Studio-33 is a BeOS related blog. Here you can find news from the Zeta and Haiku community, as well as articles and reviews on BeOS related topics. If you like this site please support it by submitting any content you feel that fits in.

New backup software for Zeta

yellowtab.de today announced the new Zeta project ZBackup.
ZBackup is done by a couple of Zeta employees in their spare-time, and is a new file backup tool for Zeta, which you can use to store a backup on a FTP-Server, on the locale disc/drive or burn it with JABA (included in ZETA) on a CD/DVD.

Current Features are:

• Guide to set together a project easy
• You can add files/folders via drag & drop
• Projects can be saved/loaded
• Store your backup on a ftp server
• Burn your backup direwctly with JABA
• Save your backup on you harddrive/mass storage drive
• Use infopopper to stay informed
• Process can run in the background
• Available in seven languages

Check out some screenshots:









The ZBackup team website can be found here, you can download ZBackup from here. I'm about to download it now, so more on ZBackup soon...

Two new partners for yT

Recently the german counterpart of the yellowTab.com website annouced that they have made arrangements with both Ingram Micro Distribution GmbH and Actebis Peacock GmbH to become new distribution partners. Both companies are active in the german IT market, with Ingram even being one of Germany's largest and prominent IT-specialist dealer.

Quoted from the newspost: (for those of you who read german)
Bernd Korz sagt: "Durch den ständigen Ausbau unseres Vertriebsnetzes möchten wir für yellowTAB ZETA mehr Flexibilität und Erreichbarkeit ermöglichen. Dies erfüllt zusätzlich, dass der Geschäftskunde vom seinem bevorzugten Händler betreut werden kann. Ingram Micro Distribution GmbH und Actebis Peacock GmbH & Co. KG sind sehr angesehene und dank ihrer besonderen Kundendienstleistungen sehr wichtige Distributionspartner für yellowTAB."

 

Read the full post (in german) here.

Abiword 2.2.8 for BeOS?

The polish Haiku website haiku-os.pl posted an interesting news item about the abiword word processor. Abiword is a free multi-platform office application, and up to version 1.01 BeOS was supported. Unfortunatly after 1.01 they dropped BeOS support, and now abiword is only available for Mac, Linux, and Windows.

However, since the sourcecode for abiword is open it should be possible to do port of abiword. It seems that the person running this russian website is doing just that! On the website is a link to the version 2.2.8 sourcecode plus some sreenshots of abiword running in BeOS.



(Right-click->view image for the fullsize images)

I gave the sourcecodes a quick try and ran into some errors, so hopefully this mysterious developer will make a abiword binary for Zeta and/or R5 soon, when do get the source to compile, you'll here from me.

News from the Haiku front

Since Yesterday a new Haiku newsletter is out, it includes the topics

• The Attack Of The Warriors, Part 2. by Hartmut Reh
• What is your problem? by Michael Phipps

Also on the Haiku homepage Michael Phipps writes that the Haiku newsletters will not neccesary follow the 'Be Inc. house style' of two articles plus an editorial in the future, but can also hold contributed material.
Read the full newspost for more about the Newsletters and some updates of what has been going on code wise lately.

Themis looks

Some days ago I posted here about the Themis project showing some signs of life, so today I downloaded the Themis sourcecode, and treid to build it on Zeta. Against all expectations Themis build without errors, and I ended up with a working binary! As eager as I was, I launched Themis and entered www.google.com in the URL field. Allthough no page shown, the status bar even said 'looking up www.google.com'. After some trying I have to conclude that no .html files either local or online could be rendered, but I did take the liberty to take some screenshots.


I must say, Themis has really good looks, I like the yellow buttons.


(Right-click->view image for the fullsize images)

Building Themis really shows what a big project this is, and how much time and effort must have gone into it allready. After running Themis I really believe these guys can pull it off, and do the unimaginable for all BeOS Zeta and Haiku users. I just wish I had the programming skills to do anything useful for projects like these, and that drives me to keep making little useless pieces of software on my own, and by doing that keep learning more about programming piece by piece.

I joined the themis-dev mailing list, so when there is big news you'll read it here.
Themis website
Themis@sourceforge

Know your dates

Do you know what happend on this day, in '97? Neither did I until I read this article, from Apple Matters.

Quoted from the article:
The company produced computers, but the name of the game was BeOS. The operating system had generated a lot of positive press and addressed many of the failings of the classic Mac OS. Apple entered into serious negotiations with Be in an attempt to purchase Be’s crown jewel. Gassee, sensing weakness, squeezed hard. Apple offered 125 million and Be asked for 200 million. Apple balked at the steep price and began to investigate other options, even going so far as to consider Windows NT.

