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Hi everyone. If you're subscribed to a BeOS mailing list, like the BeUserTalk or BeDevTalk, you'll know about this already. Bruno Albuquerque, known as BGA (Big Green Alien of course) in the BeOS world, wrote to announce that the Bug-BR server will be down for a couple of days, due to upgrading. This will involve an IP change, so the site will be unreachable while the DNS servers update the information.

This will of course take down the several mailing lists (already mentioned two of them) being hosted there, as well as the OpenBFS site and Dr. Zoidberg's site. So if you don't receive any mail from those lists, starting next Thursday (probably), you'll know why.

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OSNews put online the english version of an interview that my buddy Koki from JPBE.net did recently. You can find the original version right here.

In it Phipps talks about the beginning of OpenBeOS, some of the devs involved in the project and talks about the other OSS projects, as well as Zeta. Also, though not confirmed, he reveals the intended date for the first WalterCon. So don't wait any longer and go read it.

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yellowTab just announced the opening of their new webshop, located at www.yellowtab.biz. The new shop is the result of a growing partnership between yT and Mensys.

Read on for Bernd Korz's comments.

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How would you like to create UDF disks in BeOS, to later burn onto a DVD? Soon it will be possible, if all goes well. Tyler Dauwalder, creator of the UDF filesystem add-on has begun work on a tool to create UDF images, called (unsurprisingly) makeudfimage.

Though still not in an usable state, it now creates mountable, though empty, images. He continues to work on it and soon (so we hope) he'll post a fully working binary.

This is a very interesting (and useful) add-on for BeOS/Zeta, great work Tyler!

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Rudolf Cornelissen, coder extraordinaire, has just released the latest version of his Matrox driver. In this new version, there are too many fixes to list, but they mainly focus on the G400/450 and G550 family of cards.

Don't forget you can use them together with DualHeadSetup (self-explanatory) and VideoScreen for VCD and DVD VideoTV modes. Go download it now and enjoy, and don't forget, he wants feedback!

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yellowTab just announced at their site, their plans for expansion. Here's what they say:
yellowTAB is currently preparing significant international expansion and is to this end founding a holding company. We would like to give our customers the chance to take advantage of this opportunity which is ideal for small investors. We will be issuing option certificates to private investors valued at Euro 50 with a maximum of 20 certificates per investor.

Once the holding has been founded, certificate holders will have the option to convert their certificates into shares of the new company at a discount of 20% on the issue price. We would like to know what you think about this so please take part in our poll.
Interesting, very interesting. So head over to their site and voice out your opinion. We all (or so) would like to see yT have a bright future, this might help them achieve that goal.

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3ivx Technologies Pty. Ltd. has released their MPEG-4 Video codec called 3ivx D4 4.5 for BeOS. 3ivx allows you to compress video to be a fraction of its original size while maintaining high image quality. You can store over 2 hours of near DVD quality video on a single CD-ROM or stream near DVD quality video over a cable modem or DSL modem.

The 3ivx decoder plays back most MPEG-4 files with MPEG-4 Video (such as DivX 3, 4 and 5, Apple MPEG-4, Philips MPEG-4 and XviD) using any compatible player.

The 3ivx encoder produces industry-leading compact high quality MPEG-4 Video and is distributed as a plug-in for the BeOS Media Architecture. This allows you to encode MPEG-4 Video in MOV files. 3ivx Technologies Pty. Ltd. recommends that you use VideoPro for encoding.

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BeClan just announced that they now sample code available to everyone wanting to improve their coding abilities. Registered users themselves can upload bits (eh, funny!) of code they deem useful to everyone else.

Also, at a few pages of the site, anyone can send comments to registered users. No e-mail adresses are shown, ensuring there's no chance of spam bots going around.

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BeUnited announces today that they've enhanced their copy of BeBook to accept annotations, to anyone registered at their portal. This way, they hope to improve it, counting on you, for that.

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This is part of a newsarticle published over at Mac Rumors:

"Perhaps the most intriguing past information, however was Apple's recruitment of three developers from Gobe Software. Gobe developed an innovative office suite for Windows, Linux and BeOS, and -- after a brief disappearance -- seems to have returned.

Read the full news article:
http://www.macrumors.com