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 layout, do you like it?

As you might have noticed, I have been twiddling and fiddling with the layout of studio-33 a little. Yesterday I thought I had set up everything correct, but when I had a look today at work I noticed that IE didn't display the pages good at all. Right now both IE and Firefox should diplay the page correctly, I didn't test Opera or any other browsers yet though.

How do you like the new look? Personally I'm not completely happy yet, I think the content field should be a little wider so I might still change that.

Commenting on my posts is not forbidden ;) Feel free to posts your thoughts on the looks and contents of this site!

More video driver news

This time the news doesn't come from Rudolph but from Euan and BeDrivers.com. Euan is working on the Radeon video driver, and needs some feedback. There is a thread on the BeDrivers forum where you can post your findings. The newest version of the driver is also available there.

Read more here.

Blog updates

Rudolph's Corner was updated today with a lot more news on the BeOS/Haiku video drivers. As you might know, I don't know much about drivers and low-level programming but Rudolph does and he talks about resizing outputwindows, bilinear filtering, trilineair filtering, swapbuffers and more here.

Weekly Haiku also saw an update about MIME & Threading, plus some nice words for those who linked to Weekly Haiku lately...

Another YAB app for ZETA

After ZBackup and YellowTab's inhouse Faktum there is yet another application for ZETA made with YAB. MyLetter is an easy to use newsletter creator which uses the 'sendmail' terminal command to send newsletters to a list of mail-adresses. Check out the screenshot below:

Zeta video tutorials

Probably inspired by the learnzeta.com video tutorials, Leszek Lesner is making smaller ZETA related tutorials. There are allready 12 available, all about ZETA and BeOS applications or the ZETA system. I have tried two, and they look very nice. I never realized how powerfull video can be when you are learning the basics of an application or system task.

You can find the video tutorials here, note that all the tutorials are in German.

Help out Haiku

On his blog Bryan Varner writes that he needs some help with the ACPI drivers. Bryan started with the work done by Nathan Whitehorn and is working on bringing ACPI support to BeOS and eventually Haiku.

You can help by sending the acpi survey report to Bryan, if you have the hardware he's interested in he might get back to you to do some more testing in the future. ZETA users be aware though, the acpi survey app might crash your system, uninstall instructions are included.

Official YAB forum

Vasper from beosmax.org has started a forum for YAB. YAB is a programming language and, to be specific, a basic interpreter based upon Yabasic (Yet Another Basic) for BeOS and Zeta. YAB is maintained by the guys from Team-Maui who plan to do an official release soon. Expect screenshots and tutorials soon from Vasper. The first edition of BeSides Magazine will also include an item on YAB.

Weekly Haiku update

You may allready have read it at BeOSNews, but Weekly Haiku had another update today.

Stephan from BeOSNews writes: The update covers a wide range of topics including work on bootup debug output and the syslog daemon, advancements in PCI support, and the elimination of a few bugs related to graphics and memory accesses. Most significantly, a more recent PCI ID database has been added, which should bring improvements to PCI device identification, and there has also been recent work specific to PCI support on the PPC platform.

Sorry I was a bit late on this one, read more here.

YellowTab gives away!

YellowTab gives away for free! Games that is and to be precise one a day. The games are ported by the user 'Rafael' and are all using the SDL libraries. Execpt from individually the games will also become availeble as a collection on CD with an option to install all games in once. In order to play the games you will first need to download a 'BasisPack' from YellowTab which includes the needed SDL and python libraries. Here is a screenshot of todays game:



According to the number of screenshots in the BasisPack there are 70 games ported, so that is one game per workday for the coming 14(!) weeks. Offcourse all of the games are small puzzle-like games ala pacman or bubbles, so allthough I support the effort I think 70 of these games is a bit overkill. I certainly hope the yT devs don't intent on including all these games in the next ZETA version...

Read the original post plus an interview with Raphael on the yT website.

More IM-Kit info

Slaad updated his webpage today with news on the IM-Kit. This time he has added a customisable toolbar.



