Direct Connect For BeOS!

This just in: some unknown developer has released a "chat-only" Direct Connect client. What is Direct Connect you ask? Well, check here and here. Or maybe you could even browse to his site and find out what's going on.

Oh, and if you ever figure out who this mysterious new face is, be sure to let him know that his hard work is very much appreciated. I know I'll let him know how much I appreciate him. So what are you waiting for? Download it and try it!

B.E.O.S. Releases Beta Kernel Download

Much to my surprise, and delight, the BlueEyedOS developers have finally released something to the outside world!

Calling it a "little Christmas gift," the B.E.O.S. developers posted a beta kernel available for download so the public can test it out. This package includes the "kernel_server" along with the libroot.so binary. Aside from some typos on the download page, this is great news ;^). So go download your first ever B.E.O.S. release!

OpenBeOS Newsletter #32 is Out.

Hot from the presses, Issue 32 of the OBOS Newsletter is out. And hold on to your hats, it's a long one.

In it we have articles from Niels S. Reedijk, who tells us about Beatrice, Michael Phipps, who brings us Pix (the little app that could), and Daniel Reinhold who teaches us to be on time, with scheduling. And of course, don't forget the usual Michael Phipps (interesting) rant, this time about Moore's Law.

Well what are you waiting for? Head over to the OpenBeOS site and read it all.

Post Magic Development Update.

Post Magic's Nathan has updated his site with some juicy news, including a new screenshot.

In this update, Nathan informs us, among others bits of information, that Post Magic now uses the ColumnListView from Santa's Gift Bag. What is Santa's Gift Bag you ask? Well, it's a collection of PPC and Intel libs and demos for BeOS R4.5. You can read all about it here.

Here is the full news piece posted by Nathan:

After some work, the ColumnListView from Santa\'s Gift Bag has been incorporated into the clip bin for the Post Magic editor! See it on the screenshot page. Also, after much toil over render engine designs, I have finally reached a design that I think will work. However, it means changing the existing code a fair amount. Currently, the editor and project settings are all frame based but will have to be modified to work as time based modules. This will allow for a small, simple implementation of an integrated render/playback engine that works with all media files regardless of the files\' own field rate or frame size. A lot of work has been going on in the guts of the application, but soon a buzzing render engine will emerge that will breathe life into the project!

Nice to know he's making good progress. This is an app you should keep an eye on for the future. And don't forget, there's been a release of the standalone player for you to download and try it out, and of course, provide feedback. You can grab it here.

No, i didn't forget the link to the screenshot, such little faith you have. Here it is, enjoy. Also, we'll soon host an interview with Nathan, so stay tuned.

Gobe Productive Open Source Pledge Reaches $10K.

Due to the recent developments, and as we here at TBJ have reported, beunited.org has started a "Gobe Productive 3 Open-Source Fund Drive", which you can find here.

beunited's president Simon Gauvin has posted a new message in the Driver Fund thread here at TBJ's forums, thread you can follow here, where he mentions that the Fund pledges have now reached the (quite) incredible sum of $10,000.00 dollars. And this only 3 days after it started!.

Let me paste his post:

In just 3 days beunited.org has been pledged over $10,000.00 by the public and corporate community for the release of Gobe Productive for BeOS. Linux users have also pledged, and we encourage more members of the Linux community to participate for the release of the Linux version. Call all your friends and send them over to beunited.org to help raise awareness!

As Simon says, head over to beunited.org and pitch in. Hopefully beunited's effforts to bring Gobe Productive 3 _back_ to BeOS will pay off.

Darkwyrm Updates.

From "the man that never sleeps" comes a fresh new update to his website. This time Darkwyrm tells us about a few bug fixes to Prototype #7, one of which is that you can now resize your window without "loosing your grip on it". Here's a piece of the update:

Just this morning I also committed to the tree the updates to the ScreenDriver which emulate the mouse using the keyboard, so now it is possible to manipulate a window using this new graphics module. It still needs polish, but things are largely there. Keyboard-for-mouse substitution is necessary because of what I believe is a bug in BeOS in which mouse messages are not received by a full screen window which directly accesses the video hardware (BWindowScreen, for those developers out there).

He also mentions that a new Seeker beta is coming along, and this time with a PPC port, thanks to Brian Francis. Good news to all those (ahem) PPC users out there.

For the whole shebang go to Darkwyrm's site.

Open Source Donation Movement Seeks Your Support.

A recent thread on beunited.org's Standards Portal message board shows the passionate interest in Gobe's open source release of GoBe Productive. In over 40 posts, past users of Gobe Productive and other interested parties indicate their willingness to donate between $50 and $600 USD each to a "Free Gobe Productive" fund.

The thread started on news that FreeRadicalSoftware may not succeed in their effort to buy the Gobe Productive source and offer it as a GPL'ed product. The news first hit OSNews.com, then Slashdot.org, and then finally to beunited.org, where numerous people have posted promises to donate to the cause.

Currently, the promised donations exceed $1500 USD, but the expected cost of such a purchase is believed to be in the $100,000 USD range or above. From the looks of it, beunited.org will pursue setting up an official donation system if enough interest is expressed by users, developers, and future customers.

