ImageAnnounced yesterday was the immediate availability, from 3ivx , of their latest mpeg4 decoder/encoder for BeOS. This latest version includes, among other fixes and enhancements, frame accurate seeking and experimental aac audio. But not only that. The cherry on top of the cake is that an experimental version of their decoder is also now available for Haiku!

Expected for the future, and once Haiku's media support gets more robust, is the 3ivx encoder. This is great news for Haiku, as it shows it's receiving an increasing amount of attention. Nice job 3ivx.

Here at IsComputerOn we are thrilled about the many changes that Haiku has gotten lately, and yesterday Stephan Asmuss (stippi) could commit a patch from Artur Wyszynski (aljen) to the Haiku source tree.

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Artur has implemented the animated bootscreen BeOS (icons lighting up at different boot stages), with a new set of great looking boot splash images, generated by the new hsbg tool. And as Stephan wrote in the commit comments, the bootscreen finally contains the "new" Haiku logo. Stephan did a few changes to Artur's commit: Added Artur to the contributors list in About System, fixed some left overs in the patch, kept tracing turned off.

There is a few things left to be done, one is for instance that they remove the need for hard coding the icon positions.

Scot Hacker contributed with an article once to the BeOS Tip Server, explaining the row of icons on the splash screen:

  • Atom: Indicates the handoff of the bootloader to the BeOS kernel.
  • I/O Card: PCI initialization has been completed.
  • Lightning Bolt: This icon appears just before the system enables non-boot CPUs (where non-boot CPUs are defined as the additional processors in a multi-proc system).
  • Oscilloscope: All CPUs have now been enabled.
  • Disks: All boot drivers and modules have been initialized.
  • Magnifying Glass: The boot volume has been mounted.
  • BeBox: The system BootScript is being read into memory and its contents executed.

 

Oliver Ruiz Dorantes has implemented the SetDiscoverable() method in to Haiku's Bluetooth kit, and published a photo of his mobile phone discovering his Haiku installation:

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The phone discovered Mavin which is the name of the bluetooth dongle plugged in the Haiku Box.

Haiku yesterday announced that they, for the second straight year, have been accepted as a mentor organization for the Google Summer of Code.

The student application period will start soon, so if you are a student who would like to work on a Haiku project for the GSoC 2008, please check out their comprehensive List of GSoC Ideas and pages for detailed information on how to apply. If you still have any questions specific to GSoC after reading these pages, please contact the Haiku GSoC administrator (Bruno Albuquerque).

If you have any general questions about Haiku and want to start familiarizing yourself with our community, which we encourage you to, please join the Haiku development mailing list and also feel free to stop by the #haiku IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. Our friendly community members will be glad to help you out in pursuing a Haiku project for the GSoC 2008 and beyond.

I recently took over the ownership of the Jabber for BeOS source code, originally developed by John Blanco (Rapture from Venice). The IM client is now renamed to Jabber for Haiku, and the source code released under MIT (same license as Haiku) on OSDrawer.net. I have asked Andrea Anzani to maintain the code, but any one interested in working on the code are encouraged to make contact with me or Andrea. Today we would like to give the community a small Easter present. We hope to see you This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

jabber-haiku

Jabber (XMPP - eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) is an open, XML-inspired protocol for instant messaging (IM) and presence information ( buddy list). The protocol is built to be extensible and other features are Voice over IP and file transfer, but are currently not implemented in the client for Haiku. What has been implemented so far, is SSL (Secure Sockets Layer - for secure communications on the Internet). SSL is also needed to use client with Google Talk, something that is now possible to do with the client. SSL is not included in the package, but can be downloaded from BeBits (has been tested with the BONE version).

As I am not a coder and this is an open source project, I would like to come with suggestion for a roadmap:

    1. Typing Notification
    2. Emoicons
    3. Graphics
    4. Group Chats is supported, but more functionality is needed.
    5. Multi account support
    6. Avartar support
    7. Libjingle - For VoIP, voicemail, video and file transfer.

This past few days, a couple of BeOS related sites have been brought to life. First, OsDrawer was brought back after some hosting problems. Second, after a long hiatus (it was practically deceased), BeTips was revived by Scot Hacker himself, after regaining control of the domain. He managed to dig around for an old copy of the site's database and has now republished the articles, via WordPress. Scot is now looking for volunteers to maintain/cleanup the old database and write new tips for Haiku.

It's good to see both of these sites back online, but BeTips is a special case, for several reasons. Welcome back!

Update: And another one is back, sorry if I missed it. It's not exactly the same, but almost. RIP BeDope and welcome BeDoperer.

Last week was a busy one, for TuneTracker Systems. First, they released a new application for their package, named TuneBridge. What it does is let the users make a bridge between TuneTracker and their existing music selection application, in case they're not using TuneStacker. It builds a database of all your audio files (even from different partitions and drives) which in turn gets used by the other scheduling program. Tune Bridge is now available and costs USD $79.95.

As the title says, TT Systems not only creates but also buys software, and the one they just bought is none other than SampleStudio, created by Xentronix. Their aim is to build on its foundations, improving and expanding its abilities. Due to this purchase, TT Systems is now looking to hire a coder with BeOS audio programming experience. If you feel you're up to the job and have "the right stuff", contact them.

It's great to see what is probably the most successfull BeOS based software company still going strong, which we here at ICO hope continues for many years.

As I'm sure you're all aware, this past weekend took place the latest SCaLE edition, and once more, Haiku was there, represented by Joe Bushong, Bruno Albuquerque, aka BGA, and Jorge Mare, aka Koki. And it was Koki who published over at Haiku-OS his overall impressions (not to be confused by impressions on his overalls) of the event.

Koki gives us a kind of a diary, covering the happenings of the weekend. At the end, there's also available an interview given by BGA to the BadApples site and some pictures of the event. Great write up as always from Koki, so head over and enjoy reading what it must have been a great weekend.

Following in the SCaLE's footsteps and Bruno Albuquerque's presentation, Haiku has been in the news all over the place. It first started with Ars Technica's "Haiku Poetically Resurrects BeOS" written by former BeOS user Ryan Paul. That article in turn got picked up by (that I know of) Engadget and Slashdot. Haiku's website got hammered quite a lot, but seems to be fine as I'm writing this.

It's always great to see the project make the "big" news sites, bringing more and more attention to it, which in turn increases awareness and who knows, could even bring more users and developers. Nice.

Update: This slipped by, but OSNews also picked up this story of course. Here's the link. Now Thom, where's my sheep?

Step by step, inch by inch, Haiku is getting closer being fully self hosted. Last night (and into this morning), Michael Lotz managed to check out the Haiku tree, then compile the Haiku image and finally boot it under QEMU, all of this from Haiku itself. There are still problems of course, like memory leaks, etc, but this marks an important step in the Haiku trip (not that kind of trip).

The checkout took a long time, and several reboots, and a change (hack) was needed by Michael, but I'm everyone welcomes this news has good news. Just don't think Haiku's ready to replace your _insert most used desktop OS here_ anytime soon. Congrats to everyone involved and here's hoping to a Beta this year :)