Flash Player in development for ZETA
Stephen B. - January 29th, 2006
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Archive for the ‘News’ Category While there may not be much public discussion in the BeOS community these days, we’ve had many interesting surprises lately to remind us that there are still people out there quietly doing cool stuff. Case in point, IsComputerOn has the first details on a new Flash player in development for ZETA. From ICO:
ICO also has a screenshot of it doing what a Flash player does (no, not showing “Punch the monkey” ads). Very few details are available at this point, but it’s a safe bet that many of us will be watching this project with interest – I give them an A+ for dramatic timing.
Reader “scott mc” wrote in to alert me to the significance of today’s date. AppleMatters.com is running a story on this day in 1997, the day when Steve Jobs officially returned to Apple (as a temporary advisor). It was a pivotal moment in the history of both Be and Apple, as it lead to Apple eventually releasing the NeXT-derived OS X and Be releasing the BeOS for x86. And now, nearly a decade later, we may even be able to run BeOS on Apple hardware again thanks to the Intel transition. Who would have guessed that, nine years ago? P.S.
The developer “ZuMi” has released two new applications that make clever use of the InfoPopper application: PopAggregator and PopWeather. Both programs are implemented as BASH scripts and use the im_kit’s InfoPopper application to display data – RSS newsfeeds, with PopAggregator, and current weather info, in the case of PopWeather. A simple idea, and two useful new apps.
Thanks to Mr. X for the heads-up, HaikuNews has a story on some new software from the BeOS video driver guru himself, Rudolf Cornelissen. His latest project is a video consumer node capable of displaying video (with overlay support) on non-primary graphics cards. What does that mean, you ask? I’m not clear on the exact applications of the software, but I suspect that it’s meant to enable video playback on the second monitor in multi-monitor setups.
Okay, the second part of the headline may be speculation. Over on ICO, the tireless frankps has the scoop on the resumption of Themis development. Themis, a project which aims to build a modern, fully-native browser for BeOS, had been silent for the last year or so. The site currently doesn’t have any details on their upcoming plans, but they do promise that updates will be posted to the Themis mailing lists and website in the near future. You can also find some intriguing tidbits in this message recently sent to their dev mailing list by Raymond “z3r0_one” Rodgers, which mentions plans for the HTML and CSS parsers. Also from ICO: any sheep out there should be afraid, be very afraid ;)
The BeOS/Zeta gaming site BeEmulated.net was recently shut down while renovations are made to the site. From the notice posted by GoodOldGames:
It also looks as if the site is broadening its focus to include “BeOS, Haiku and Zeta entertainment,” based on the new tag-line and their new domain / domain alias: BeEntertained.net. Thanks to Mr. X for the news submission.
An experimental R5 version of the Zenebona music player/manager (which we reported on earlier) was released on BeBits a day or two ago. I wasn’t able to get it to work with a few moments of testing and there were a few quirks with the installation. It appears that the .zip is intended to be expanded to /boot/ – which isn’t really necessary, the standard method of using a symlink named “drop such-and-such file here” would suffice. The zip also contains a symlink in the ~/home/config/ZetaMenu folder, which should be ~/config/be in R5. It’s great to see support for R5 though, and this is an app that I’ve long wanted to see in BeOS. I think that BeOS and a music library application a la iTunes are a natural fit, given that a large amount of the functionality needed by such software is already built into the OS. In a sense, we’ve had a web-based equivalent to iTunes for years in the form of BeInYourStereo.
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