Early Christmas Gift For Developers?

beunited.org (and people united there) have something for developers:

For about a week the development site for beunited.org projects has been available to the general public thanks to the work of our Director of Developer Relations, Paul Ashford.
The site lists the projects currently available at beunited.org and provides cvs access via browser access to open source code.
The site will eventually mature into a full fledged developer portal with individual pages for each project. More work is being done on this site daily, so keep an eye out for new features. All suggestions are welcome.

Good! Now bugs will be squashed faster and great applications will be even greater!
Are You a developer? What are You waiting for? Go there and play! :)
I already use the newer ArtPaint with the fixes by Segei "fyysik" Dolgov (try searching for ArtPaint on BeShare).
Update: You can get fixed ArtPaint here THX to fyysik :)

OpenBeOS Newsletter #30 is out.

The OpenBeOS folks have put out (mmmmm...) newsletter #30.

In this issue, Mike Wilber goes mining for gold, Axel Dörfler gives us some insights on (O)BFS and it's future, while Michael Phipps discusses gas problems.

As always, a good and interesting read. Go grab it right here.

OpenBFS Beta 4 Released!

WOW!! Look what those 3 hours outside the basement did to Axel! Only 5 days after B3 was released, B4 comes our way.

This one brings us more goodies, the most important one being the fixed (finally) VM bug. Another important goodie is that it doesn't seem to incorporate any new BGA code, which is always good news... couldn't resist, we love ya BGA!

Here's the full announcement:

As they had nothing usefull to do in the past days, the OpenBFS Team decided to hunt down the Virtual Memory bug and fix it. After days of intense investigation (yeah, right), we tracked it down to a stupid bug that took Axel something like 2 seconds to fix.

The end result is that now OpenBFS can really be used as a complete BFS replacement (yes, I know you heard that before) without the need for any special tricks.

Not being happy with that fix, and because there is not much else to do in his basement, Axel decided to also fix a deadlock with live queries and a problem in the locking mechanism that usually got people to KDL.

So, in other words, go get it as it is worth the download.

Truly great work! Now... if with B3 Axel got a full 3 hours outside the basement, we can only wonder at the possibilities B4 will bring him... maybe even... *gasp*... HALF A DAY!!

B.E.O.S. News Update.

Our buddies over at BlueEyedOS have posted a news update, by the hand of Guillaume Maillard.

The now have BMenu working, as well as a functional BButton. Full monty follows:

Hi all! News from BMenu: look at here. It's an initial release, but a working BMenu. I fixed a lot of things. Please note that it's huge step to port BeOS apps to our OS. Now also BButon work as expected when you click and go out of the button (I implemented a basic "mouse tracking").

Good news, they're making good progress. Keep it up guys!

OpenBFS beta 3 Released.

The OBFS team has a new release for everyone to stress and test. It brings this to version 1.0 beta 3.

As usual, downloaded it, "plug it in", test it, stress the hell out of it, make it crash, make it work, but remember.. ALWAYS provide feedback to the developers about your experience with it.

Let me post here the annoucement:

The OpenBFS Team is proud to announce the release of OpenBFS v1.0 Beta 3. This version is a huge step from Beta 2 and includes the following fixes:

* Should not switch to read-only mode that often making it actually useable)
* Is now compatible with BFS (no KDLs when switching from OpenBFS to BFS)
* Queries now work as expected.
* And more...


You still need to disable virtual memory to use it. We are working on tracking this bug down.

Get it at the usual place. Renaming to WalterFS is being discussed.

With this release, the OBFS team has moved to Middle Beta Stage. A friendly word of advice: Although Axel coded on this, it still has BGA's code, so beware...*cough BUGS cough*

A reliable source has told us that in fact Axel will be let out of the basement for 3 hours later today, though keeping the iron ball chained to his leg. This is a happy day indeed.

Another App_Server Update.

He's at it again. Darkwyrm and his Duracell batteries are one fierce partnership. He has updated his site with news of his latest progress.

It's short but sweet (er... i could take that to a whole different way.. but i won't), so i'll paste it all here. Why? Because i know you like it:

I got a breakthrough in the font code - the rotated text works almost exactly like Be's. Obligatory screenshot here. Once I have some real time, we should be looking at prototype 7 being released pretty darn soon along with some real OpenBeOS font code also being checked into the tree. We're getting closer, folks!

Darkwyrm better take a rest because i'm running out of adjectives for him... he rocks, he rules.. ah yes, he's L337! Keep it up!

FFmpeg Update and How-To.

