Good morning everyone! After a weekend of waiting, here's what the teaser was all about.

With the very generous contribution of Dane Scott, IsComputerOn associated itself with TuneTracker Systems and will be giving away a fully licensed copy of TuneTracker 2, in the value of $149.95!

Read more to find out what you have to do.

Rudolf Cornelissen has updated his Matrox driver page with some good news for those who own those cards. Here's the update:
More good news indeed. We now have the VCD and DVD TVout playback modes for G400 upto and including G550 cards. I was indeed able to get them working nicely on G400 also now, although overscanning in NTSC VCD mode is very minimal. It seems the G400 MAVEN design has restrictions which are just a bit too narrow to support all important modes exactly as they are supposed to be. Note please that you will need the (updated) tool 'VideoScreen V6' for setting the VCD/DVD modes for now (see the techinfo and tools page).
So if you own such a card, download it and don't forget, report back to Rudolf if you encounter any problems, or just to praise him.
Stay tuned for a nice (and long overdue) surprise, coming to a browser near you, Monday, Dec. 8th...
I'm sure you've all heard of BeClan by now, and if you haven't, go check it out. BeClan is constantly trying to find new ways to help everyone involved in the community, and providing documentation is one of them. Read on for their request:
As BeClan is trying to provide more facilities to the community in general, one of the things we're interested in is keeping as much information about our favourite platform (and all it's derivatives) in the public domain as possible. To further this we have been discussing making the BeBook available, with some interesting twists that should return it to a living, growing entity that is truly useful.

To get this started we'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has a copy of the annotated BeBook. We'll give full credit for anyone able to provide an archive of it (of course). Should you be able to help please This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.! Thanks!
So if you're reading this, and you have what they're looking for, go ahead and contact them. You know it'll give you a nice warm feeling inside.
After almost a month and a half since the last update (doesn't mean they're not working, don't forget that), the OpenBeOS site gains a pulse again. Michael Phipps writes in a series of updates, from which I'd like to point out:
1) We are consistantly near the top 25 or so projects on SourceForge. This week, for example, we are 94% on the project activity list. That means a lot of checkins are happening.

3) We have around 1.3 million lines of source code. Compared to R5's 6 million, that may not seem like much, but I believe that we will come in substantially under 3 million lines of source at the end of the day.

9) What I hope to be the last paperwork for the recognition of the non-profit has been sent out to the IRS via FedEx.
Some very interesting points indeed, especially the last one, hopefully things will move faster now and they'll be able to (finally) change to their new name. There are other updates of course, so to read them all go to the OpenBeOS site.

I'd like to thank Oscar Lesta for the heads up on this one.
Koki, a well known (and one of the hard working) member of JPBE.net shot me a very interesting e-mail today.

JPBE has launched a Hardware Compatability Database, in Japanese and for Japanese users. It's most likely the first hardware database with full"compatibility with Zeta in its various flavors (RC1, RC1 + SP1, R1, whenever it becomes available).".

Click on Read More for more information.

ZetaNews has an article about what yellowTAB has added to the soon coming SP2. The list is impressive, and more things will be added before the update gets released.

Among the most interesting things with this update are that yellowTAB have added a new decor to replace the BeOS R5 one. All old decors that were buggy have been removed. But not only the decors have changed, also the system font is replaced by a clean looking Sans Serif font, as you can see from a screenshot published over at ZetaNews.

Related link:
The article over at ZetaNews
NBC GIGA reports that their Zeta show last Thursday was a huge success. The responce in the forum regarding the OS was overwhelming.

Zeta can be seen again tonight at 17.30 (CET).

Related links:
Story @ GIGA
GIGA's forum

Update: ICO is now hosting (as a mirror) the GIGA show, broken into 4 mpeg files. So for your viewing pleasure, here's file one,two, three and four, Thanks to BeUserGroup for the files!
Earlier this week, I wrote a mail to The General Coffee Company, makers of the Macromedia Flash Player for BeOS.

In that mail, I asked them, among other things, the current state of their BeOS port of the popular Player, planned updates to later (and current) versions, etc. Click on Read More for their reply.

yellowTAB and BeUnited will be co-operating on porting Sun's Java J2SE version 1.4 to Zeta and OSBOS. beunited.org will lead the project with yellowTAB providing technical support for the Zeta specific parts. In addition yellowTAB CTO Alan Westbrook will join the beunited.org Open Standards Committee.

yellowTAB has also agreed to submit it's acclaimed LocaleKit for standardisation by beunited.org. Thus, all OSBOS will have compatible localisation making it easier for developers to release localised versions of their applications for various OSBOS distributions.

For full pressrelease: http://www.yellowtab.com.