Haikuware News

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

BeOSRADIO Entering its Tenth Year!

BeOSRADIO, the radio station originally launched to demonstrate the Be Operating System's strength as a place to do radio broadcasting, is about to enter into its tenth year on the air.

BeOSRADIO hit the Internet airwaves November 9th of 2000 using "BRS" (BeOS Radio Scripter) and the SoundPlay audio player, which evolved into the TuneTracker radio automation system.  Currently BeOSRADIO uses a fourth-generation TuneTracker product called Command Center.

Broadcasting an "Extreme Variety" of easy-listening music, and spanning such diverse genres as Jazz, Acoustic, Ambient, Folk, Ethnic, and Classical, BeOSRADIO continues 24/7 operation.  News from FSN is featured at the top and bottom of each hour, there's extended tech programming from Dave Graveline on Saturdays and Sundays, and the "Faith Online" show with David Selness is heard Sunday mornings.

Another feature for which BeOSRADIO is recognized is its special Christmas programming all during December, including Christmas music in the same Extreme Variety format, plus a number of produced special programs right near Christmas.

BeOSRADIO operates commercial-free, and does incur expense.  If you tune-in and enjoy the programming, you can help the cause by clicking the Donate button on the BeOSRADIO web site.

Long time BeOS and Haiku developer 3dEyes recently posted some screenshots of the progress porting QT4 to Haiku (a three-member team is working on it, with much of the work done by Evgeny Abdraimov aka Shade).

The port isn't yet ready for release, but users are welcome to checkout the project at OSDrawer and compile it themselves/submit bug reports.

Seven years ago I ported QT 2.3 to BeOS. There were a number of reasons why I didn't continue the port:

• It needed X11. A better approach would be to create a BeOS native Xlib wrapper, so that X11 applications can run rootless. This is what Mac OSX uses to run WINE, NeoOffice etc.
• Qt apps are not BeOS apps. It may bring quick and dirty KDE applications across, but you miss out on all advanced BeOS native concepts.

After that, I figured that my time would have been better spend developing BeOS native applications instead of being a QT maintainer for BeOS.

As far as bounties are concerned, it is almost trivial to port Qt using X11 with a posix OS.

What is QT?

'Qt (pronounced as the English word "cute"^[2]) is a cross-platform application development framework, widely used for the development of GUI programs (in which case it is known as a widget toolkit), and also used for developing non-GUI programs such as console tools and servers. Qt is most notably used in KDE, Google Earth, Skype, Qt Extended, Adobe Photoshop Album, VirtualBox and OPIE. It is produced by Nokia's Qt Development Frameworks division, which came into being after Nokia's acquisition of the Norwegian company Trolltech, the original producer of Qt, on June 17, 2008.^[3]

Qt uses standard C++, but makes extensive use of the C pre-processor to enrich the language. Qt can also be used in several other programming languages via language bindings. It runs on all major platforms, and has extensive internationalization support. Non-GUI features include SQL database access, XML parsing, thread management, network support and a unified cross-platform API for file handling.

Distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (among others), Qt is free and open source software.' (source)

Also, we reported a while back that he had gotten Helios to work on Haiku - a download location has now been provided for it, although it's completely untested.

Now for the screenshots:

A nice application that normal Haiku users could use, is a CD Burning Program. The command line tools exist already, (mkisofs - included in Haiku & cdrecord, dvdrecord < not so sure the latter works under Haiku), but a GUI front-end would be welcome.



The author of Jaba jan__64 (which was a CD burning program included in Zeta and written in Yab), has asked for help in creating a new program for Haiku. So if you're good with Yab and artwork (icons) leave a comment here and we'll get you in contact with him.

I have the sources (and the rights) of JABA, the ZETA cdrecord frontend written in yab. However, it was written with yab version 0.2.4 and it needs quite some adjustments for yab 1.5, and some new icons and graphics too. Any volunteer who wants to help with JABA for Haiku is welcome to do so.