Darkwyrm’s Adventures in the Third Dimension!
Stephen B. - April 21st, 2007

DarkWyrm, familiar to many as a long-time BeOS developer and prominent member of the Haiku Project, has written a blog post with some ideas for the use of 3D acceleration on the Haiku Desktop. BeGroovy was the first site to report on Darkwyrm’s article, which includes his thoughts on ways to make pratical use of 3D acceleration in Haiku’s GUI – as well as some interesting ideas for improving the BeOS UI. I personally think his idea for a Deskbar replacement / Haiku implementation of tabbed folders a-la the Classic MacOS is quite clever (screenshot 1, screenshot 2).

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Footnote to the ZETA Saga
Stephen B. - April 21st, 2007

For the last few days, all visitors to berndsworld.com – the personal blog of Bernd Korz – have been greeted by the following:

I decide to not longer run this Blog. The reasons are mainly due the fact that the private life of my family get extremly affected due the Blog.

Bernd Korz

Shortly after several comments on ZETA’s legality (or lack thereof) were made by David Schlesinger of ACCESS Ltd., Bernd posted a reply on the berndsworld.com blog. In the reply, he claimed he was scheduled to speak with a lawyer and would post clarification of the issue afterward. Since the blog is now closed and the clarification was promised over two weeks ago, it doesn’t appear that any explanation is forthcoming. Sadly, that probably isn’t a surprise to anyone in the BeOS community at this point.

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Transmission 0.7 Released
Stephen B. - April 19th, 2007

An updated version of the Transmission BitTorrent client was posted to BeBits on Sunday, bringing it up to version 0.70. According to the listing page on BeBits, the new version includes the following changes:

* New icon
* Peer exchange (PEX) compatible with Azureus and uTorrent
* Multitracker support
* Better handling of tracker announce interval
* Fixes bug where absurdly huge upload/download totals could be sent
* Automatic tracker scraping
* Cache connected peers
* Many miscellaneous bugfixes and small improvements

The update has been made available in both BONE and net_server flavours – and while I haven’t had a chance to try out the official 0.7 release yet, I have been using the SVN builds of it for a few weeks now and it’s been a nice upgrade to the 0.6 releases.

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More about OOffice
0033 - April 19th, 2007

Two days ago I posted about new office applications coming to the BeOS/Haiku platform. I’ll admit that the title of my post was a little bit to enthusiastic. As Oliver (the developer of OOffice) notes on his blog he is mostly working on a “Office Development Framework” and he can hardly find the time to get some code written. Also he notes that he is not going to be able to finish this alone but wants to show what is possible in a short amount of time. For Olivier his Mentor task in the Haiku GSoC is obviously much more important.

Unfortunately OSNews took my post a bit to literal and the whole story blew up making it seem like a new office suite for the Be platform was about to be released. I’d like to take the opportunity to say sorry to Olivier who got overwhelmed by questions and comments about his hobby project. I really do like the initiative he started and hope that it will attract some more developers. A decent, actively maintained, application for text and spreadsheet documents is lacking from BeOS at the moment.

Olivier writes about the discussion that OSNews and I caused on his blog, read his post here.

Category: News   -   2 Comments »

Haiku doc team started
0033 - April 19th, 2007

As you can read on Haiku-os.org a new team has been formed, the Documentation Team. The Doc Team will be providing current and future Haiku dev’s with up-to-date documentation, in the form of a new Haiku API, written from scratch.

Quoted from Haiku-os.org:
With the release of the BeBook under the Creative Commons license, ACCESS Co. Ltd enables us to provide the potential developers of today with all the documentation of the BeOS API. But to ensure that API documentation will be available and up to date for the future generations of developers, the Haiku project announces a structured effort on the writing of the Haiku API documentation from scratch. The documentation team is small and young and any help would be very much appreciated.

If you want to help go to the Haiku website to find out how.

There is more news about Haiku, Micheal Lotz has updated his blog with a long and interesting post about the Haiku USB stack, read it here. Besides that Brian Varner reports that the bittorent client transmission is now running on Haiku. Go to his page for a nice screenshot.

Category: News   -   1 Comment »

Brand new office applications coming
0033 - April 17th, 2007

Thanks to the (German) site Be User Community I came across the blog of Oliver Ruiz Dorantes. Oliver will be mentoring the GSoC student Salvatore Benedetto during this summer, but apart from that (and his development for Haiku) he is working on office software for the BeOS/Haiku platform. Work on his project has just been started and Olivier is looking for people that can help him with the huge amount of work there is to be done. Good to see that someone has the guts to start a big project like this, I hope some more developers will team up with Olivier to create some killer office applications for Haiku.

Category: News   -   17 Comments »

Icons, icons
0033 - April 17th, 2007

Leszeks (known form Teckview and LL Electronics, both in German) has created a new Video tutorial. Unlike the previous ones this one is in English and is about the usage of Haiku’s Icon-O-Matic.

Quoted from Leseks blog: The first of my new english Videotutorials is out. It is for all those guy’s out there that like Haiku and want to start helping the Haiku Project in some way even if it is only in creating icons. This Videotutorial shows the basic functions and features of Icon-O-Matic an application with that you can create wonderful icons.

Get the Icon-O-Matic Video tutorial here.

Also about icons, on ICO frankps posts about Haiku’s wonderfull icons,
watch a nice picture displaying them here.

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