Two days ago OsDrawer finally opened their website for the public. ICO has been following the development of this new site basically for a month now, and we are very happy to be among the first ones to announce it.

According to the people behind OsDrawer, the project aims to be a meeting point both for developers and for the whole BeOS/Haiku/ZETA community. The site hosts a system for the development of opensource projects, and offers them management of their source, a bug tracker, mailing lists, and a software repository that will become a meeting place for the community, worldwide. OsDrawer is pretty much the same as BeClan was a year or two ago, and perhaps the few projects that got registered there should consider moving their projects over to OsDrawer as well. Hopefully OsDrawer also could set up an aggregator/planet for developers/users blogging about BeOS/Haiku/ZETA?

The people behind OsDrawer unveil that they are planning to start the development of a program for an automatic management of the packages in the repository. Something that sounds pretty much like a SoftwareValet for Haiku, not that ZETA has gotten it's own in v1.5. ICO hopes that the Haiku management group and OsDrawer can work something out together regarding Google Summer of Code, as a SoftwareValet was one of the listed ideas for a project.

Their goal is to offer developers valid tools for their work, and for endusers a simple and intuitive system to manage their installed software, while trying to keep the Be style: simple, nice and cool!

The OsDrawer team consists of three members:

• Andrea: He keeps track of the relations with the Italian BeOS community. He is, for most of us, known as the admin of the Italian Beos User Group website (www.itbug.org). And, as for ITbug, he will be taking care of the graphics and the management of the projects.

• Enrico: He is an expert sysadmin of IBM AIX, with a growing interest for Haiku's opensource world. Thanks to his knowledge he installed the server and had some night-long works to ensure a good working site.

• Francesca: She's the project's translator and interpreter, and will be taking s care of public relations.

OsDrawer is a 100% non-profit project, all the expenses for the creation and the developing of the project are totally up to the ones taking part in the project, so all kinds of help and donations are welcomed and highly appreciated.

OsDrawer is very much needed for the Haiku platform, and we hope that will give the development of applications a real boost.