BeLife for Haiku and R5

Aswell as for BeeF, I also made a BeLife binary for Haiku and R5. I tested it both on Haiku and on BeMax v3, and it works like a charm.

Get the R5 .zip from the BeLife bebits page or from the apps section of this site.

Gnash = Flash?

DaaT from IsComputerOn had a little surprise today!


This may not look like much, but it is a flash 7 movie playing in Zeta! Gnash is a gnu project into creating a free (as in beer) flash player which can either be run standalone, or as a FireFox plugin. Having a FireFox plugin on Zeta that can actually play flash files that are not older than my mom, would be really cool. If this is released anytime soon, there will be yet another reason for a lot of people to start using Zeta (or Haiku in the future) as their main system.

Read the complete post from ico here, more about the gnash project can be found here.

Blender 2.41 available for Zeta!

The new 2.41 version of blender is available for Zeta 1.1 users from bebits.



Blender is the open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Available for all major operating systems.

The Zeta port of blender is maintaned by emwe, who also ported the 2.40 version.

Installing and running blender on Zeta was not much of a problem, you download the .zip archive, and unpack where you like. Blender loaded faster then any other software port I ever ran, and seemed to work very good on Zeta. I didn't play with it very much (yet), but here is a screenshot of the blender 2.41 welcome screen:



As far as I'm concerend, the more good opensource applications availeble for Zeta and Haiku the better, so emwe keep up the good work!
Here are some more screenshots of blender in action:

blender_051023_1
blender_050109_3
blender_050109_2
blender_050109_1
blender_050103_2
blender_050103_1

You can download blender here and here.

I'm planning to do some reviews on recently released apps for BeOS and Zeta, like Transmission, Zenebona, and Blender in the nearby future, so more on blender soon.

BeeF for Haiku and R5 fixed

In the bebits talkback of BeeF, sasquatch666 complained about getting missing libzeta.so errors for BeeF for R5, so I did some research and found out that I accidently packed the wrong version of prefslib.so in the .zip, ooopps! I've uploaded a new .zip and the problem should be fixed now.

When I made a new archive I also decided to test BeeF for R5 on the latest Haiku build, I turned out it worked perfect! The application-launch panel stayed blank though, but that was to be expected. When Haiku matures I'll be compiling Haiku versions of all my apps, and drop the R5 builds.

Get the newly uploaded BeeF for Haiku and R5 here.

Do you want to BeEntertained?

The BeOS gaming and emulation guys from BeEmulated are renovating their website. Mysteriously, their tag line all of a sudden says:

BeEntertained.net: Emulation - Gaming - Music - Video

And guess what BeEntertained.net links to the same site...

The last piece of news says:

Quote:
All downloads will be available again after they have been tested. Stay tuned and come back in some weeks.

Themis activity

Once upon a time there was a project called Themis...

Project Goal
Themis will be a thoroughly modern web browser taking advantage of BeOS' features where it can. Currently, it is planned to use OpenSSL, and use the translation kit to view images.

Allthough there it has been very silent around Themis for a long time, today this message was posted in the mailing list:

Quote:
Hi folks,
Mark, Olivier, and Procton sat around on IRC today talking about old times, and (GASP!!!) actually moving forward on Themis.
Yes, you read that right, moving forward on Themis.
First off, let me apologize for not doing anything at all over the past year; the real world has not been kind to me, and I've been extremely busy. Too busy to even take care a lot of things that needed to be taken care of. While there is no excuse for the lack of progress, I ask that you forgive me and move forward with us.
The gist of the meeting was to discuss how we can get Themis usable, and there are a few key points that we're going to be working on in the near future to do just that.
As soon as I can get a new hard disk drive in my development machine, I'll be working on Axel Dörfler's CSS parser that he donated to the project some time ago, to get it integrated and usable in Themis in some way.
Mark will be working on the HTML Parser, ironing out a few things that have been bothering him, and then will resume work on the CSS DOM tree support; which may or may not be necessary. We also discussed, a bit, storing CSS attributes in the main DOM tree, but keeping a separate copy of the CSS tree so that multiple documents may use it if necessary.
From there, we move on to resuming work on the renderer. In addition to the renderer, there will be a need to modify or work with the user interface so that clicking on items actually works, but right now I'd settle for being able to just see a web page live-rendered within Themis. Every major advance forward is made up with many small steps, so we'll take care of getting to rendering before we get to clicking...
That's about it, but I invite Mark, Olivier, or even Procton to speak up if I missed something or completely botched this update... :-)
Talk to you again soon, Raymond z3r0_one

Let's hope they get going soon, a native BeOS webbrowser would be very very appreciated by me and probably by a lot of others.

