The release can be obtained, in various formats & via various download methods, from the main Get Haiku page. The most notable changes since Alpha 1 are the inclusion of Wifi support (with support for WEP encryption and several common wireless chipsets) and, of course, WebPositive – a Haiku-native browser based on webkit (and with a GUI based on NetPositive).

Playing around with the release for a few hours should bring a warm glow to any old BeOS user’s heart (or at least the nostalgia center of the brain). A few quick first impressions: the installation has seen a few improvements, and it’s as painless as always. WebPositive is already stable and functional enough for most day-to-day usage, and it’s quite pleasant to use. And, even more so than Alpha 1, it is noticeably faster & more responsive than R5 on the same hardware.

The biggest immediate implication is that the QT & webkit-based browser Arora (one of the included sample apps) can now run on Haiku – a very nice bonus, given that BeZilla development has largely stalled and a Haiku-native webkit-based browser will (evidently) not be ready for some time. Arora works quite well in Haiku, based on some quick testing – it’s also very fast, I’d go so far as to say it’s the closest we’ve seen to a functional, modern NetPositive equivalent (a screenshot is included in the “Read more” section of this post).

BeOSFrance was (so far as I know) the first to break the news, followed by IsComputerOn and OSNews. And particularly in the OSNews comments, the announcement has sparked a lively debate over whether or not the presence the QT port is beneficial to Haiku.

Read on for some quick impressions and screenshots of the various sample apps (and a note on installing the dev release).

Sample Applications

The development release includes 20 sample applications in the in “QtDemos” folder. Before you try to run them, open up the “common” folder (inside the folder where you decompressed the “Qt4HaikuDemoPack_a1.zip” file); you should see two sub-folders called “lib” and “plugins.” First, move the entire “plugins” folder to “/boot/common/” (double-click the “Haiku” icon on your desktop, then open the “common” folder). Next, copy all of the files from the QT “common/lib/” folder into into “/boot/common/lib/”.

Asteroids
There isn’t much to say about this one – it’s a decent little Asteroids clone (if you’ve played the original or other clones like Maelstrom, then you know what to expect).

ASTranslator
A small application for translating text between different languages. It does its job – non-Latin alphabets show blank ASCII squares, but translating between English and French works and appears to be fairly accurate (based on my limited knowledge of French, at least).

Browser
This is the Arora browser, mentioned earlier. I did experience a few quirks (E.g. menus that stay active even after you’ve clicked away from them), but most of the basic functionality works without a problem – the screenshot shows Arora rendering BeOSNews.com.

bsc
Apparently short for “Beesoft Commander,” BSC is a two-pane Norton Commander-style filemanager. I couldn’t get much of the functionality to work (buttons for basic file management operations don’t work, but the F-key shortcuts do) – once the glitches are ironed out, it should be a nice option for people who prefer that style of filemanager.

calculator
Not much to say about this one either, it’s a basic calculator application. I could not operate it via the keyboard (numeric keypad or otherwise), but using the mouse works.

calendarwidget
The name is fairly self-explanatory: it’s a widget that displays a calendar grid view, with some nice configuration options. It doesn’t do much on it’s own, but I assume it’s intended to work as part of a scheduling/PIM application.

chessx
Apparently a chess game, judging by the name – but I was unable to make it do anything after loading it (couldn’t start or load a game, etc). The UI looks decent, though.

collidingmice
I’m not entirely sure what this app is for, but it appears to be a demo of animation with collision detection (the ears of the mice light up when they collide).

kChmViewer
This appears to be a viewer application for .CHM help files (typically found in Windows). I tested it briefly with the help file for a text editor I use in Windows (EditPlus), all of the standard functionality works – and unlike the Windows help viewer, it allows you have two separate articles/tabs open at once.

kCheckers

A simple, but addictive, checkers game – and relatively challenging, too (the computer soundly beats me, even at the lowest difficulty settings).

movie
As the name suggests, it’s a video player application. I couldn’t get it to open any files files (tried AVI, MP4, MOV files – with a variety of codecs) other than the “animation.mng” file that’s located in the same folder as the application.

openpref
Not much I can say about “openpref” either, mainly because I couldn’t get it to do anything. It launches, but there’s just an empty window – there are several menus, but nothing happens when I click any of the menu items. As far as I can tell, it’s some sort of game.

orderform
This one is really barebones, it appears to be a viewer for printable order forms.

pixelator
A simple graphics demo, it presents a pixelated image and allows you increase or decrease the size of the pixels.

qsimplesheet
A basic spreadsheet application, and probably the most interesting QT demo app other than Arora. While it certainly isn’t a replacement for Excel, it is still nice to see some actively-maintained productivity software running in Haiku.

qutIM_0.2
This app is a simple, multi-protocol IM client. While it does appear to support the Jabber and ICQ networks, I wasn’t able to sign on with my gmail/gtalk account (and I don’t have an ICQ account to test with) – it does look like a fairly nice piece of software, though.

simsu
It appears to be a game of some sort, but not one that I’m familiar with. It does appear to work, however.

tetrix
The obligatory tetris clone – possibly the only game that has more clones that Asteroids.

textedit
While the name suggests a text editor, it’s acutually a basic word processor/rich-text editor along the lines of WordPad. The default format for saving files is .odt (same format as the OpenOffice word processor) – it’s functional enough that I was able to create an .odt file, open it with OpenOffice and make some changes, then re-open the modified file in textedit.

