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.

BNX = BeOS + QNX?

Here's something for you to thing about, the Haiku servers on top of a specially licensed QNX kernel, with a XFS filesystem. In an interview by Grant Hayes on osnews.com today Sven Jorg talkes about a new project called BNX with the initiative to 'create a bleeding-edge BeOS that can be used for high-end production'. He wants 'BNX to be a Media OS today, like BeOS was in the late Nineties'.

In the interview Jorg says they're looking to acquire a special license to use the QNX kernel only, and then put Haiku's servers on top of it together with parts from other sytems like the FreeBSD netstack and the IRIX XFS file system. Jorg expects to be able to run BeOS apps within a year.

The project team took over the current BNX project page at sourceforge, but they have to wait for it to be activated as it is still used by another inactive project.

Unfortunately at this moment I can only provide you the link to the interview over at osnews as there is no other known lead to this project or its developers...

News from the front

It took a while, but there's an update on Axel Dörfler's Haiku Development Blog. Axel talks about an important fix to the app_server memory management. After finding a bug with the BeIDE interface he started digging and found this:

Quoted from Axel's post: Bitmaps are located in a shared memory pool between the app_server, and an application. Unfortunately, the app_server put those bitmaps into arbitrary larger areas, and put the structures managing that space into those areas as well - like a userland memory allocator would do. However, if a client clobbered memory outside of its space in those areas (and that's what buggy clients do all the time), the structures could be easily broken, which caused the app_server to crash when it tried to use them next time. Also, since all applications shared the same area, they could easily clobber bitmaps of each other, as well.

Read the full post here.

(German) Interview with Bernd Korz

Johannes Krobath from the german-language Power Dreams website posted a short interview today with the CEO / CVO of yellowTab, Bernd Korz. Obviously the interview is in German. There's not a lot of hot new stuff in the interview, mainly Bernd says that they are working hard on getting the planned new release done and that he is very content with the reactions to the Live-CD and previous releases sofar. He also notes that there are some things he thinks need serious attention like ACPI, WIFI and other modern hardware support. The upcoming release will not carry a lot of new applications but most effort has gone into the operating system itself, which is a good thing I think. Here's a short exerpt from the interview.

Quoted from the interview:
Johannes:
Wie war das Feedback der Gemeinschaft zu Zeta 1.1 und der Zeta LiveCD?

Bernd:
Soweit sehr positiv wobei es natürlich immer Anwender gibt die Probleme haben, aber das liegt in der Natur der Sache. Wir versuchen zu helfen wo es geht damit die Anwender mit unserem Produkt zufrieden sind.
Die LiveCD ist unglaubich gut angekommen und das weltweit. Wir haben mehr als 1 Million CDs auf dem Markt dank sehr vieler Magazine.

Read the original interview here, or use Babelfish to translate it.

Haiku: Where are we at, part 2

A week later than had I planned, but here it is: Haiku: Where are we at, part 2 The second mini-article in a serie in which I look at the achievements from the Haiku development team. I hope you like the read, comments are always welcome.

Quoted from the article: Welcome to the second part of this series of articles on the Haiku operating system. If you didn't yet, you should first read part one. In the previous part I talked about the achievements of the Haiku Team since the project was first started, this time I will go deeper into the work that has been done lately and which parts need serious attention in the coming months.

Read the full article here.

InfoPopper news: Restraining orders

Yet more news from Slaad and his InfoPopper adventures. He has been working on a prefs app for InfoPopper to set which applications and notifications can use the InfoPopper and it became that and more...

Quoted from Slaad's Programming Stuff: You may have noticed that last post I hinted about banning notifications from apps. That's not true, I didn't really hint, I said it's something that'd happen in time. Well, it's pretty much done. I just need to finish off the preflet for changing which applications and notifications can use the InfoPopper.

Seem as though I was writing a preflet for that, I made it a preflet for all of the InfoPopper settings.

Read more here.

Open Source Conference Tokyo

Guiseppe from Il Tuo Sistema got hold on some photo's from the Tokyo Open Source Conference 2006. Along with the photo's he posted a (long) list with changes for Zeta 1.2. Check out the Photo's here, the original post on Il Tuo Sistema can be found here.