Michael writes: Okay, so the other day I made a list of little things I wanted to do with the IM Kit. Little things that I think make it more pleasant to use (At least for me, anyway). Today I bring you the next installment... A customisable toolbar.

Read the post at Slaad's Programming Stuff.

BeGeistert sixteen: Berlin

The Deutsche BeOS, ZETA und Haiku Community, DeBug, has a post today announcing the sixteenth addition of BeGeistert. BeGeistert is an international gathering of BeOS developers, users and enthousiasts. The program usually consists of a variety of BeOS themes in the form of presentations and workshops.



BeGeistert 16 will be held in the German capital Berlin, on 19-21 May 2006. The location is the Youth-hostel 'Am Wannsee'.

More from our driver wizard Rudolph

Only days ago I posted about Rudolph Cornelissen's new blog, but today there is another update allready. Rudulph writes about MESA support for BEOS/Haiku:

While searching for a good solution for that delayed swap I mentioned to solve drawing errors, I once again compared Mesa 3.2.1 and 3.4.2. One of the differences between them turns out to be the added Mesa feature to complete pending drawing commands right before a driver issues the swapbuffer() command.

Read more.

InfoPopper & IM-Kit News

News from Slaad today! Your favorite BeOS programmer writes on his blog:

So I've been getting itchy feet lately. The chemist suggested I try an anti-fungal cream... Wait, no. I mean... I've had the desire to work on the IM Kit lately. So I have.


Informative, yet pretty


Keyseses

Read the full post here.

Yet another Haiku newsletter!

That's right, it was only eleven days ago the previous newsletter was posted, but there is a new one allready. Top 20 Reasons Why I Think That Haiku is Still Relevant is a sunny article summing up the twenty biggest reasons that Haiku can be succesfull. I especially like number twenty :)

Community - I have had the opportunity to meet many, many people in the Haiku community. They are, without exception, the nicest, most helpful, kindest, most friendly group of people I have ever met. Even the ones on BeDoper.

I think it's good see that the Haiku website has seen more updates lately. A two days old post on the project's main website is probably more appealing for newcomers than a two months old...

Read the 60th(!) Haiku newsletter here.

Weekly Haiku: PS2 & Video

There is another update over at Weekly Haiku for you all to read. The main areas it covers are, like the title says, more on PS2 bus manager features and news about Rudolph's video accelerants.

r16005 - r16064

While app and preference kit development was slightly quieter than normal, JackBurton continued the BPicture implementation work of the past few weeks along with speed improvements to BBitmap and timing tweaks for BMenus. The Installer application took another step towards completion with the improvement and integrated use of the copy engine with Korli’s run of work additionally including a number of tests and CD / read-only detection.

Read more.

New blog on the block

Our beloved hardware guru Rudolf Cornelissen has opened a blog listening to the name behold: Rudolph's corner (Actually the blog is up since Jan. 22, I didn't know it existed though). In his last post Rudolph talks about his work on the nVidia 2D driver. I've done some programming for BeOS, but drivers are like space-engineering to me so here's an exerpt from the post:

Some 'nonsense' 3D setup where removed, and I could also find one point where more speed could be gained for 3D: I modified the rendering output colorspace from some 'special' type with different input/output spaces, to 'standard' ARGB32. This apparantly means less drawing overhead, which lead to a 11% rendering speedup in B_RGB32 space on my P4-2.8Ghz using the NV18 card. On my dualP3-500 with NV11 a 7% speedup was still gained. 15 and 16 bit spaces are unmodified speed-wise.

Read more at behold: Rudolph's Corner.

Quiet BeOS days, or not?

There was not a lot of BeOS news for the last two or three days, so I haven't had much to post about. However, it wasn't very quiet at Studio-33 today, with a lot of attention for my Hiaku mini-review on Haiku News, ICO and especially OSNews. The average of +/- 100 pageviews went up to 3000+ today. If there are any 'bandwith exceeded' errors for the coming days, this is why...

Just to post some news, the german language Pimp My Zeta webpage is undergoing a layout redo, if you like disco you will sure like the new looks!!

