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Haiku Podcast #4 has just been released. This month, Sikosis has done an interview with Weekly Haiku's site operator - Danny Robson. Also, he has the latest news (a little stale now sorry) and the usuale segments of the podcast.

If you have any feedback about the show or would like to be involved, drop Sikosis a comment or email - haiku at sikosis dot com.

If you haven't bought FunkyIdeaSoft's BePodder, now is a good time! A 30 days fully working demo is also available for download.

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From the Haiku weblog of Michael Lotz, you can today read about his progress on the USB stack for Haiku. The blog entry is an interesting read and sums up the development since Michael started working on USB in May this year. The work was originally started by Niels Reedijk who did the groundwork for the USB stack and the UHCI Host Controller Driver.

From the blog you can further read that:

  • USB stack: Done to about 80% - Most of the public API is implemented and works
  • UHCI Host Controller Driver: Done to about 75% - All except isochronous transfers is in place
  • OHCI Host Controller Driver: Not done yet - There is a skeleton driver in the tree
  • EHCI Host Controller Driver: Not done yet - Needs to be written from scratch

And the best of new is, Michael can use his USB mouse to navigate Haiku. The bad news is that it works only for a short period of time because of a yet to be found memory leak somewhere in the Host Controller Driver.

Michael ends the blog entry with a few words of what we can expect from him in the future. He will be finishing UHCI, so that USB input devices under Haiku would work for anyone with a Universal Host Controller. Another short term goal is to support bulk transfers, which will bring USB mass storage support and support for other protocols like PTP for some cameras. Since the infrastructure is in place implementing bulk transfers is not a big task. After that work will start with implementing the OHCI Host Controller Driver. With this Haiku USB should be mostly USB 1.1 capable. The longer term goal is then to implement EHCI and adapt the stack to hi-speed. This should bring full USB 2.0 support. If everything goes well, Michael will have finished basic USB support for Haiku in the coming next few weeks.

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Yab, a BASIC interpreter for BeOS/Haiku and ZETA, has had for a couple of weeks a brand new homepage, and now there are some more news coming your way. It's now possible for you to download Yab's source, via CVS, which is available over at Sourceforge.

Yab has been used as coding base for some applications already, from a simple Calculator or Sokoban game, to a more complex Yab IDE. Even some more notorious applications are coded using Yab. So if you're a developer or developer-wannabe, go check it out... literally.

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Over at Haiku Bounties, Karl announced the results of the poll, in which the people who donated (about 66% of them) got to vote on the destination for their money. The majority of the votes determined that the USB Stack bounty would be topped at $500 USD and the rest of the money, around $770 USD would be donated to Haiku. Karl also proposed to Michael Phipps that Haiku should set up their own bounty system.

Today Karl got confirmation from Michael Phipps that Haiku will do just that and the funds will be transfered to Haiku's account, thus helping the project in keeping up the forward motion.

Most likely, the bounty system at Haiku will be more focused, meaning it'll target specific... errr... targets, like drivers, which implies some research, so if you want to help Karl, don't be afraid to contact him (he rarely bites). Karl's been doing an amazing job so far, I'm sure he'll keep it up, now together with the Haiku team.

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Axel Dörfler has just published yet another contest on the Haiku-OS site.

Axel is asking the community for help with creating a new nice theme for the new Haiku-OS website. The new site will be based on Drupal, a popular community-oriented content management system.

The website will have a one-level navbar at the top, so please optimize your theme for this particular case. Additionally, a list of "Related Pages" will be used for secondary navigation. There will be nine navigation entries which should always be visible:

  • Welcome
  • FAQ
  • Screenshots
  • Documentation
  • Development
  • Collaborate
  • Get Haiku
  • Donate
  • Contact

Interested in giving it a shot? Then have a look at their requirements and wish list for the theme.

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Image After a loooong time since its last release, Axel has just released an update to OpenTracker, bringing it up to version 5.3.0. Since most of OT's contributors have been busy working on Haiku, it's no wonder it's taken so long for the update to come out.

New in this release, along with plenty of other fixes and enhancements, you can, for example, find:

  • The Deskbar's time view now shows a nice calendar when you click over it and hold the mouse button.
  • Switcher can now quit applications when you press the 'q' key in the Switcher window.
  • Support for undo/redo of Tracker operations (but no undelete, of course)

Of course, don't forget that, when you find a bug, feedback is the best help you can provide to the developers, that way you'll be assisting them in fixing that nasty bug you just discovered. You can get it over at BeBits.