One of the photo's from the OSC

Haiku screenshots

You might allready know, but just incase you missed it. User '[Beta]' has been building up a huge amount of Haiku screenshots. The Flickr database contains 283(!) screenshots all relevant to Haiku, with for instance applications like Beezer, Qemu, Mr. Peeps!, Zenebona and Wonderbrush running. New screenshots are added (almost) daily.

Visit the Flickr page here.

Capital Be on the way

Some news yesterday from Darkwyrm and his application project 'Capital Be'. Capital Be is becoming a nice simple financial app which will be very useful for those who don't have overly complicated finances, a savings account and a checking account for example. Check out these screens for a better idea:

Darkwyrm writes: I just finished working on the main interface for Capital Be along with the window for balancing an account. You might notice a button in the screenshot called 'Quick Balance' and wonder what it is. Quick Balance is something I've wanted from a financial app ever since I started using Quicken back in 1998. It's an attempt to take time out of having to balance an account by having it check through all unreconciled transactions up to the date entered in the window, adding them up, and if the total matches the one from the bank statement that was entered in the window, it marks them all reconciled and declares you finished. Very nice considering that adding online banking is no small task.

Read more here.

News from Team Maui

I received an email from Vasper today, with news about the YAB intrepeter made by Team Maui. YAB is a basic interpreter based upon Yabasic (Yet Another Basic) for BeOS and Zeta. It can be used to program everything you can imagine from a simple tool to complex applications. YAB is upgraded with elements from BeOS and Zeta API, which makes it possible to create native software in Basic. With a lot of applications from yT (Faktum, ZBackup etc.) it is good news that a common YAB IDE will be availeble soon.

Here is a screenshot of what's coming from Team Maui:

Team Maui says: "Just a status report for those that are eagerly waiting for 1.0 final (me too Wink):

Interpreter:

The interpreter got quite some bugfixes since RC8, there are some few new commands too, e.g. improved filepanels. On the todo list are still some simple to implement commands for list-/tree-/columnboxes and there are two open bugs on the columnbox.

IDE:

The IDE improved a lot since RC8, it has several new features as a find in the toolbar, free font selection and a build factory. The build factory allows you to compile your code within yab, so that it cannot be destroyed by adding attributes as for bound programs. Furthermore, it reduces the binary size as only those parts that are needed are compiled.

However, I removed some stuff again, as the version control and the add-on framework. Those will not make it in 1.0

Documentation:

I am currently writing a lot of documentation for the new commands. This will be integrated into the IDE in form of a help browser. (But it will be printable externally too.) Currently I covered about 20% of the new commands, I hope to finish the other in this week.

When there is more news from Team Maui, you'll be the first to know!

InfoPopper news

Just a quick update for you all, I'm terribly busy today...
Michael from Slaad's programming stuff posted news today about the InfoPopper application.

Slaad writes: So I've had something in mind for the InfoPopper for a while, which I've only just gotten round to implementing. Application groups. Basically, every message that gets sent to the InfoPopper now gets put into a group based on its application. This allows a user to dismiss all notifications from a group in a simple click. Or to "minimise" an application's notifications. It also opens up the way to allow a user to "ban" notifications from an application.

In other news, the latest Haiku build I tested had a nice surprise: Double cliking on tabs now minimizes the window! Are sliding tabs next?

IsComputerOnFire

Some more news on the ACPI driver by Bryan Varner Today,

At the current time, it will read the temperaturs from any thermal zones that have temperatures. These could be system board, processor core, sensors attached to fans, etc. It all depends on your system configuration, motherboard, and it’s ACPI support.

Bryan has done an amazing amount of work on Haiku lately, which almost led to a caffeine addiction as he writes... Let's hope for Bryan he can stay away from the hot black beverages and continue to work for Haiku.

Read more here.

BEnutzerinnen

I noticed it before, but I kinda forgot to write about it. Vasper from BeOSMax and BeSides recently opened a BeOS discussion forum. I think of forums as one of the best ways to help new users get their questions answered, so everyone get over there and share your Be knowledge, experiences and tricks.

Something I also noticed, but didn't want to write about to soon, since a couple of days the BeClan seems to be down. I really hope both BeClan and BeGroovy will be back soon as it would be a real miss to see the dissapear. DaaT from IsComputerOn allready let me know he is working on getting ICO back online, he emailed me that their host lost all data, including their backups. The postings, comments etc seem to be saved though and he hopes to get everything back online soon.
Update March 11: BeClan is back online!