Undo
Last is “undo,” an aptly-named demo of a undo stack, similiar to the “History” pallette in PhotoShop and other Adobe applications. It allows you to create and make basic changes to vector shapes – then the lefthand pane can be used to undo or redo the changes.

Conclusions

Overall, I was quite impressed with the demo apps. While most of them probably won’t be used much on their own (with the exceptions of Arora and the games), it’s still encouraging to see them running at all. Having QT available paves the way for more sophisticated QT apps to be ported – or to be created by extending the demo apps. It also potentially makes Haiku more appealing to developers who currently use QT on other platforms.

If the demo apps are any indication, QT on Haiku is already fairly stable and fast. Despite being only a development release (running on an Alpha OS), I didn’t encounter many problems or crashes – the most common issue was that some of the applications crashed on exit. And for the most part, the demo apps have the look and feel of native apps so (unlike most ported applications) they don’t look (or feel) out of place.

Read on for Dane’s announcement.

BeOSRADIO Entering its Tenth Year

BeOSRADIO, the radio station originally launched to demonstrate the Be Operating System’s strength as a place to do radio broadcasting, is about to enter into its tenth year on the air.

BeOSRADIO hit the Internet airwaves November 9th of 2000 using “BRS” (BeOS Radio Scripter) and the SoundPlay audio player, which evolved into the TuneTracker radio automation system. Currently BeOSRADIO uses a fourth-generation TuneTracker product called Command Center.

Broadcasting an “Extreme Variety” of easy-listening music, and spanning such diverse genres as Jazz, Acoustic, Ambient, Folk, Ethnic, and Classical, BeOSRADIO continues 24/7 operation. News from FSN is featured at the top and bottom of each hour, there’s extended tech programming from Dave Graveline on Saturdays and Sundays, and the “Faith Online” show with David Selness is heard Sunday mornings.

Another feature for which BeOSRADIO is recognized is its special Christmas programming all during December, including Christmas music in the same Extreme Variety format, plus a number of produced special programs right near Christmas.

BeOSRADIO operates commercial-free, and does incur expense. If you tune-in and enjoy the programming, you can help the cause by clicking the Donate button on the BeOSRADIO web site.

Read on for the news release from Dane, it also contains some good news for SoundPlay fans.

TuneTracker Running Under Haiku

TuneTracker Systems has successfully run the TuneTracker radio automation program under Haiku. According to developer Dane Scott, it took only modest work to get the “Command Center” automating component functioning under Haiku using an older version of SoundPlay, the player that forms the “audio engine” portion of TuneTracker. Most of Command Center’s functionality is already perfect, and when the newest version of SoundPlay is made compatible with Haiku, Command Center will be able to run 100% on the Haiku platform.

Other components in the TuneTracker System, such as the TunePrepper music ripper and prepper, Lightning request finder and playlist builder, and TT Anywhere remote administration server, all launch and run as well, and appear to only require minor work before they will do everything correctly.

“Our plan is to have the entire TuneTracker software suite running great on this platform before Haiku R1 is released,” says Scott, “and the fact that Haiku’s developers have done such a good job with BeOS binary compatibility is really speeding up that process.”

More recently, OSNews has posted two separate reviews of the Alpha release. First up was Kevin Miller with his article “Seven Days in Haiku,” which focused mainly on hardware compatibility (running Haiku on a netbook) and includes an account of his experience testing out the experimental wifi support. Next was Alfonso Martinez with his “My 7 Days Using Haiku Alpha Release 1” review, which focuses on software compatibility.

And on a personal note, I’m in the process of finishing a (probably) 3-part review of the Alpha release. I’ve focused primarily on topics that should be of interest to long-time BeOS users, hopefully avoiding duplication of Kevin and Alfonso’s efforts. Stay tuned!

It’s amazing to think that it was only a few years ago that simply getting Tracker & Deskbar running on Haiku was viewed as a huge accomplishment – and now a full-featured, stable release looks to be right around the corner. Everyone involved in getting Haiku to this stage deserves a huge congratulations.

Here are the details of the release schedule for the Alpha 1 release:

* Sunday August 23rd, 12:00 GMT. The trunk will be branched so that the release team can work on optimizing the final image.
* Wednesday September 9th, 12:00 GMT. Alpha 1 will be tagged. Then a build will be made and tested.

The testing of the build is expected to take a few days (pending any unforeseen problems). The website team will also require a few days to upgrade the website in order to support the release of the first alpha. The expected release date is around Monday the 14th.

The schedule appears to be fairly tentative, so the release could (presumably) be delayed if new critical bugs are found. But at present, everything appears to be on track for a Sept. 14th release.