BeeF for R5

Update 23-01-2006
BeeF for R5 is available for download in the apps section and on Bebits



For all the R5 users out there, I compiled BeeF to run on BeOS R5.0.3. Some things like the calendar and the timezones rely on Zeta code, so they won't work in the R5 version, but overall most things work. I still have to rewrite some code, but I'll have a R5 install package ready for download tomorrow or the day after.

You can download the binary of BeeF for R5 here. You need this file in your /boot/home/config/lib directory to run BeeF on R5.

Let the games begin...

Gaming has never been a BeOS thing, but luckely there are two new games on the way.
First off, Zenja Solaja has annouced some time ago that he is testing his 'History of the World' engine in a side project by creating a Tennis game where the players are visualised as smileys ;)



Than there is Joseba, who is working on a BeOS port of the game 'Nuts & Scrap' by Develish Games also know from the games EpsiloN, Devilish Racing and Camaleon. Nuts & Scrap will most probably be a commercial game for the BeOS platform. Check out the screens below:




More Screenshots are:
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
and here.

I hope both of these projects will see the finish line soon, gaming is for me probably the third most important thing to improve on BeOS/Zeta/Haiku, webapps and office being the number one and two...

New webadress: studio-33.blogspot.com

Just to let you know, I dropped the .tk domain, they were getting unfriendlier by the day so I moved some html around, and the new url is now:

studio-33.blogspot.com

This also means that there will be no more annoying banner at the top of the page. The .tk url will redirect you to blogspot for the coming weeks.

0033

Blogger!

I decided to change from plain html to blogger for the news page. This makes it much easier for me to publish news, but also allows you to post comments on news items!

If you encounter any problems viewing the blogger page let me know so I can fix it.

Ciao,

0033

New BeeF available

The newest version of BeeF is done!
Get BeeF DR3 now in the apps section on the left, where you will also find some screenshots.

While there are a lot of bugs fixed and new things added, there is still one very annoying bug that I didn't find a fix for. This bug only comes along when FIRST_CLICK_ACCEPTED is enabled, therefore BeeF sofar doesn't allow first clicks. This is not due to the experimental B_CALENDAR_CONTROL code, as I first thought so I will have to look elsewhere for a solution. If anyone is eager to fix this, please try. All the sourcecode is included.

If you like or dislike BeeF vote for it on bebits I'm anxious to know how it scores!

p.s. Please download trough beshare whenever possible, my ISP doesn't allow to much bandwidth used by website traffic.

Beefy news!

The newest version of BeeF is almost done. Allthough I didn't have much time to spend on it lately there were some big improvements over the last version, check out the screenshots below to see what I changed and added.


I added a new panel which gives you easy acces to all the applications listed in the Deskbar->Software menu.


The mail panel now has nice icons, also double-clicking an email actually lauches that message.


Curious what time it is around the world?, the time panel now shows a list of timezones.


Add a day and time to your reminders!


Other changes for the new version are:
  -   Arrows for switching workspaces
  -   A find button in the rightclick menu.
  -   The sysinfo panel now displays used bootdisk space instead of free space.
  -   A tooltip for your uptime in days, hours, minutes and seconds.
  -   A tooltip for all the running teams plus their id.
  -   A button for ZetaPC-Info instead of a button for checkBFS.
  -   Focus on first click.

Known bugs:
  -   The year textedit in the calendar becomes uneditable after switching workspaces.
This showed up after changing the main window to B_ACCEPT_FIRST_CLICK, and is actually a bug in the experimental B_CALENDAR_CONTROL code from yT.

I hope to finish BeeF this month, It will be on BeBits as soon as it done.

Update, Fri, 13 Jan:
I ran into new problems with B_ACCEPT_FIRST_CLICK, so the upcoming version will not focus on first click, this will be fixed in the future.

Changes...

A new year, a new section. Today I've added a weblinks section to this site. You can find it in the menu on the left. I also updated the backgrounds section with a couple of new backgrounds.
Besides these, I'm still in desperate need of some more content, so if you have made backgrounds or decors you would like to share with the world please drop me an email. Also, if you are interested in writing articles, reviews or other pieces of text let me know.

ps. If you think I missed a website, contact me.