Haiku: Where are we at

I was a bit bored by watching the winter olympics this morning, so I thought lets try out a new Haiku build. I donwloaded the last revision of the source (rev. 16374) and installed it on my Haiku partition. You can read my findings over here. This is the first article on Haiku in a montly series in which I will test the latest Haiku builds up to the fisrt release. If you have suggestions or comments about the article please let me know!


The Screen preference app, About Haiku and Pulse

Read more.

News from Slaad & WonderBrush review

It was quiet for a while on Slaad's Programming Stuff but last Saturday Michael posted some news about QueryViewer.



QueryViewer now uses plugins to handle columns. So far I've got 4 addons, Text, Integer, BuddyIcons and Albums. The nifty thing is that addons can add more than one column. So the Album addon returns two columns, one with the name of the album and one with the cover art of the album. BuddyIcon returns number_of_protocols + 1. One for each protocol plus another that will have the first valid icon the user has. You can sort of see the "guarenteed icon" column in action.

Read more at Slaad's
  ---

On other news, on BeOSNews you can read a review of WonderBrush. WonderBrush is an image editor for and I think one of the nicest commercially developed pieces of software for BeOS and Zeta.

Winter olympics 2006

Only moments ago the olympic fire was light in Torino, the North-Italian city that will host the 2006 winter olympics. Offcourse this hasn't much to do with BeOS, but I'm a big sports fan.

Since I was nine I've been playing icehockey in my hometown, so I'll be watching as many hockey games as I can! I'm a big fan of the Czech-Republic team and I'll keep you updated about their performances during the olympic tournament.


Czech's win gold medal in '98 Nagano games

Weekly Haiku news updates

The Weekly Haiku blog has been updated with two interesting posts this week, both about the work that has been going on by the Haiku devs.

Weekly Haiku summarizes the hot issues from the mailinglists of the different Haiku devs teams and makes this information available for everyone to read. I found that Weekly Haiku is a good way to keep up with what is going on in the Haiku teams without signing up to all the mailinglists. This weeks updates covers work done by Stippi to the app_server, Ingo's PPC work and a lot more.

In what appears to have been a great gathering Haiku developers Axel, Ingo and Stippi combined forces to toward the following goals

• Haiku is now BeOS compatible once more, as Stippi wrote, “[We] Made our glue code compatible to BeOS again. IOW executables compiled for Haiku will now run under BeOS as well (as long as they don’t use any functions that are not available under R5).”
• ListView drag & drop support
• View and layer heirarchy deletion and detachment

weekly Haiku can be found here.

ZETA 1.1 review on OSNews

I was home late today, so you might have allready read this at BeOS News, but over at OS News David Courtney has written a review of ZETA 1.1. The review is written with a outsiders view, and makes a lot comparisations with ZETA and popular Linux distro's. David specifically emphasises on the lack of good applications included and availeble for ZETA, but has some good words for the ease of installation, speed and userfriendliness.

The review concludes that ZETA carries a lot of potential, but isn't really ready for the average Joe. Something I unfortunatly have to agree with to some level. However, the review also claims that
'Most of the included programs are so bad that I wouldn't even recommend installing them. And finding programs to do what you want is going to be challenging.'
Which I think is total nonsense, personally I can use ZETA for 95% of the tasks I want my computer to be capable of, and most of the applications that come with ZETA serve my needs fairly good (Beam, netpenguin, BeShare, MediaPlayer, JABA, Artpaint, GoBe, etc)

Excerpt from the review:
I think Zeta has a lot of potential. Zeta is very different from Windows, OSX, and the two "big" X Window System desktops, GNOME and KDE. If you like light weight window managers for the X Window System, you would probably admire Zeta. The responsiveness of the user interface is far better than what I'm use to with the X Window System or OSX. In many ways, it's far more responsive than Microsoft Windows. And in general, the user interface is just "cool", though some people might not like it. Personally, I've always been a fan of alternative operating systems and doing things in a variety of ways.

Read the full, 7 page review here.