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Stephan Assmus (alias stippi) has for some time worked on an icon editor for Haiku, and it is now possible to see the result of his work, a Mini-Wonderbrush:

 

Icon-O-Matic

In an e-mail to the Haiku-developers community he last Friday published a preview release of the application, toghter with a couple of newly created sample icons and a README file you should definatly read.

In the introduction you can read about Stephan's motivation for his work:
We Haiku developers agree on the fact that Haiku cannot be officially released with the original BeOS R5 icons. For this reason, all icons within Haiku need to be original artwork. Since we have to do this work anyways, we might as well switch to vector icons now. At least we should be able to design the icons in a vector format, so that we don't have to do it all again when we do switch to vector icons. However, as things progress, I am confident that we can use vector icons in R1 without the associated drawbacks.

IsComputerOn would like to suggest that a Haiku Icon Project site is created, in the same way as the Linux community started their successful Tango Desktop Project. With icon style guidelines and naming specifications.

And finally, the link to the e-mail sent on the openbeos mailinglist.

Update: Axel Dörfler yesterday announced the Haiku Icon Contest over at the Haiku site. In the contest you may enter an existing icon set which has a suitable licence (MIT or equivalent). The icons should be available as vector data. To make the process as easy as possible, each submit should be made available as 32 bit PNG images in the resolutions 16x16, 32x32 and 64x64 on transparent background. A page will be made available at Haiku where each submission will be added, so that the community can vote on what icons to be included.

The submission deadline is September 1st 2006.

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Troeglazov Gerasim (alias _3dEyes) rides again. Earlier IsComputerOn has written about his AIM/ICQ client project Romashka, the dictionary application Paradigm and his work on a DjVu Viewer for BeOS / ZETA.

MyContacts

Well, he is once again busy... This time the developer has taken up work again on one of his earlier projects, the NaviTracker. The latest version are available from a newsupdate over at the Russian site Qube.ru.

Version 0.63a can be downloaded for BeOS 5-based versions (PE and Pro, MAX, DevEd, RuEd) and for Dano-based BeOS versions (BeOS 5.1, PhOS and ZETA). The differences in these two versions are related to changes in app_server and libroot in later versions of BeOS. IsComputerOn has not tested the latest version of NaviTracker, but would like to recommend ZETA users to not install it as it would probably break some of ZETA's functionality, like the Preferences.

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Flojo-Soft has introduced yet another of their upcoming applications, MyContact, over at BeBug. The addressbook was first developed by DasJott, under the project title Peat. The application is now being developed further together with thaflo, and rumors are that it is soon to reach beta status.

MyContacts

Their productline will be MyPasswords, My Budget, MyBackup and now also MyContact.

MyBudget is already available for EUR 19,95 and can be bought via PayPal. Just as FunkyIdeaSoft, Flojo-Soft, has decided to give some of their sales (10% of each sold license) to the Haiku project.

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Last.fm is one of the most popular music services on the Internet, and is one of the most successful Web 2.0 applications (2nd generation of Internet services that lets people collaborate and share information online). Sadly only with official clients for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. There has untill now not been a way to get access to the content from BeOS. For those who haven't heard about it, Last.fm is an Internet radio station and music recommendation system, that builds up a detailed profile of each user's musical taste, showing their favourite artists and songs on a customizable profile webpage.

The German user kr1stof found LastFMProxy v1.1, a proxy server for the last.fm radio streams, that allows you to use your favourite audio player (either it being, VLC, SoundPlay or ZETA's MediaPlayer) to listen to the last.fm streams. kr1stof has posted a how-to and some screenshots over at BeUser.de Now if only a developer could make an Audioscrobbler plugin for Soundplay, we would have a great way to tag our favourite music.

So if you haven't signed up at Last.fm yet, then do so and as you are at it, join the already exsisting BeOS and Haiku groups. Oh yes, the groups already there and in the time of writing this, the BeOS group has a bit more then 20 members and Haiku 10 members.

As it's all about sharing, here is my, Begasus and kr1stof's Last.fm profiles.