Last but not least, over at the german website BeImpressed an initiative is started to packup some of the existing BeOS reference material like the Be Newsletters, Technoids, The Be Bible and such and release it together on CD. I couldn't really find out, but it is most likely that this will all be in german language. Something else Holger from BeImpressed wants is this:

Quoted from this post at BeBug:

BEnutzerinnen
Initiative zur Förderung des Frauenanteils an den BeOS Benutzern. Hauptziel ist es weibliche Benutzer für das Betriebssystem zu begeistern und Anfangshürden zu überwinden.

Which I think is always a good thing ;)

ObjektSynth for ZETA

Only minutes ago Curt Malouin from Mayan Technology shot me an email with the following message:

Today we released ObjektSynth 2 for ZETA. ObjektSynth is a modular software synthesizer inspired by analog modular synths. It was originally released for BeOS 9 years ago.

ObjektSynth 2 was revolutionary when it was first released in 2000, featuring ultra-low latency, advanced MIDI control, and exceptional sound quality. It has been updated for yellowTAB ZETA. ObjektSynth takes full advantage of ZETA's media capabilities. MIDI and audio can be routed between applications, creating a flexible, modular environment for experimenting with music.

As you can read, ObjektSynth is former BeOS software now rereleased for ZETA! ObjektSynth is modular software synth inspired by analog modular synthesizers. Routing MIDI and audio between ObjektSynth and other ZETA applications creates a flexible environment for electronic music. ObjektSynth has a fully modular engine. Add as many oscillators, filters, and LFOs as you need to create the perfect sound.

ObjektSynth's modules have a lot of features - without being confusing or hard to use. Modules handle MIDI events themselves, so you don't need little helper modules. Some modules are modeled after analog classics, others could only be achieved by a computer.

ObjektSynth was designed specifically for yellowTAB ZETA. ZETA's advanced media capabilities make it a great modular studio environment and it runs fast even on older laptops. Instead of loading plugins into a monolithic sequencer, ZETA lets you route MIDI and audio between full-featured applications. Several music applications are included.



It's good to see former Be products being rereleased for ZETA!, espacially when it's commercial software. These kind of applications are the ones to keep the media os alive, I hope more companies which made software for BeOS will decide to rerelease their software for ZETA...

Read more at the product website.

SunBird for BeOS and Zeta

mmadia has announced on the BeZilla blog that he has done an almost straight out of the box build of SunBird 0.3a1+. Sunbird is a redesign of the Mozilla Calendar component. Mozilla's goal is to produce a cross platform standalone calendar application based on the XUL user interface language.

I had a quick look at SunBird, and it worked perfect on my ZETA 1.1 installation. However it's very noticable that it is not a native BeOS application. It has a very long startup time, non BeOS widgets and scrolling is not optimal just like in Firefox and Seamonkey. Also I think that unlike a webbrowser it should not be that hard to create a native BeOS calendar/agenda application. The fact that SunBirg for BeOS is not much more than an almost clean compile of the existing sources is a positive thing though, allthough not native, SunBird does what it needs to do and updates and fixes will automatically be availeble from the Mozilla developers.

Here are two screenshots I made:

  (Clickable)


Read the original post here, the Mozilla project page can be found here. Sunbird for BeOS is availeble from here.

Weekly Haiku & BeDoper updates

Weekly Haiku was updated with a new post today, covering builds r16212 to r16284.

Exerpted from the post: BShape and BShapeIterator joined the ranks of R5 compatible classes thanks to mmlr (who worked like a mad man in this area). These fixes immediately benefited the app_server when tested with the font glyph extraction code and additional freetype rotation and sheering code, bringing font rendering closer to perfection.

Head over there to read more.
  --
Also today, the 'whining shits' (as someone over at another Be newssite calls them) from BeDoper come with a double article concerning some 'Codename Shortage' and a gameconsole.

Faktum: business made simple?

Last november yellowTab announced that they were working on an application for small businesses called Faktum. Today a trail version is released on the yellowTab website which includes the customers contact, warehouse, and billing administration modules.