ZBackup news

Florian Thaler just posted on his blog that he has completed the ZBackup 'server'. The zbackup_server allows you to do automated backups at predifined times. The preference panel of ZBackup is also updated so that you can set if and when you want to perform automated updates, like for instance every Monday morning at 10.



As soon as I get my hands on the new version, I'll report back ;)

BeSides Magazine

About a month ago Vasper, known from BeMax, announced that he was thinking about making a BeOS related (e-)magazine called BeSides. After this announcement it became a little quiet on the former BeMax website, but yesterday the page was updated with the news that preperations are ongoing and they are open to receive material for the magazine. There are openings for reviews on apps like NVU, Refraction and ZBackup. Also welcome are things like interviews and such.



So lets all head over there, and fill that magazine!

Why Apple ditched the PowerPC

Not a lot of BeOS news today, but I did find an interesting read. This article is about the real reason Apple decided to switch to Intel processors.

Apple wants to make their switch to Intel chips seem like a no-brainer, but the reality of it was a lot more complicated than just faster chips for Macs. Apple's claims of their Intel systems being "4-5x faster" than their PowerPC systems is a little much to swallow, especially with Intel Macs landing in users' hands and failing to live up to the hype. So if these Intel chips aren't really that much faster than the G5, why did Apple make the switch? The answer to this question is a lot more interesting than what Apple's telling you.

Read the full article here.

German ZETA Wikipage

For all of you who read german, Florian Thaler has set up a wikipage about yellowtab ZETA.

The page holds links to popular german ZETA websites and has some information about the history of yellowTab. Florian Thaler is also known for the recently released spare-time project ZBackup. It's good to see yellowTab employees actively involved in BeOS and ZETA outside there work!

Visit the wiki here.

APM Driver for Haiku

Last saturday Axel Dörfler posted on his blog about an Advanced Power Management driver for Haiku.

APM is the 10 years old brother of Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), and is used to to put your system in one of several power states, like suspend or power off, or to read out battery information from your laptop.

Axel writes:
...
The driver doesn't do much yet, but it should let you shutdown your computer. In addition to that, it follows the standard and periodically polls for APM events. An example APM event would happen when you connect the AC adapter to your laptop.

By default, the driver is currently disabled, but that might change when I have a better picture about on which hardware it doesn't run yet. I have successfully tested in on 4 different systems over here, but I also have one negative report.
...

Read the full post here.

CDRecord binary

IsComputerOn writes:
It seems that Joerg Schilling finally found the time to create updated BeOs/ZETA binaries of his CD/DVD recording tools. You can find the binaries right here.

The binary is for Bone and Zeta. Read the post on ICO to find out how to use it on R5. The original announcement by Joerg Schilling can be found here.

Super Steelers

This year the Vince Lombardi Trophy goes to pittsburgh after they beat the Seattle Seahawks with 21-10.

The Steelers, my all-time favorites, were the third team to win the Super Bowl championship for the fifth time. Pittsburg fans did have to wait for the fifth victory sonce 1980 though. No nipplegate this year in the halftime-show, however the five-second tape delay on the Super Bowl halftime show was used to silence some words from the Rolling Stones performance.



Steelers 21 - Seahawks 10

The Steelers were 7-5, then won their final four regular-season games to secure the AFC's last playoff spot. They went to Cincinnati and won a wild-card game. They won at Indianapolis, which had the league's best record. And then they handed Denver its first home loss in the AFC championship game.

And now they have their "One for the Thumb" -- the first four came in their Steel Curtain days, won by the likes of Mean Joe Greene, Terry Bradshaw and Franco Harris.

Early on, the noise seemed to unnerve the Steelers, who had two motion penalties on their first offensive series. Of course, none of their active players Sunday ever played in a Super Bowl.

Seattle forced another three-and-out on Pittsburgh's next possession, keeping Bettis on the sideline, then took the lead.

Josh Brown made a 47-yard field goal with 22 seconds left in the first quarter after the Seahawks lost a touchdown on Darrell Jackson's pass interference in the end zone. Jackson still had 50 yards on five receptions in the quarter.

