood and Maxime Simon have made in their efforts to develop a native, webkit-based browser for Haiku. Several other sites have already picked up the news, including IsComputerOn and OSNews.

The amount of progress that they’ve made in a relatively short time is very encouraging – the basic GUI and browser functionality is ready (in a preliminary stage, at least), recent webkit releases have been successfully compiled in Haiku, and work is underway to integrate the rendering engine with the GUI. The progress report also contains two screenshots of the current GUI (screenshot 1, screenshot 2).

The general direction that they’ve chosen is also encouraging – based on the update, it appears that Ryan and Maxime’s goal is to combine the best concepts from NetPositive (bookmark management, etc) and Google Chrome (process isolation, tab management, etc).

Category: News   -   No Comments »

Blast from the Past: Be Share Dividends
Stephen B. - June 14th, 2009

A few days back, Adam “Kancept” McNutt alerted me to an interesting tidbit: in a nutshell, it appears that the final chapter in the Be Inc. saga has finally come to a close. Nearly a decade after Be’s IP assets were sold to Palm (now Access Co.), the lingering tax liabilities have finally been dealt with – and the remaining assets have been distributed to shareholders.

Kancept’s EMail included an image of the cheque he received for his one share (at a whopping 8 cents per share) and the letter that accompanied it. For those of us who have been long-time BeOS users & remember watching Be’s share price dwindle online, it’s sure to come as a piece of bittersweet news.

On a related note, Kancept also mentioned that he’s planning to list his extensive collection of BeOS / Haiku / ZETA-related memorabilia on eBay. So keep an eye out if you’re interested in picking up a few pieces of BeOS history.

Category: News   -   1 Comment »

Haiku Podcast #17
Stephen B. - June 13th, 2009

Sikosis and TheNerd are back for another Haiku Podcast: Episode 17 this time.

In addition to the usual news roundup & “app of the month” features, this episode also includes an interview with Humdinger, who heads the Haiku Documentation project (and handled the German translations for the recent Haiku GSoC student interviews).

Category: News   -   No Comments »

GSoC Interview: Ankur Sethi
Stephen B. - May 13th, 2009

Today we bring you the second GSoC Interview, following on the heels of the Adrien Destugues interview last posted week.

Today’s interview is with Ankur Sethi, an IT student from New Delhi who had submitted an application to add full text search and indexing functionality to Haiku. Unfortunately, due to limited resources (and a limit on the overall number of students accepted to GSoC this year), the Haiku project was not able to accept most of the applications they received – including Ankur’s.

Read on for the interview.

Category: News   -   No Comments »

GSoC Interview: Adrien Destugues
Stephen B. - May 10th, 2009

As mentioned back on Friday, the various BeOS/Haiku news sites have gotten together to conduct interviews of the students who applied to Haiku for this year’s Google Summer of Code.

The first BeOSNews entry is an interview with Adrien Destugues, who was accepted to work on internationalization support (under mentor Oliver Tappe). Read on for the rest of the interview.

Category: News   -   No Comments »

Haiku GSoC Interviews
Stephen B. - May 9th, 2009

On the various BeOS/Haiku news sites, interviews with applicants to Haiku for the 2009 Summer of Code have started popping up over the last few days. The interviews were conducted with both the students whose proposals were and weren’t accepted – credit for the idea goes to Matt Madia and the interviews are the result of a collaboration between several of the BeOS/Haiku news sites.

So far, IsComputerOn has posted their interview with Maxime Simon, HaikuWare has posted their interview with JiSheng Zhang , and BeGroovy has posted their interviews with Smita Vijayakumar and Henri Vettenranta. Haiku Gazette has also posted an interview, in German, with Johannes Wischert.

BeOSNews was not left out – the first of our interviews will be posted tomorrow. This also gives me the opportunity to point out that the listed of accepted students for the 2009 GSoC has been announced & posted on the Haiku website.

Category: News   -   3 Comments »

Haiku’s Progress Towards an Alpha Release
Stephen B. - April 26th, 2009

Over on HaikuWare, Karl has posted about the remaining work needed before an Alpha release of Haiku can be made. The details come from a report written by Lorglas (in German) after the most recent Begeistert.

While the remaining tasks aren’t trivial, the list itself is encouragingly-short: the ATA bus manager needs a rewrite, and there is still some work needed before a bootable Haiku install CD can be created. Here’s hoping that, at this time next year, we’ll be talking about a Haiku Beta – or even a stable 1.0 release.

Category: News   -   No Comments »