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The master for Zeta RC2 has been brought to the presses. yellowTAB just announced. The step from RC1-SP2 to RC2 incorporates literally hundreds of bugfixes, support for 64-bit processors, and updates to Tracker, Deskbar and other system processes.

Because of this update, yellowTAB offers a one-time offer for its customers to purchase the RC2 CD at cost price.

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A new beta of Refraction will be available to its customers in the nearby future. This has been announced on the website of Xentronix.

The forthcoming version, beta 7, will be another vast improvement in the progress of Refraction. This time not only because of the dedicated work by Frans van Nispen, but also thanks to submissions to the quite recently opened Bugs and Features bugtracker. Of the 52 bugs submitted over the last period of time, only 11 have not yet been resolved.

The reason why it took some time for Refraction to reach the beta 7 status was that Frans wanted to have dealt with several issues before he felt the new version of Refraction to be good enough for release. Because of the progress of late, he has announced that beta 7 will be the last version available under the Early Bird Licence discount. After that, Refraction will cost EUR 79.95 in stead of the current bargain of EUR 39.95, and won't be having the free update from Refraction R1 to R1.5. Bear in mind that Refraction will get scanner support for Zeta soon, and that there will also be a Refraction Lite edition available for purchase that is a better and more professional frontend than Sanity.

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The IM Kit is a modular framework developed to make it easy to access various IM networks (ICQ, AIM, etc) and is designed in a way it is fully integrated with BeOS. It makes use of BeOS attributes, indexes and live queries to make it as flexible as possible. With the IM Kit you can, for instance, search for all members of your family that are online and that by using the standard Find interface. You can also manage all the contacts using Tracker.

You can also see in the screenshot that the IM Kit even changes the icon color according to the user status and that change is, as expected, live.

The IM Kit was envisioned by Linus Almstron and was later "adopted" by Mikael Eiman (m_eiman). Active developers working on the project right now include Bruno G. Albuquerque (BGA), Mikael Jansson (tic) and Michael Davidson (slaad).

BeOS IM Kit is in an alpha stage of development, and in the time of writing it only supports a subset of the ICQ protocol.

If you have ideas for the project or want to contribute with code, please join the developers at #beosimkit (irc.freenode.org). The latest version of the kit can be downloaded from:

http://eiman.tv/files/imkit_alpha_6.1.zip

Press Read more... to see a screenshot of the kit.

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The OpenBeOS project has just announce that their Translation Kit is now available in beta 3. This release includes the latest Translation Kit library, the latest BMP, GIF, JPEG2000, JPEG, PNG, PPM, StyledEdit, TGA and TIFF Translators and the latest version of ShowImage, which should now have all of the features of Be's version, plus very nice extra features. Many bugs have been fixed, including one in the Translation Kit which caused some applications to crash and prevented others from loading bitmap resources.

This release is available for download from here.

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In one last effort of attracting new users to the BeOS platform, the Norwegian BeOS UserGroup has started their own webshop.

We have found several items missing and been trying to get in touch with the leaders of the usergroup.

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After a particularly well timed server crash at our hosting company, ICO is now back up, as you've noticed, since you're reading this.

So, though a bit later than I would have liked, I'd like to wish everyone out there a very happy Christmas, if you celebrate it, on behalf of ICO. I hope you had a nice peaceful time with your family and that you had the gift you most wanted.

And now, back to our usual programming...

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It's that time again, time for a new poll, and seeing as we're in the holidays, it's about Christmas (1 point for originality). So what would you like? Chose and if there's something you want that's not an option, leave a comment. Enjoy and start voting.

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After a few weeks being offline due to connection problems, Pixel32's author is now back online and has announced that he intends to upload Pixel32 RC1 still during the holidays. So if you're a registered user, stay tuned.

Thanks to Jean Marc for the heads up on this one. It's great to have active readers. Thanks everyone.

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I had this in my mailbox yesterday (thanks Dane) but I had a pretty hectic day, seeing as it was my last day at work, so sorry for the delay.

BeOSRadio is having a special Christmas programming for the holidays. Today and tomorrow, each hour, Dane Scott will have a special Christmas Countdown "complete with BeOSRADIO's top-ten favorite submitted Christmas songs, plus interview clips with a "secret" featured artist." Also, today, Christmas' Eve, there will be another holiday special produced by Dane Scott, from 18h00m (6pm) up to midnight, starting every hour just after the news.

So don't forget to tune in to listen to this special programming. You have two connection flavours to chose from, the 64k Stereo and the 16k Mono one. There has been some buffering problems with the 64k stream, so if you encounter any problems, use the 16k stream. Enjoy and Merry Christmas!

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BlueEyedOS has just announced that they are changing to LGPL. What motivated them to make this move? There's been a lack of developers joining the project, so by doing this, they seek to atract more devs to join their effort.

Also, they will soon open a CVS server, available to everyone. Along with all of this, you can read about it and more over at Guillaume Maillard's column. An interesting read.

Thanks to Syrek for the mail about this one.