Bettis made his Super Bowl debut 2:47 into the second quarter with the Pittsburgh offense in dire need of a boost. The Steelers got it, but from an 8-yard completion to Randle El for their initial first down -- 19 minutes into the game.

Ward followed with an 18-yard run on an end-around, but Roethlisberger's ill-advised lob on the next play was picked off by safety Michael Boulware at the Seattle 25.

With Seattle's other safety, Marquand Manuel, sidelined in the second quarter with a right ankle injury, Roethlisberger began finding open receivers. Ward gained 12 yards, Cedrick Wilson got 20 and, moments after Ward dropped a pass in the corner of the end zone, he outwrestled Boulware for a 37-yard completion.

The Bus couldn't roll in on two tries, then the 6-foot-5 Roethlisberger dived left and barely squeezed the ball over the goal line. A replay review upheld the touchdown with 1:55 remaining in the half.

Perhaps unnerved themselves by the ruling, the Seahawks squandered much of that time before Brown missed a 54-yard field goal wide right. Holmgren argued as he walked off the field that the ball never crossed the goal line, but referee Bill Leavy told him it did.

Seattle also could bemoan a holding call on Peter Warrick's 32-yard punt return to open the second quarter, and a goal-line completion to Jackson on which he barely was out of bounds.

It didn't get a lot better in the second half for Seattle, and Holmgren failed to become the first coach to win Super Bowls with two franchises. In 1997, his Green Bay Packers beat New England.

But his Seahawks didn't give themselves much of a chance. By the end, the crowd was singing "Here We Go Steelers, Here We Go."

BeGroovy down?

For a couple of days now BeGroovy.com doesn't load. As of today the following message is shown when trying to load begroovy.com:

BeGroovy BeGroovy is experiencing technical server difficulties, and will return again shortly.

Since BeGroovy's motto is 'Until the last user leaves' I'm sure they will be back soon!

Lots of Be bits today

It was a busy day at bebits today. First off, developer Cyan released Dualhead-O-Matic which allows dual-head users to set a different desktop background image for each monitor, or use the same image on both monitors without any stretching/tiling problems. As a single-head user, I didn't test it, but the readme alone is worth downloading the app...

Then there is the new alpha12 build of IM Kit by Mikael Eiman and co. The IM Kit is a uniform way to access the various IM networks that exist, and a connection between a People file and the IM accounts that person has.

Last but not least, Nvu. Nvu is a html composer based on the one in the Seamonkey suite. Nvu is available for Bone aswell as net_server systems. After some testing, Nvu seems to work good, although it is very obvious that it is not a native BeOS application like the Raycone products.

ZBackup: A closer look

Yesterday I posted about ZBackup, a new backup tool for Zeta and I promised more info about it. I've done some testing and I can say, ZBackup does exactly what you would expect it to do, it proves to be a very easy tool for securing your files from being lost due to a harddisk faillure.


ZBackup main window

Read more...

If you like the review please comment on this post, I'm planning on doing more of these mini-reviews in the future, but I have to know what you think about them!

Zenebona 1.0.0 first impressions

A couple of days ago, Zenebona 1.0.0 was released at bebits. Zenebona is a jukebox application for BeOS R5 and Zeta. Stephen B. from BeOSNews.com did a small review of Zenebona for R5, read it here.

Stephen B. writes:
At this point, Zenebona is a fairly "young" program and it shows in some of the rough edges. Even with the youth of the software and the rough areas however, Zenebona's developer has done a good job of implementing the functionality that makes iTunes/WinAMP5-esque applications useful and fun to use. While I've spent more hours than I can count manually organizing my MP3s into folders, the simplicity of the Zenebona approach is definitely attractive. With some more development (especially support for BFS attributes) and a bit more polish, I can easily see myself being torn between Zenebona and my preferred audo player for the last half-decade, SoundPlay.

a trail version of Zenebona is available for free at bebits, the full version can be bought at the Zenebona website for twenty Euro's