These have been a busy few weeks for Haiku, with its members and GSoC students working and commiting, commiting and working. For example, Bryce Groff got DriveSetup to work with extended partitions, making it a more and more complete tool for us the users.

Adrien Destugues on his part, announced that ICU integration is coming to his Locale Kit work. ICU is an open source library which provides localization for all different sorts of items, like date and currency. It's a very important and relevant part of his project to bring localization to Haiku and we're hoping he gets it integrated soon, if not already.

For his Indexing project, Ankur Sethi managed to code a search GUI for full text indexing daemon he created named Beacon, though his plan is to integrate it into the Find window. Next step on his agenda, get different file formats to work in Beacon, top of the list, PDF support.

Last but definitely not least, Stephan, Ingo and Michael Lotz bunked for a few days over at Axel's place and had an "informal summer gathering" where it's obvious to see that sleep was optional, not mandatory.They worked on several areas of Haiku, including (but not restricted to) the USB kit and the Media kit. Work was also done on improving Haiku's stability including fixing bugs on the VFS. They also created a webpage for Future Haiku Features, a nice "todo" list.

One relevant point which was discussed and which all of us are interested on is the timeline for an Alpha release! Let me just quote Stephan on this one: "We have talked about it a lot and I am happy to report that we don't consider any remaining issue serious enough to hold it back any longer". Awesome! One personal wish I have on this: how about releasing it over the upcoming BeGeistert weekend? The oldest BeOS/Haiku gathering and the first release milestone... nice, no? ;)

Awesome work everyone, really amazing.