As it had been discussed/announced earlier, there have been some changes at Haiku Inc's board of directors. Bruno (BGA) and Matthew (mmadia) have stepped down from their respective positions of vice-president and secretary, having been replaced by René (DeadYak) and Alexander (kallisti5), also respectively. According to the link above, the board have already working on some pending projects, so let's hope news will come out shortly.

You can also find the meeting minute over at the Haiku Inc's website.

There's been a flurry of activity over at Haiku for the past couple of weeks, which is how we like it! Adrien posted his regular monthly update, tracking what the devs have been working now. René, aka Yak Man, continues working on the debugger and wrote a blog post about the latest developments, namely the fact that you're now able to edit memory using it.

Jessica's been busy as well, not only adding TeX Live (mammoth size indeed) and LyX packages to the repository, but also improving Haiku's support for GPT partitions! This will make life easier for those who want to install Haiku onto a GPT partition, no more need for hacks and workarounds.

Last and definitely not least, a new dev contract has begun and Waddlesplash is now working on the packaging infrastructure. His contract is for a six weeks full-time work and he already posted his first weekly update.

Nicely done to everyone, congrats.

Many of you might recall the image editor Refraction, created by Frans van Nispen of Xentronix (also the creator of SampleStudio). At the time this was created for BeOS and Zeta but unfortunately it was last updated 10 years ago. Well there's now some in the community who would like to open-source Refraction so it can be easily updated and kept current. And for that they've created a crowd funding campaign, which you can check out here.

The amount is steep though. According to Frans, it'll take €10,000 to open-source it and at the moment only USD $570 have been pledged, which comes to around €510, so there's a long way to go. If you feel this is a worthy cause, head over to the link above and add your pledge. You can also view the discussion going on in the Haiku's site's forum, by going here.

Thanks to Matthias, aka Paradoxon, for the tip.

Adrien has posted another monthly update, giving us an overview of what the devs have been up to during April. He goes over work done on packages for Haiku Depot, on the user interface and other areas. A very interesting tidbit he shared, regards work being done outside of the tree, specifically Axel's work on a launch daemon. If this comes to fruition, it'll replace the venerable boot script, allowing for more flexibility and faster boot times, among other improvements. Looking forward to see the results.

On a side note, and something Adrien also mentioned, BeBits is now offline (same for Haikuware), which is sad news, for this site had been with us for such a long time... I'm curious though, with Haiku Depot and more and more software being made available through it, is there a big demand for an external software site? Drop me a line with your thoughts.

The development team behind the proprietary Static Code Analyzer for C and C++, PVS, ran it through Haiku's code and have now published part 1 of their report. They cover errors and warnings they found in different parts of the code (including.. Cortex) but I'm guessing we have to wait for part 2 for the final conclusion. This doesn't seem to be very different from what Haiku already has in place with the Coverity scans, but if it helps squash bugs or just improve the code quality, no complaints.

Thanks to Dmitriy for the tip!

Update: The second part of the analysis, along with the conclusion, is now up and available for you to read.

Adrien started (what I hope is) a new trend last month, posting monthly reports of the work being done on Haiku, and we now have March's. He goes over the main changes/commits done by the developers, to different areas of Haiku, from packages to drivers/kernel.

One worthy of a mention is a long standing bug that Michael Lotz squashed, which was affecting TuneTracker Systems' work, when it came to working with audio CDs, so that's a big plus to a very successful commercial enterprise based on Haiku. And speaking of such, Ithamar Adema has been working with iZCorp to help them migrate from BeOS/Zeta to Haiku and it has paid off, as they're now shipping their systems with Haiku!! Not only is that great for them, it's very good for Haiku since the fixes/improvements made will be merged back to Haiku's source.

Great stuff everyone, really well done.

Fresh news, unfortunately not the kind we were hoping for, out of Google's HQ. Sadly Haiku isn't part of the list of selected mentoring organizations for Google Summer of Code 2015, as you can see right here. That's a shame, the list of project ideas had some very interesting ones, but Haiku can't make it every year of course, though it has been chosen the majority of years GSoC's been around.

There's no word yet why it wasn't picked since the meeting where it'll be discussed doesn't take place till later this week, but once it's known we'll update this piece.

Update: As mentioned above, the meeting won't be until Friday, but it seems the much lower number of accepted organizations this year could be a big reason why Haiku isn't in. The same thing happened to the Mozilla, the Linux Foundation and Tor, for example. In any case, if you were interested in participating, there's nothing stopping you from contributing to Haiku, so why not have a go?

Latest Update: The reason why Haiku wasn't included in this year's GSoC is pretty much the same why Mozilla wasn't included as well, a lower number of organizations and Google wanted to give the opportunity to newer/smaller organizations. You can read more in Urias' e-mail to the mailing list. Hopefully Haiku will be back in next year.

TuneTracker Systems, makers of what is (pretty much without a doubt) the most successful commercial BeOS/Haiku project, the TuneTracker radio system, wants to help people everywhere discover what Haiku is.

To do so, they've started selling a USB stick which not only comes with Haiku but it also bundles a number of different software packages which aren't (obviously) included with the nightlies we all use daily. This includes, for example, WonderBrush, ArmyKnife and UberTuber among many others. Also included is TuneTracker itself, which hopefully will help TT Systems move some more units.

Head over here if you're (or know someone who might be) interested and order it. Best of luck to Dane and everyone over at TT Systems.

After a long (loooooong) time, Tracker has finally been switched to use the Layout Kit. Waddlesplash posted tonight over at the Haiku site that he has now merged his work on this branch, ending (well, it's still WIP) what started back in 2012. 

This change is mostly in the background and may be unnoticed by the users (one trick is to spot the new icons in the navigation bar), but it's quite important moving forward, simplifying code and paving the way for future changes.

More details are available at the blog post above and after you update Haiku to the latest hrev and give it a spin, don't forget to file bug reports if you come across them. Nice work Waddleslapsh.

Celebrations have already started in some parts of the world, for example our Kiwi friends over in sheep-land (mmmmmmmm...) are one year ahead already, but most of us are still waiting for the clock to strike 12. So for them and for us, ICO would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year, hoping everyone has a great 2015. And hopefully this will be the year of the (Haiku) Beta!

Have fun everyone!