Make your thoughts known on beunited.org's Standard Portals' forum if you wish to help out.

Xentronix Updates.

Those nice guys (Frans and YNOP) over at Xentronix have updated their site. In this updated they mention new site features, like a Gallery, to show work that users did with Refraction. They will also add a Documentation area to the site.

Concerning Refraction, they state that most of the stability issues have been fixed, as well as the marquee selection now works as intended. What does this mean to us all? They're close to a new public Beta release. Very nice indeed. I think Refraction and Sample Studio will be two important applications to have in BeOS.

Gobe Productive is NOT Open-Source.

I just spotted this over at OSNews. Difficulties (financial) have prevented FreeRadicalSoftware of GPL'ing GobeProductive.

Information is still scarse, the info was mailed to the Gobe user mailing list.

What has happended to the Open sourcing of the code ??

At this time, Free Radical has been unable to raise the money necessary to license the code from Gobe Software Inc. Free Radical is effectively a nonstarter at this point.

Sad news indeed.. we'll try to post more information as it becomes available.

Update: In the light of this recent development, beunited.org is in the process of launching a "Gobe Productive for BeOS Donation Drive". They have been in contact with Gobe, asking them for access to the BeOS source code. So let yourself be heard, agree or not with this effort, by going to the beunited.org site. This one's important folks, so speak out your opinion.

BeBochs 2 on BeOS.

Just a news bit for those interested in BeBochs, and were complaining that it doesn't run (or runs very poorly) on BeOS. Well, that's about to end.

In the upcoming release Zeta, BeBochs not only works, it works well too! For example, Windows 98SE loads in 71 seconds. You can also run Windows 2000, and XP should work too (some more tests needed). That loading time is on an Athlon 1.4 with 512MB RAM, with a ATI Radeon 64 DDR.

This will be present in the Deluxe Edition, which will included (for you to play with BeBochs) FreeDOS and a Debian Linux Image.

Update: I just receive more information from Bernd. He now has a new machine, with an AMD XP2400 CPU and 512RAM, giving it considerable more "juice". And that sped up BeBochs of course, and now Windows 98SE boots up in 58secs (with Mousespeed set to Original 1:1). Here are some new details about BeBochs:

• Win Explorer Loads in 12 seconds.
• Win 98SE shutddowns in 10 seconds.
• BeBochs runs from Deskbar without any run settings.
• BeBochs can now run full screen, and with "full" VGA, no more limited to 640x480.
• You can run a real FAT (or FAT32) partition as D:

It's worth noting that Bernd has worked on the BeOS port since it was abandoned in version 0.5, bringing it up to speed for all BeOS users, up to version 2.0pre3, with the help of the Bochs team.

For your voyeuristic pleasure, here is screenshot #1, screenshot #2 and last but not least screenshot #3.

I have more and more confidence that Zeta will be one terrific piece of software. Stay tuned for more information.

On Zeta's Hardware List.

Many of us are waiting (im)patiently for Zeta's release. One of aspects people are more curious about is what (and how much) hardware it will support. Thus, they've been waiting for it's hardware list to posted online.

And now that it has, many have read and their reaction was "WHAT?!?!? ONLY THAT!!!". Well, i've said this on BeShare, on site forums, mails and i'll say it again here, the list is VERY INCOMPLETE. Trust me on that. New hardware is being added everyday and even with that, it'll be incomplete for quite some time. One example is graphics cards. It's one of the biggest handycaps BeOS has, since it supports the GeForce family only up to version 3 and doesn't support the latest and greatest Radeon (though Thomas did a wonderful job getting the 8500 and even some 9000 to work, kudos to him). Well, it's not on the list, but Zeta does support GeForce 4's family for example.

Another example. BeOS has, at best, a flaky USB support. Bernd has said in public (thus i hope you don't mind me saying this Bernd), he installed Beta 3 on a couple of laptops and USB (well, everything really) worked flawlessly. There are other goodies of course (can you say mplayer?) but you'll have to wait and see.

So you see, don't base your decision to buy (or not) Zeta on a (and i repeat) VERY INCOMPLETE hardware compatibility list. Wait till more is announced, or till it's released. End of rant now, thanks for your time. More on Zeta, soon.

New Pe release. And it takes steroids!

Many of you know Pe. For those who don't, Pe is a text editor, released for several platforms, and is the daddy of Pepper, of whom you might have heard lately.

And why am i telling you this you ask? Because just a couple of days ago, GuyHaviv released a plugin for Pe, and he called it Pe-on-Steroids. What is it you ask? Here's the answer, in the developer's own words:

Pe-On-Steroids is a Pe syntax highlighting plugin (based on the c++ highlighter source) that adds support for Operator, Symbol and Number highlighting levels to Pe default highlighter. once you install it, you can set colors for those 3 by changing the UserKeyword colors 2-4.

I started working on Pe's highlighter because i am an interface addict. i always thought BeIDE was very lacking and i got every editor i could get my hands on, all of them supported only 4 levels (5 at most) of syntax-highlighting, and i find it difficult to write code that way.

