It was a fine, sunny morning in Brisbane, Australia: home of the Third Annual Haiku Down Under Virtual Conference for Haiku OS Users and Developers. Virtual in the respect that the event was streamed live over the Internet via the uStream service. We accept (and regret) that this service requires Flash, so you can’t use Haiku to view this event, you must use another OS like Windows, Mac or Linux.

This year, HDU (short for Haiku Down Under; not slang for How Dare yoU) were able to book a conference venue at The University of Queensland with projector, white board and limited seating where myself, Sikosis was joined by BeMark and Mojodale.

read more

DaaT over at IsComputerOn reminds us that today is Haiku's 9th birthday!

I guess we were so busy, we forgot to post something... shame on us!

Axel has now completed his contract, and intends to pursue the Haikuware bounty for implementing the missing bits of WiFi support over the next weeks.

Your generous donations are allowing us to continue contracting Haiku developers for money. Thank-You-All for supporting these efforts!

Stephan has submitted (edit: and has been accepted for) a development contract -- 160 hours at $2000 USD. Originally he proposed for additional features relating to WebPositive. However in the scope of the next release and even R1 (Final), other areas whose outstanding bugs and issues need greater attention:

• app_server
• MediaPlayer
• Media Kit

Purchasing time and allocating it towards these areas will remove another obstacle while moving towards the great goal of R1.

Lastly in case you didn't hear yet, Haiku, Inc. has launched a website for itself! A few days ago, there was a reminder that using or modifying the trademarked HAIKU logo as your logo is not `OK'. This is strictly about using the HAIKU logo as branding for your goods or services. On the other hand, displaying the logo for saying We support Haiku or as part of an explanation of what is Haiku is allowed and encouraged.

We are excited to tell you about another proposal for contract development! This time, it is from Axel Dörfler. He is proposing to work 120 hours at $14 per hour, for a total of $1,680. To remind you of the sheer awesomeness of this, Axel has been with the Project since nearly the beginning -- he joined a few months after it was started in 2001. Axel was also Haiku's first employee back in 2005! This is a chance to get him back in the saddle -- or, according to some jokes, back in the basement -- coding Haiku full time for a few weeks.

Astonishing Update: In a mere 24 hours, over $800 36 hours, over $1,100 42hours, over $3,000 has been donated! Your response has been overwhelmingly amazing. Thank you for all of your support!

read more

Miroslav Stimac, a part time student at the FernUniversitaet in Hagen, is writing a master thesis about Haiku and asks you to answer his survey at www.haiku-survey.com. The survey is relatively short, and should be answered in about two minutes.

The aggregated results of the survey are expected to be published in early 2011, so don't hold your breath.

Some days ago, I realized that Haiku, Inc. never gave an official status update on its progress. Looking back at where we were last year, a lot of progress has been made. While this is not an official statement from the BOD, these are just my personal observations and recollections.

read more

The FLOSS Weekly (Free Libre Open Source Software) podcast is featuring Haiku in episode 120. Hosts Randal Schwartz and Aaron Seigo talk with Haiku developer Ryan Leavengood and contributor Niels Sascha Reedijk about the origins of Haiku, its purpose, the current status of the project and the potential for the future. Of course, alpha 2 is shamelessly being plugged!

Listen to the podcast now, or download it for later!

Haiku's new web browser, WebPositive, has seen a new update. This new release benefits from updates in app_server and enables better text and canvas rendering. The new WebKit-based browser also has new support for bookmarks and additional usability improvements. Find out more at the developer's blog.

BeOS came with a relatively straightforward browser called NetPositive, or Net+ in shorthand. Especially by today's standards, it can hardly do anything more complicated than rendering basic HTML, so it isn't of much use. Luckily, Haiku has a successor now, born out of the HaikuLauncher conceptbrowser we talked about earlier: WebPositive.

This is news that makes me very, very happy. Stephan "stippi" Assmus has written a lengthy blog post detailing the progress made on Haiku's WebKit port, and they're quite far along. Thanks to the help of several community members, the test browser, enticingly named (euh...) HaikuLauncher, is already relatively stable, supports tabbed browsing, and a whole lot more.

What's that you say? You made a New Year's resolution but haven't kept it? You vowed to sharpen your programming skills, write a cool application, AND use cutting edge operating system technology? Look no further, you have come to the right place. This article will get you started writing applications for Haiku, the open source version of the advanced BeOS operating system.

And now we're ready to start picking the fruits of Qt being available on Haiku. We reported on the completion of the Qt port to Haiku on January 1, 2010, and now we already have KOffice running on the open source recreation of the BeOS. A modern office suite for Haiku!

As I drag myself from cup of coffee to cup of coffee, led by the soothing sounds of The Eagles, still recovering from last night (happy new year everyone!), it hit me that there is this thing I normally do, this website. Anyway, we've got some good Haiku news on this first day of 2010.

Today there are many operating systems available. Every vendor or community round it tries to make it as good as possible. Having different goals, different legacy and different cultures, they succeed in it more or less. We (end users) end up with big selection of operating systems, but for us the operating systems are usually compromise of the features that we would like to have. So is there an operating system that would fit all the needs of the end user? Is is the BeOS clone Haiku?