A couple of weeks ago, Cyan (who over the years released a good number of applications over at BeBits), published his latest work named TubePositive. What it does is allow you to watch videos online, using sites such as YouTube, Google Video, etc, under BeOS. What it does is use VLC and the ripping web-service Keepvid.com.

I wanted to see if it worked under Haiku, but since at home I don't have it installed (still no WiFi support unfortunately) and at work I can't access those sites, I asked known community member scottmc, who had already tried it if he could give it another test run and send me a screenshot, for ICO to publish. He was (as usual) kind enough to do so, and the next day replied with the screenshot. This was over a week ago, so slacker little me would like to apologize to Scott for taking soooo long to publish this.

Click on "Read More" below for some more information about his test and the shot itself.

Stephan Aßmus, aka stippi, reported today yesterday that Haiku was awarded five student slots from GSoC. They had to review many applications and the choice wasn't made easy at all, by the students quality. In the end, they settled for the following students/projects:

• Paging support: Zhao Shuai
• Zeroconf support: Alexandru Roman
• HPET and other timers: Dustin Howett
• Sub-pixel antialised rendering in the app_server: Andrej Spielmann
• CIFS client: Adrien Lemaire

Axel Dörfler recently got a mail from Kevin Musick, the author of BeServed (ie. Teldar Corporation), that he would like to donate BeServed and its companion tools (like its Windows server) under the MIT license. He has already retrieved most sources from him (the Unix server code is still missing, everything else is there).

So the question is now what the Haiku Dev Team is to do with it exactly.

Haiku already has a more or less complete network file system written by Ingo. As Axel writes on the dev mailinglist: "Since we probably need to rework that one anyway when porting it to Haiku, it might be a good idea to have a look at BeServed, and see if we can reuse the best parts of both file systems, whereever feasible."

The sources are for now commited into the Haiku repository unchanged (under src/tests/add-ons/kernel/file_systems), available for inspection.

AFAIK both file systems are pretty complete by themselves (disregarding any eventual bugs). The advantage of BeServed is that it comes with servers for other operating systems, so that you can access their file systems using BeServed as well (you then don't have attribute support, AFAICT).

Everyone's favorite argentino, Jorge Mare, aka Koki, spent this past weekend in the company of BeDrivers' Scott McCreary, at their own Haiku booth in San Francisco, for this year's LugRadio Live USA 2008. As usual, he now posted his report of the weekend, and also as usual, it's a great read. It's plain to see they had a good time and helped spread the word about Haiku, increasing awareness for the project, which is always a good thing. AND, it ended with a donated Dell computer :)

Thanks not only for the report, but especially for the time spent (and to you too Scott). Great work guys.

Announced yesterday was the immediate availability, from 3ivx , of their latest mpeg4 decoder/encoder for BeOS. This latest version includes, among other fixes and enhancements, frame accurate seeking and experimental aac audio. But not only that. The cherry on top of the cake is that an experimental version of their decoder is also now available for Haiku!

Expected for the future, and once Haiku's media support gets more robust, is the 3ivx encoder. This is great news for Haiku, as it shows it's receiving an increasing amount of attention. Nice job 3ivx.

Here at IsComputerOn we are thrilled about the many changes that Haiku has gotten lately, and yesterday Stephan Asmuss (stippi) could commit a patch from Artur Wyszynski (aljen) to the Haiku source tree.

Artur has implemented the animated bootscreen BeOS (icons lighting up at different boot stages), with a new set of great looking boot splash images, generated by the new hsbg tool. And as Stephan wrote in the commit comments, the bootscreen finally contains the "new" Haiku logo. Stephan did a few changes to Artur's commit: Added Artur to the contributors list in About System, fixed some left overs in the patch, kept tracing turned off.

There is a few things left to be done, one is for instance that they remove the need for hard coding the icon positions.

Scot Hacker contributed with an article once to the BeOS Tip Server, explaining the row of icons on the splash screen:

• Atom: Indicates the handoff of the bootloader to the BeOS kernel.
• I/O Card: PCI initialization has been completed.
• Lightning Bolt: This icon appears just before the system enables non-boot CPUs (where non-boot CPUs are defined as the additional processors in a multi-proc system).
• Oscilloscope: All CPUs have now been enabled.
• Disks: All boot drivers and modules have been initialized.
• Magnifying Glass: The boot volume has been mounted.
• BeBox: The system BootScript is being read into memory and its contents executed.

Oliver Ruiz Dorantes has implemented the SetDiscoverable() method in to Haiku's Bluetooth kit, and published a photo of his mobile phone discovering his Haiku installation:

The phone discovered Mavin which is the name of the bluetooth dongle plugged in the Haiku Box.

Haiku yesterday announced that they, for the second straight year, have been accepted as a mentor organization for the Google Summer of Code.

The student application period will start soon, so if you are a student who would like to work on a Haiku project for the GSoC 2008, please check out their comprehensive List of GSoC Ideas and pages for detailed information on how to apply. If you still have any questions specific to GSoC after reading these pages, please contact the Haiku GSoC administrator (Bruno Albuquerque).

If you have any general questions about Haiku and want to start familiarizing yourself with our community, which we encourage you to, please join the Haiku development mailing list and also feel free to stop by the #haiku IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. Our friendly community members will be glad to help you out in pursuing a Haiku project for the GSoC 2008 and beyond.

I recently took over the ownership of the Jabber for BeOS source code, originally developed by John Blanco (Rapture from Venice). The IM client is now renamed to Jabber for Haiku, and the source code released under MIT (same license as Haiku) on OSDrawer.net. I have asked Andrea Anzani to maintain the code, but any one interested in working on the code are encouraged to make contact with me or Andrea. Today we would like to give the community a small Easter present. We hope to see you This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Jabber (XMPP - eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) is an open, XML-inspired protocol for instant messaging (IM) and presence information ( buddy list). The protocol is built to be extensible and other features are Voice over IP and file transfer, but are currently not implemented in the client for Haiku. What has been implemented so far, is SSL (Secure Sockets Layer - for secure communications on the Internet). SSL is also needed to use client with Google Talk, something that is now possible to do with the client. SSL is not included in the package, but can be downloaded from BeBits (has been tested with the BONE version).

As I am not a coder and this is an open source project, I would like to come with suggestion for a roadmap:

1. Typing Notification

2. Emoicons

3. Graphics

4. Group Chats is supported, but more functionality is needed.

5. Multi account support

6. Avartar support

7. Libjingle - For VoIP, voicemail, video and file transfer.

This past few days, a couple of BeOS related sites have been brought to life. First, OsDrawer was brought back after some hosting problems. Second, after a long hiatus (it was practically deceased), BeTips was revived by Scot Hacker himself, after regaining control of the domain. He managed to dig around for an old copy of the site's database and has now republished the articles, via WordPress. Scot is now looking for volunteers to maintain/cleanup the old database and write new tips for Haiku.

It's good to see both of these sites back online, but BeTips is a special case, for several reasons. Welcome back!

Update: And another one is back, sorry if I missed it. It's not exactly the same, but almost. RIP BeDope and welcome BeDoperer.