Future plans: add more cool interface features to Pe, a font-size (zoom )slider on the toolbar, and stuff like that.

So there you have it folks. A very nice (and helpful) addition to those who use Pe. To grab this plugin click right here. And if you want to see it in action, here's a nice screenshot for you.

Seeker Beta and Prototype #7 Released.

Darkwyrm strikes once again. His "top secret" project was recently released, as many of you might have seen over on BeBits. It's called Seeker, and it's tree-based, double-paned file manager app, the continuation of an old app, Pioneer. It's now up to Beta 3 and will continue to improve. I ran it and it's fast, light-weight. A good addition to the BeOS software collection.

Along with working on Seeker, Darkwyrm continues work on the App_Server and now, he has released Prototype #7, which is the final one. Let me paste his announcement:

Wow. You'd almost think I don't sleep. Yep, it's finally here. Things work pretty well, too, although not perfect. Both the binary and source packages are available in the OpenBeOS section, and neither is all that big. This one displays how all this work I've been putting into learning about FreeType and fonts is paying off. You may experience mouse problems while resizing the test window - this is that unfixable bug I mentioned a while ago in another post. If it hangs while resizing or moving, the problem is the same. These both have to do with emulating the input_server. The prototype itself doesn't have any bugs that I currently know of. *knocks on wood* Now, I will begin revising the app_server specs the rest of the way and hopefully be slinging server code by the end of the month. Have fun, everyone. :)

Yep, i doubt he gets any sleep at all. Great work Darkwyrm. Keep it up (i know you will).

Mozilla getting better and better.

Mozilla.org released their browser version 1.2.1 (after discovering some big DHTML bugs in, released few days ago, version 1.2). There's no official release for BeOS yet, but... there's a new nightly build up there! :) It's the first nightly update for BeOS in over a month. Get it while it's hot!

For those of you who don't know mozilla yet: it's the best browser for BeOS right now (there's Phoenix getting close, but it's still based on mozilla) in sense of compatibility with latest web standards (HTML 4.0.1, CSS 1 and 2, DHTML, JavaScript...). It's much bigger and slower than NetPositive, but you can view every page with it. I use mozilla with some favourite addons/changes for it:

• Gestures addon - If you have used Opera 5+ (not on BeOS), you've probably used gestures too. I love it. It was main (and only one, maybe except ideological ;) reason i used Opera. Than i found addon for mozilla giving the same functionality and i could jump to 100% mozilla only wagon. And it works in BeOS too (just change miliseconds to much longer time period).
• Themes - I know that modern theme is really fine, but sometimes i need change. So i use Orbit (but it isn't updated for newest mozilla which had some change in themes support - it doesn't work with 1.2x) and Breeze along with default themes.
• Shortcuts - If you have changed shortcut key to CTRL, you would like to make mozilla know it (for now mozilla can't read this setting itself). There is a FAQ on BeZilla.org which explains how to do that. I'll copy it here for you this time:

  The change the default accelerator key:
  
  Open up the prefs.js file in your $HOME/config/settings/Mozilla/default/{profilename} directory.
  Add these lines to the file:
  user_pref("ui.key.accelKey", 18);
  user_pref("ui.key.menuAccessKey", 17);
  This will make the Alt key the accelerator and the Ctrl key the menu access key.

  Edit prefs.js when mozilla is NOT running, because mozilla saves this file after each quit (and will overwrite any changes made to it after mozilla's startup).
  
  Update: Mike Carlson pointed out that you can create user.js (in the same directory as prefs.js - $HOME/config/settings/Mozilla/default/{profilename}) file and put settings there. Mozilla never alters that file so you can modify it at any time (but to use new settings you have to restart mozilla of course).
• Flash plugin - If you have Flash Player you can use it for playing flash movies on web pages. Just make link to Flash Player binary in mozilla/plugins folder (name of the link doesn't matter, you can call it as you want :)

More info about mozilla (and phoenix) for BeOS here.
Happy browsing! :)

Open Standards Portal Launched.

beunited.org has just launched their new Open Standards Portal. As beunited's President Simon Gauvin mentions, this marks a "new chapter in the life of beunited.org and the community it represents".

Everyone is welcomed (and encouraged) to join, participate and discuss in the development of standards as well as in the discussion of existing ones.

Here's a quote from the full announcement, detailing the beneficts of joining the Portal:

The new site features a login that automatically benefits everyone with a full year membership to beunited.org, and our new monthly newsletter. As well, we will also be providing members with free copies of the UnitedBeOS distribution based on OSBOS compliant open source code. For creating new standard proposals check the Template page.

The BeOSJournal would like to thank the beunited team for all their work and effort to help bring a new future to BeOS. You can read the announcement by clicking the link above, or go directly to the Portal by clicking here.

Farewell To A Friend -- Eugenia Loli-Queru.

Some of our readership routinely follows the news at OSNews and already know that Eugenia has decided to leave her "baby" for pursuits more humane to her health. ;)

For those that do not know, please head there now, and post a comment in her story, wishing her a big thankyou from all of us in the BeOS Community. It would mean a lot to her, I'm sure, if we could say that which we've always just thought to ourselves.

Peace!