From the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon department, IsComputerOn is proud to present the FlyingTroll project. FlyingTroll is a light documentation browser, very much like Orb, the first browser BeOS had.
The browser is developed by the Russian developer Nikita Zalyotov (alias Makitka), 21 years old. He first learned about BeOS from russian magazine already back in 2000 and fell instantly in love, as so many of us.
ICO asked Nikita a few questions about his project, and he could tell us that the reason he started it was that Firefox simply isn't the right choice for such a task. When you want to read development documentation or simply the usermanual for an application, you don't want to wait 3-4 seconds each time for Firefox to start. Firefox is great for surfing the web, but for reading documentation he wanted to make a "lite version of NetPositive". And the fact that Haiku needs such a browser.
Nikita tells ICO that his dream is that FlyingTroll becomes part of the Haiku project, and continues with imagine you are installing an application, like Becasso, and the documentation for it is automatically added to the /config/FlyingTroll/Bookmarks/ directory.
For the future Nikita hopes to be able to implement basic network support for the browser, so that users don't have to have all the documentation stored on their local harddrive and if possible printing support.
In the next release of FlyingTroll ((DR3 or DR4), the browser will come bundled with the sources and a FTView class. FTView is a BView with bonus, as you can load HTML code in it. You will also be able to enable/disable scrollbars, statusbar, tollbars and popup menus. For example, you can add this FTView in a mailing program, to show emails in HTML. Or to read history in an ICQ client :). FTView will support printing, networking and possibly also some other options.
On the screenshot the About window is already making use of the FTView class.
ICO would like to thank Nikita for his contributions to the Haiku project, and will be writing about this project as it progresses and releases are made available for us endusers.