François Revol, mmu_man in BeShare has done some quality work for BeOS, for example porting Emacs and making Nplay, a very good media player. On top of it all, he's a really nice guy. This time he brings us news of ffmpeg, a status update and a How-To giving us examples of how and where to use ffmpeg. Remember, if you don't like what he writes, i'm just the messenger.

Read On...

BlueEyedOS Update.

Sorry for not posting this sooner. It slipped like sand through my fingers (that's the poet in me). I regularly check the B.E.O.S. site often, and just now that i didn't for a couple of days, they update it... Shame on them, they did it on purpose.

Michael informs us that the kernel server is almost finished and not only that, they have a new screenshot straight from their app_server lab. Here's the full monty:

TEAMS update! Now, we have validated the team&thread mechanisms, and it will register team and add new thread to thread & team table, reports Martin Handl. With this code, 90% of kernel_server is ok! What's more, the new app_server made a new step, the new font rendering is now working as expected. The quality was improved, see this screenshot.

AH! You thought i had forgotten the link to their screenshot... ppphhhttt... here it is, click where it says "click me" and enjoy.

The Voting has Ended.

That's it ladies and gentlemen, the voting session is closed. Finito, kaput, acabou. The response was quite good according to OBOS. Now it's time for the OpenBeOS leads to check the results and announce them.

Once more, and since i'm such a nice guy, i'll post the announcement here:

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Name Vote is now closed. We had well over 4000 votes cast, and would like to thank you for your tremendous support in this. The admin team is working hard and fast on finishing up the behind-the-scenes part of the process. Hopefully, we will have a date soon when you will know the results of the entire process. Once again, thank you for your support.

As i said it's tic-tac time now, time to wait. Let's see what comes out of this.

Mr. App_Server Update.

He's at it again. I'm telling you, this guy doesn't stop. I wonder what he takes.. mmmmmmm

He brings us some more news on his progress and this time he even marvels us with his knowledge of french!

For you viewing (and lazy) pleasure, i'll post the whole shebang here:

I spent most of this weekend bashing my head against a wall, figuratively speaking. Rendering a normal string is relatively easy compared to rendering a rotated string - which *still* doesn't work right. :( OTOH, our font shear code will work better than Be's - theirs causes the characters to slide a little and ours doesn't, and it also looks quite good. Ironically, getting the transform code right is the hardest part of all the font code, it seems. R2 may have other transforms available, such as horizontal or vertical flipping, projection, and/or vertical shear, depending on how things work out.

Anyway, I've also got a new display module for the server under construction and well under way. The one seen in prototypes 3-6 utilized an offscreen bitmap drawn to the screen via a regular BWindow. The new one takes over the screen and writes directly to the hardware. The difference? An improvement anywhere from 2 to 10 times or more, depending on how slow the old driver decides to be. The only down side to the thing is that the Input Server emulation is done via the cursor keys - polling the mouse manually will take too much CPU power and using the Router add-on isn't a real good idea, either, because of system stability problems it causes. Oh well. C'est la vie.

Not only does he code fast, he codes damn well too... i'm telling you, the app_server will rock!

Xentronix VST News & Icon Competition.

More Xentronix updates folks. This time they bring us news of a new VST plugin that will get ported to BeOS. It's name is ZR-3 and it's a triple drawbar organ. More information is available here.

Also, they have started a competition. An Icon Competition. Create the best set for the "newBeOS" and win $70. Sweet. You can read it all on their news page.

So head over there, read the rules and start drawing! May the best icon win.

Phoenix for BeOS.

IT BUILDS!! And what builds you might ask? Phoenix does of course. And what is Phoenix you ask? Well... Phoenix is a light-weight (compared to his "papa") browser, based on Mozilla. It uses the XUL user interface language and is designed to be cross-platform. For more info on it, you can head over to the Phoenix site.

So what you ask? Well, Bezilla.org's own Arougthopher (nickname Paul) has managed to get it to build under BeOS. Yes i know, it is great news. Let me paste some of his words for your reading pleasure:

Well, with a little work, I was able to get Phoenix to build on my box. In fact, I'm writing this article in the Phoenix browser under BeOS. Being that this is a debug build, however, I can't really comment on speed (all debug builds are slow :-) So, I have a patch I need to put up on BugZilla. Then, there are two things I would like to get implemented in Mozilla for BeOS, before I make a public build ...

And that's not all! Now for your viewing pleasure, click right here for a screenshot of Phoenix running under BeOS.

That's really great news folks, Paul's been doing a terrific job and now this. Choice is a Good Thing (tm), like they say, the more the merrier. And Phoenix really ROCKS!