From the “posts that I wrote weeks ago but forgot to publish” department comes a story that has been reported just about everywhere else: BeBits.com is now under new management, as of the New Year. To quote from the announcement made by Sean and Greg back in December:

If you’ve been paying attention, though, it shouldn’t be a surprise that we haven’t had a lot of time to devote to BeBits lately. As many of you have mentioned, it shows: we’ve had technical problems, email that has gone unanswered, dead links that take too long to get fixed, and other, similar issues. […]

So with that in mind, […] we’re very pleased (and a little sad) to announce that as of today, we are turning BeBits over to a new owner and operator. We won’t say at this point who the new owner is yet; he will make that announcement himself when the time is right. But we will say that he’s a dedicated and active member of the community, and that he’s got some great plans for the site. After almost 10 years, it’s hard for us to walk away, but we’re thrilled that BeBits will be in such capable hands.

The identity of the new BeBits admin has not yet been publicly-announced, although they are already hard at work, having moved BeBits to a new web host back in January. OSNews and IsComputerOn also featured the story (and thanks to Oscar Lesta for reminding me that it hadn’t been posted here yet).

Besides yesterdays good news show there’s more going on lately.
Guiseppe from The Italian Haiku User Group has done a very nice write-up about the latest Haiku build, rev 29065. Although in Italian, this is a extensive review covering the better and worse parts of Haiku and the latest (pre-)alpha release. The accompanying screenshots show a lot of applications running on Haiku. I’m not sure about the Haiku-Love density in Italy but HUG-It is one the most active and up-to-date user group websites around, keep up the good work!

Also (always) active is Karl form Haikuware, one of the most popular Haiku news/community websites at this moment. Overshadowed by the news from the official Haiku website about the GCC4 builds, this months ‘Thank You Award’ goes to the University of Auckland (New Zealand) for their work on the experimental Stack & Tile and User Editable Interfaces patches, which were covered by Stephen earlier.

Haikuware.com also features an (ini)-mini-interview with previous Thank You Award winner, Artur Wyszynski. Artur won his award for his work on the Haiku interface, these mockups show you why. To me the plain looks of Haiku are good but a little outdated, Artur’s design’s stay close to the ‘original’ Be interface but then much more modern with nice gradients but clean and not at all overdone.

Last but not least, Fredrik Modeen has been crunching numbers to make it possible to put a running version of Haiku on any USB device, using WinXP. Check out how this is done here. As always you can read and write about these news items in our talkback section.

After some quiet weeks on the Haiku project website, there’s good news today! Thanks to Michael Lotz and all the other devs involved in this, Haiku can now be build using GCC 4.3.3. If you are more technically inclined than I am, you will find Micheal’s blog post an interesting read. The lengthy article explains the steps that were necessary to free Haiku from the obsolete and ancient GCC 2.95.3 and all the hurdles and problems that were encountered.

Quote: This opens the door for easier porting of modern software, and more easily moves Haiku out of the “dark” GCC2 cloud that BeOS had lived under.

Why is this such great news?

Lately Haiku has become much more stable and ‘usable’, now it needs applications. Having a native GCC4 toolchain means that it will be easier to port existing software, and especially easier to port parts and packages needed by newer versions of existing applications. This will for instance benefit the work on the Mozilla ports (Firefox/Thunderbird/Seamonkey/Sunbird) & the webkit browser, but also brings a port of Gnash much closer.

‘Dogfooding’

If you believe in the project that you are developing the best way to test it would be use it yourself right? Michael uses Haiku as only operating system while doing his development work, proving that Haiku can be used daily as a development platform and that it might also be getting close to it’s initial purpose, a full replacement for BeOS release 5. The latter is shown by these screenshots, created by Giuseppe from the Italian Haiku User Group.

For the full story on Haiku-os.org you can point you mouse here, or you can stick around and discuss this news here.

Some idle searching on youTube for “Haiku OS” turned up a very interesting video demonstration of a prototype for user-editable GUIs. It’s apparently based on something called the “Auckland Layout Model (ALM),” which allows WYSIWIG editing of a GUI without the need for recompiling – or any access to the applications source code, for that matter.

Based on the video, it looks like an incredibly powerful way to customize a GUI – as well as being a clever extension of the heavily-modular approach taken by BeOS and Haiku. The video can be viewed below, but sadly not in BeOS (although there are numerous sites like keepvid.com that will allow you to download the video as an FLV file, which the BeOS version of VLC can handle).

UPDATE: Thanks to “Humdinger” for posting a comment with a link to an AVI version of the video, along with links to another Haiku-related project that’s being worked on by the same group of people:

Here’s the video as XVID:
http://aucklandlayout.sourceforge.net/videos/alm-editor.avi

For the other project of Auckland University, Stack&Tile of windows, there’s also a video:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~lutteroth/videos/stack-and-tile.avi
There are already patches for it available which have been been updated several times since:
http://www.freelists.org/post/haiku-development/Stack-Tile-for-Haiku

• A new post in Oliver’s blog tells us that progress has been made on the bluetooth preference app.
• Candidates for the Haikuware’s Feb. 1st Thank You Award are now known. Please read ahead here and vote for your Hero :-)
• On the Polish Haiku-OS.pl site you can read that mmu_man has just fixed the last thing that prevented cd booting.  Don’t ask me how to test it, the only thing I know is that you need rev. 28965+. Also it is a good thing for the alpha release.
• Altough not started yet, Google Summer of Code 2009 is being anticipated and prepared as you can read on the haiku mailing-list.  things like flyers and tests for applicants are being discussed.

As 0033 and Manette have been doing a great job keeping the site’s content up-to-date, I’ve been doing a bit of playing around with behind-the-scenes stuff. First, a little background: one thing I’ve always disliked about blogging applications is that their handling of comments tends to fragment reader discussion more than (E.g.) a forum or a newsgroup. And even when there’s a lively discussion attached to a post, it usually dies out when that post gets pushed off the frontpage by newer items – rather than when people lose interest in the discussion.

Enter my rather hacked-together solution: an “All Comments” page that displays a forum-like index of recent comments, grouped by post. There are still a few missing pieces – mainly timezone options (everything is in Atlantic Time right now, aka GMT-4) and the ability for readers to create a new thread (a la a real forum). But it’s close enough to make live at this point and add it to the navigation links on the lefthand side.

If anyone is interested in the technical details, read on.

Ever wanted to get your hands on a piece of true Be history? Check out this ebay add! Cameron Mac Millan, once a employe at Be inc., is selling a very rare BeBox prototype that was saved from the scrapheap. This BeBox machine was build before Be switched to PPC and runs on two AT&T Hobbit processors.

The computer is said to run fine although you will have to connect it to your own monitor, mouse and keyboard as they are not included. It does have a modem and video card on-board. Extra cool is the San Jose Sharks hockey team logo (see below) filling in the space for the final BeOS logo…

At the moment of posting this bidding starts at $511,-. There’s five days left to place a bid for this fourteen year old 58th BeBox build by Be inc.