Beunited.org Clarifies Position on Standards.

In an effort to reduce confusion, beunited.org has clarified their position on OSBOS standards. Beunited.org states that they "support the development of standards for all OSBOS projects, regardless of license." They also have changed the definition of OSBOS to "Open Standards BeOS-Compatible Operating Systems".

Beunited.org announced that they will open the new standards portal Monday and invites “all members of the community to join and work together in the development of standards. “

Two bugs discovered in OpenBFS beta 5.

On OpenBeOS site, BGA informs about two discovered bugs in latest beta version of OpenBFS. One is minor (but can be annoying for people using queries a lot). Second one is more nasty (but happening only after running chkbfs).

Read more...

Interview With Jeremy Freisner.

Jeremy Friesner is the talented author of MUSCLE, BeShare and Spicy Keys, essential applications to the BeOS experience. Today The BeOS Journal put him through his Jedi Training, asking those questions you were too afraid to ask.

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Updates & Reminders.

Quite a few small, but important updates and reminders to go out to the BeOS Community today...

I wanted to first ask again if people had questions for Rudolf Cornelissen or Thomas Kurschel, developers of the Matrix and ATI video drivers, respectively.

Check out the forum where you can post your questions to Rudolf, and or to Thomas. They work closely with each other, and are good friends, so all relevant questions will be brought to them both when I conduct their interview. I was planning to include Thomas as a surprise to you all, but now realize that perhaps there might be seperate questions. ;)

In other news, openBeOS has another newsletter and it's chock full of update goodness! I nearly fell off my chair when I read about Marcus' progress with the media kit. Michael has some potentially disruptive advice and thoughts, and Tyler publishes another article on using Doxygen. All in all, it's an excellent newsletter issue.

The fine folks managing Team BeOS have asked me to remind everyone who has spare cpu cycles to help them with not only the Distributed Folding project, but the new Seventeen or Bust project. The reason? If we can accomplish being #1 in overall progress, there will be a GUI client written for BeOS. Sweeeeet. ;)

And finally, I end with words to all of us who have stuck together on this journey to develop a BeOS replacement. It's been a turbulant year, especially after events of Sept. 11, 2001, but things are looking brighter for everyone. I expect an even better year in 2003 as our hard work starts to produce tangible results that we can show to the public. Keep the faith, and cheers!

OpenBFS getting closer to v1.0.

As we wrote last week, OpenBFS Team released OpenBFS beta5, which is first beta they call "stable" (without any known bugs):

From now on, our efforts will go towards making it as fast as possible without compromising data integrity. There should be another beta release in a while and if no more bugs are found, we will have the final 1.0 version just after that! At this point Axel will be free to leave the basement ;)

This version also includes the first version of the chkbfs replacement and you will want this. It can detect and fix a lot more problems than the original BFS one can.

More info here.
THX again to BGA and Axel!

PS: have You noted that part about basement? Join our efforts to FREE AXEL by downloading and testing OpenBFS beta5! :D

Ur-Quan Masters Alpha Released.

A new game has been released for BeOS. It's name is Ur-Quan Masters.

It's brough to us by the company Toys for Bob, who made, among others, Pandemonium and Star Control. Ur-Quan Masters is actually Star Control 2, released for the old console 3DO. The company released it's source, and there's a project going on to port it to several operating systems. You can check the project's page here.

The download is quite big, it's a 140MB pkg file, so those with dial-up connections... better use a download manager. It's an alpha build, so it IS buggy. Provide feedback at it's BeBits talkback page. Here's the link to the download: Ur-Quan Masters.

Nice. A new game for BeOS, and most of all, a big project sees BeOS has a target for it's efforts.

Interview with Guillaume Maillard.

In honor of our BUG-BR (Brazilian BeOS User Group) friends, and since i'm portuguese (we rule), this will be the first news post, in two languages. First the native language:

O site BUG-BR (Grupo Brasileiro de Usuários do BeOS) colocou online uma entrevista efectuada por Marcos Gonçalves (conhecido no BeShare como markanth) com Guillaume Maillard, um dos coordenadores do BlueEyedOS.

