Software Updates: Pe, MultiMonitorTools & HaikuFox
Stephen B. - August 16th, 2006
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Archive for the ‘News’ Category As has been reported already by… pretty much everyone else, there have been some recent significant software releases and updates. First up, recent days saw an update to a veneered and generated… I mean revered and venerated BeOS application, Pe – the Programmer’s Editor. It’s hard to imagine, but the folks maintaining the open source version have managed to make improvements to the best text editor in existence (and I say that as someone who has heavily used EditPlus, Arachnophilia, BBEdit, vim, EMACS, and JOE). The new release adds a ruler along the top, a button to quickly enable/disable soft-wrapping, the UI is now much more font-sensitive, and Pe now has support for passive FTP. Next, Tigerdog has posted a new version of the HaikuFox Theme, his NetPositive-esque theme for Firefox; as always, he’s been hard at work making tweaks and adding new visual touches to the theme. And lastly, Slaad recently posted a set of utilities for users of multi-monitor setups, descriptively named MultiMonitorTools. The suite inlcudes two applications meant to be bound to SpiceyKey shortcuts: MonitorSwitcher, which moves the current window to a different monitor, and LocalFullScreener, which makes the active window fill the current monitor (the zoom/maximize button apparently makes a window fill both monitors). They sound quite handy, makes me wish I could find an affordable KVM switch with multi-monitor support.
The Haiku Project has recently announced two design contests. Most recently they’ve announced a web design contest; as reported by HaikuNews and ICO, the objective is to create a theme for the new Haiku website (based on the Drupal “content management platform”). Second, they’ve also begun accepting entries to the Haiku Icon Contest – the winning entry will, presumably, become the default icon set for Haiku’s first release. One entry has already been submitted by Mitiya Masuda, he’s released an extremely slick-looking icon set called “Ponkan” (which means “Tangerine,” according to the post on ICO). Just in time for the icon contest, Stephan A??mus (aka stippi, the developer of the WonderBrush vector graphics app) has announced a preview release of a new version of Icon-O-Matic. As reported by ICO, it’s essentially a “lite” version of WonderBrush, focused on icon creation.
The first new release of OpenTracker in some time is available for download on BeBits. This release, labeled version 5.3.0, contains several bugfixes and new features – including a graphical calendar when you click-and-hold the Deskbar clock, and the ability to quit applications from the Switcher (Alt-Tab popup). The version details on BeBits contain an important note for ZETA users: the normal installation method shouldn’t be used under ZETA, because it will replace its version of libtracker.so (some ZETA-specific features depend on that library).
…until someone loses an eye. Then it’s just a sport, as a friend of mine used to say. What is that non-sequitur of an intro referring to, you say? I’m glad you asked, hypothetical reader – it’s oblique reference to the two new commercial games that Magnussoft has announced they are porting to ZETA. As reported by frankps on ICO, the games should be ready for release sometime in September of this year, and the titles consist of Airline Tycoon Deluxe and Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood. The news was announced at the annual GC – Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany and Magnussoft will be working with Runesoft to release two games.
While randomly browsing about the other day, I came across a blog post containing a video of a rather cool – and somewhat violent – method for switching virtual desktops using the motion sensor in Apple’s new laptops (intended to disable the hard drive in case of falls). While I’m hesitant to spoil the video, this post would be pretty pointless otherwise – it shows the developer of the hack, Erling Ellingsen, switching between virtual workspaces by whacking the right or left side of his screen. For those wondering “what relevance does this have to BeOSNews,” the idea has also been implemented under Linux using the similar motion sensor in IBM / Leonovo ThinkPads – so it probably wouldn’t be that difficult to accomplish under BeOS / Haiku / ZETA. Sadly my Thinkpad is a generation or two earlier than models containing the motion sensor (an X30 – still a sweet little laptop nonetheless, especially if I ever find my laptop-to-desktop ATA converter and get BeOS on there), but despite that critical factor, it would still be a pretty neat toy.
OSNews is reporting on an interesting new development with the SkyOS alternative-operating system: a developer by the name of Lukas Linemayr has implemented support for BeOS People files. Lukas’ blog also contains a screenshot of a slick-looking People application. SkyOS has also been using the OpenBFS filesystem for some time now, so BeOS and SkyOS People files should be compatible.
Over on HaikuNews Kian Duffy has posted a fascinating short piece called “The Telling Secrets of Haiku’s Bugzilla“. Among the 700 (or so) entries, Kian dug up some great indications of Haiku’s current development status – including a cool screenshot of Haiku with an uptime of 52 hours-plus. Kian also mentions that, in addition to giving a good overview of what’s working and what’s not, the Haiku Bugzilla is the best place to submit any bugs you encounter while testing Haiku. A somewhat obvious point, but one that’s worth repeating as the Bugzilla is not as widely-known as some of the other Haiku Project resources.
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