The commercial version of Faktum which will be available later supports the following task:

• Price Quotes
• Billing (including Invoices and Past-due reminders)
• Credit
• Customer administration
• Inventory
• Product Management
• Accounting / Bookkeeping
• Order Management
• Reseller Management

These tasks are separated into different modules, and customers can decide for themselves which modules they need. Faktum has been designed so that modules can be added or removed individually without effecting the other modules. All data is stored in individual files.

For now, with the trail version you can:

• create a warehouse
• stock up to 5 different products in your warehouse
• manage contacts for up to 20 customers
• create up to 100 bills of sale

Let's have a closer look at Faktum,









Get the free trail version of Faktum here, read the newspost from yellowTab here.

Ooops mistake on my side, commenting now works

I was a bit worried about the fact that nobody was commenting on the news posts here, until I found out today that because of some stupid setting in the blogger config all the comments were being held for moderation by me. For some reason the emails that should have notified me about new comments didn't arrive but all the comments are visible now.

My excuses for all of you trying to post commands, it's my fault they didn't show up.

BePodder beta 2

Giuseppe from Il Tuo Sistema send me an email today about the upcoming BePodder beta 2 release. This upcoming beta brings a number of new features and improvements: GUI restyling, Full Screen, Channels reordering (drag and drop), Multi-download system, Toolbar hide/show, Move on workspace, Keyboard Shortcuts, new OPML directories, HTTP Proxy, Channel and Downloads info panel and a lot of bugfixes. The beta 2 release will be available for betatesters, but after I had a look at the screenshots I think we can expext a public release soon.



BePodder is a feed aggregator/podcatcher, working with Podcasts and Videoblogs, supporting both RSS and Atom feeds, BePodder fetches the files enclosed in the feed and downloads them.

BePodder will be shareware, but his way the team can provide support and updates plus they will donate 20% of the sales to Haiku to support their development. Like BePodder's quality wasn't a good enough reason to buy it, you now have the added incentive of supporting Haiku through your purchase. The main features are:

• Easy to use yet powerful Graphical User Interface
• Handles all news/podcast feeds in RSS 0.9, 2.0 , Atom and iTunes
• Fully integrated with BFS (Zeta file system)
• Integrated podcast, videoblog, imagefeeds and newsfeeds built-in OPML directories with thousands of feeds
• Advanced channels/lists management with drag and drop support
• Support for more than 10 languages
• Easy to integrate with other applications like BitTorrent/ Installer / Unzip / etc.
• Support for multithreading podcast download
• BePodder is 100% adwares/spywares free
• Low price

Chech out these screenshots to get a better idea of BePodder:




(Images are clickable)

More screenshots are available here, read the original post at Il Tuo Sistema here.

New version of SimplyVorbis

Today Darkwyrm announced that he has finished up a new version of his audio-tool SimplyVorbis.

SimplyVorbis is a program to turn CDs into digital music files - MP3 or Ogg Vorbis but can also play music. It is made with simplicity in mind, just pop in a CD, select the songs you want, and hit 'Go'.

DarkWyrm writes:RC2 is a bugfix release for SimplyVorbis, and quite a sizable one at that. Included in this version are fixes for CD info lookups which have non-English characters. Editing keys work better, fixes for various playlist problems, tweaks to the interface, and Ogg Vorbis quality is higher by default - equivalent to 160 kilobit MP3's for those techies out there. Undoubtedly, though, there are likely to *still* be bugs in it (despite the fact that it's stable for everyday use), so it's still a release candidate.

Get SimplyVorbis here.

VLC and Haiku

Browsing the Haiku mailinglists I found something I had to share with you:


(Image is clickable)

Wow! Thats right, vlc running under Haiku...
Here is where I found the screenshot.

TurkBUG back online

Stephan from BeOSNews had the scoop on this one, he received an email from the webmaster of TurkBUG with the news that they are back up. Espacially the index page of TurkBUG looks familiar:

Stephan writes:
Here's the scoop, courtesy of the TurkBUG.org webmaster:

The first (and AFAIK the only) BeOS Usergroup in Turkey, TurkBUG found a new team for reporting news, translating/doing tests & wikis.

We had a freeze of the site about 6 month because the team disappeared (too much work, private reasons etc. - you know the story).

Read the full post here.