Nesta entrevista Guillaume aborda vários assuntos referentes ao B.E.O.S., entre os quais o uso (ou não) do BFS e do Opentracker e uma possível data para a publicação online de uma primeira versão para testes.

Para a entrevista completa, clique aqui.

And now the english version.

The BUG-BR (Brazilian BeOS User Group) posted online an interview with BlueEyedOS' Guillaume Maillard, conducted by Marcos Conçalves (known in BeShare as markanth).

In this interview, Guillaume approaches several subjects concerning B.E.O.S., among which the use (or not) of BFS and Opentracker, as well as a possible date for the release of a basic version for testers.

For the complete interview (the english version), click here.

We hope you liked this bilingual posting. Esperamos que tenham gostado desta notícia bilingue.

We now resume our regular programming.

WE GOT SLIDING TABS!!

First of all, i want to know who recognizes where i got the department from... write me or let me know on BeShare.

Now for the real deal. Darkwyrm is at it again, though slower now, since that pesky Real Life(tm) keep interfering.

He's updated his site with some interesting (as always) news bits, but what comes out the most is that he has sliding tabs working! YES! The famous and loved sliding tabs will be present in R1! Very good news, i'm sure everyone will enjoy this, especially a certain annoying brat i know... *cough* Zaranthos *cough*

As usual, i'll paste the update here for your reading pleasure:

Yup. Thursday is Thanksgiving, which means a vacation, time to gorge oneself on poultry, and more time to code. :) I am currently doing Christmas programs at school, so time is tight. Nonetheless, I am still working on the prototype and other things. John Hedditch has come forward and has volunteered to work on getting a real BWindow class done and a skeleton is checked into the tree. I've got more bugs squashed and the window decorator now will allow you to slide the tab. Screen redraw while sliding tabs is still buggy, but the actual tab stuff works ok. I also have discovered that there is a more-or-less unfixable bug in ViewDriver, much to my chagrin, so the sooner the ScreenDriver class is finished, the better. I'm still playing with the abandoned project, but I still haven't decided if I'm going to do serious development on it yet, so no details as of now.

I have one question though... what his that misterious BeOS abandoned project he might start working on? I'll try to find out and let you know.

Also, welcome to John Hedditch and thanks for your help. I'm sure you'll do a great job.

More Names to Ponder

Our "Juniour Scribe" leader here, Technix, has posted an open vote on whatever name YOU want for OpenBeOS which you can find here.

This is a tbj initiative to collect some more names, that will hopefully add some more perspective to this whole name choosing game. You have until Jan 1st 2003 to vote on this current poll and subsequent polls shall arise later down the track. So what are you waiting for? Go vote for your favourite name!

I'm "rooting" (as those outlandish Americans would say) for Indigo, OR miszaOS!!!!! Ahem, now, get to it, and remember Indigo, Indigo, Indigo! And tell your friends to vote for Indigo! ;)

B.E.O.S. Plays A Game.

Blue Eyed OS' own Guillaume Maillard brings us the most recent update to their saga.

In it he discusses.. a game. In this case BePuyo (talk about publicity). The bit to retain about this update isn't the liking Guillaume has for little coloured balls with wide (or evil) open eyes, it's the fact that he got it running on B.E.O.S., recompiling it without changes. I'll post the update:

Simple games are often the best, in this category, the game I prefer is BePuyo. It appeared on BeBits.com months ago. I even helped a bit his author to make it a little more stable in order to be able to play more :) . Because a B.E.OS without BePuyo is not a B.E.OS, I took some hours to fix some bugs and implements some new things in the new app_server. Now it works, see this screenshot. (BePuyo was recompiled without changes).

So there you have folks, Blue Eyed Os keeps progressing. Stay tuned.

BeOS PE Max Edition 2.1 Released.

Thanks to Prakash Shetty for the heads up. The BeOS PE Max Edition v. 2.1 edition has been released. In it you can find many apps, drivers, updates and enhancements to the original R5 Edition.

You download the installation image and burn it to a CD, which is bootable. An important update is the AMD Athlon XP patch (with SSED enabled) which allows users to install it on new machine with that AMD cpu. As stated above, it contains many changes to list here. So if you're new to BeOS, or a veteran user looking to try an alternative edition, point your mouse to to this page and download it.

What's this? Sound coming from my Audigy?!?!

It had been discussed some time ago at the BeDriverTalk mailing list. In it i practically begged a coder named Greg Crain to send me mail as soon as he had as much as a peep from his soundcard. He said he would, so i waited. The wait seemed to go on for ages, afterall, for someone who can't live without music (I made my boss give me a workstation with on-board audio), having no sound in BeOS was a torture. Then two weeks ago it came...

During my lunch hour, a mail arrived from Greg, with the subject line "Audigy alpha driver". I threw myself at the keyboard and mouse to read the instructions and install it. I HAD SOUND!! Greg was now my personal hero (after some other awesome coders like for example Thomas Kurschel for both his IDE Replacement Driver and his Radeon Driver). It was only left channel as he told me it would be, but I H-A-D S-O-U-N-D!!!!

A few days later i got another mail and oh joy, stereo sound in all it's glory! And it sounded better than when i had my Live card, at least to my ears.

So for two weeks i provided feedback and basically enjoyed listening to my albums in mp3. Life was (almost) good again. And i waited for his OK so i could post it here for everyone who has been sound-deprived to go and download it. Thank you Greg for all your work, and to everyone who helped in anyway to bring this driver to BeOS.

What? What's that you say? "Where's the freaking link to the driver you #@#4@$#%$!!!"... No, i didn't forget, click right HERE and download it. And remember, coders love feedback.

Update 1: Along with the talkback section over at BeBits, you can discuss the driver and provide feeback here. Update 2 coming along shortly...

Update 2: Greg asked me to make a small update to the article, so without further ado, here are his words: "Jerome Duval did a huge amount of work on the SBLive driver code that I updated and modified for the Audigy. It might be nice to mention his name and that I thank him. He got some of his code from Marcus Overhagen's driver, so the community really does feed itself !"

Phoenix On BeOS.

If you remember, a while ago (few weeks time) i wrote here about the coming of a new browser to BeOS land. It's name is Phoenix.

Paul from Bezilla.org has been hard at work on it, as well as Bezilla (where he has done a terrific job so far). I don't know the origin, if it's Paul or someone else, but as of today, Phoenix for BeOS is out in the open, and is being used, shared (BeShare) and downloaded by anyone who wants it. Your's truly has it already and i have been using it on and off.

I have been using it, for Windows, for some time now (i have to use windows at work, unfortunately), and i love it. So i had high expectations for it, running on BeOS. And i must say, i'm not disappointed, at all. Apart from some crashes (which are to be expected, even in windows it does that, afterall, it's only on version 0.4), it's fast, very fast, both at loading (with blank page loads here in 1.66sec) and at rendering pages. I highly recommend everyone to try it out, and report back to Bezilla.org with bug reports.

With Bezilla and Phoenix, BeOS is very well serviced in the Browser Department. And there might be a surprise or two coming up...

UPDATE: Paul (from Bezilla.org) has asked me to post this update. He would like , since this released Phoenix build isn't from his "forge", that those who run it don't report bugs back to him. He has a lot of things going on, and when he is ready to make an "official" release, he will announce it at his site (link above). Thank you all and thank you Paul.

Guess what we get next week?

I was chatting on BeShare when BGA came and gave us some happy news. Next week we'll get OpenBFS beta5! And here's what You'll find there:

- chkbfs like tool (and one that is *A LOT* more complete than the one in R5).
- A nasty allocator bug has been fixed, and we think that was the last one (wich means OpenBFS is a lot more stable now and near release quality).
- Several other minor bugs were fixed...
- Live queries are working again (they were not in beta 4).

So now: sit back, relax, and wait till next week for some fun (especially if they will put some new bugs and Your precious data will evaporate in a short time after install.. but of course long enough for You to realize what's happening ;). THX to TeamBFS (mainly BGA and Axel) for great job!

Storage Kit team strikes again!

Fresh news from OpenBeOS Storage Kit team:

The fearless Storage Kit team, this time supported by Gabe Yoder, strikes again. Milestone 3 of our four-phased registrar development schedule has been reached.

Newly implemented are the application roster features application launching and watching, recent application/document support and message broadcasting, and the BMessageRunner and BClipboard classes.

Let alone one method, BRoster::ActiveApp(), which requires our own working app server, the entire part of the BeOS API that depends on interactions with the registrar is completely implemented. For the next and last milestone the two missing registrar services, the automatic background updating of the MIME database and the system shutdown, need to be added. For the time being they are not crucial, and it does make more sense to tackle them, when we can run applications under our operating system, so we postpone the remaining tasks and, in the meantime, get some other work done.

Yeah! That means it's so-so-so-close to have fully functional registrar! but it will be finished when other, also important, parts will be finished too... argh i hate waiting for fun ;]

Mixed Audio News.

From several sources comes several audio news. Let's start.

From the OBOS Preferences Team Website (which you can reach right here), comes the news of the new MIDI Player for OBOS. It seems Jerome Leveque is working on a test app for the MIDI Kit and it will, in turn, become the OS's MIDI Player. Good work.

From our friends over at LeBuzz, comes the news of BeOS Peer-To-Peer Radio. Here's what they have to say about it:

Peer-to-peer radio is the next big thing on the BeOS audio horizon, and it's here...right...now. Buzzer Procton has created a very stable relay server that lets people share the load of distributing radio to many listeners. His "Splinter" relay server is already reliably relaying streams at two different bandwidths this very minute for BeOSRADIO.

Even as Splinter grows and matures, another project, a promising new open-source peer-to-peer broadcasting solution called PeerCast, is being ported to BeOS by Buzzer Jeremy Friesner, creater of the popular BeShare chat client. Jeremy tells us he has already gotten it to compile.

Last but not least, they talk about another ongoing project (this one is also known for those who hang on BeShare). It's an MP3 Leveling App. Once again, let me post their news bit:

Buzzers Bruno "BGA" Albuquerque and François "mmu_man" Revol are hard at work bringing together the tools necessary to do crucial, "lossless" work on MP3 files. Bruno has succeeded in getting a port of "mp3gain" working for BeOS and is working on a graphical interface of it this weekend. François is looking at ways to incorporate both MP3 volume normalization and auto-silence-trimming into the ripper/encoder, Flipside AE.

Nice.. very nice. Like Dane Scott says, this is very important for BeOS. And Flipside A.E. being the great app it is (thank you Jason), would only get better with this addition.

Team BeOS Update and Goodies.

Our buddy Scott mailed me with news on the progress of Team BeOS.

There's a new project surfacing. It already has a BeOS client, and Team BeOS is already on the job! It's called Seventeen or Bust, and its goal is to help solve the Sierpinski problem. More info (and the client) can be obtained here.

Scott goes on to inform us that the Distributed Folding Team is moving up in the ranks. It's currently on 31st place, and it has passed 40 members now.

Good work everyone (i'm a member of Seti@home's Team BeOS, so i'll pat myself in the back too), keep it up. And don't forget, for the latest news and updates go to the Team BeOS website.

UPDATE:The DF BeOS Team is now in 30th place!! Way to go!!

He's Alive... He's Alive...

Here he is again, Darkwyrm, still kicking, still breathing. For those wondering why he hadn't updated his site in over 10 days (a record to him i think), rest assured he wasn't swallowed by Earth itself.

He wrote a small update, where he reveals the existance of another IK Team, which for your convenience, i'll post here:

Once in a while I have a severe case of Real Life (TM). Such was last week. I didn't have time to do much of anything, but it doesn't mean nothing's been done. Gabe Yoder, a fellow member of the Interface Kit team, is working with me on the new display module, amongst other things. Our server now more or less does DrawString() and StringWidth() commands. I also have played with an unrelated, abandoned BeOS project and am contemplating finishing it. The proto7 is slowly, but surely, getting closer to the release. :)

Yep, Real Life can be a pain sometimes. But like he says, their work is coming together, slowly but surely, and that's what counts.