GNOME 3 is out and of course I was very curious to give it a spin. As the GNOME developers claim they care a lot about usability and have given the new desktop design a lot of thought, I was pretty excited, since I care about these things as well. Haiku still has a lot of usability issues that we need to sort out. Maybe we can learn a few things. So what are my impressions? To be honest, I have pretty mixed feelings.
After a long hiatus, Lesson #18 is available for your reading pleasure. The topic? Scripting Haiku applications, possibly one of the least understood aspects of the operating system. Learn about hey command, its uses, and even see some of the most English-like bash commands ever. Also see how to make almost any Haiku application answer your beck and call and tinker around the operating system with an updated version of the ScriptWorld demo application, Scripting Explorer.
Going through some backup files on my hard drive, I discovered a blog entry about my work on the Media Kit and MediaPlayer, which I for some reason never published. Even though it's about work which happened some time ago, I am going ahead and publish it anyway, perhaps it's still an interesting read for some. Here it goes:
While I was contracted to work on the port of WebKit to Haiku, and later on WebPositive, I've written regular enthusiastic blog entries to report on my progress. This time around, I haven't felt confident in the results of my work up until now. Getting the FFmpeg plugin to perform decently was quite a piece of often frustrating work.
One month has passed (too fast), so it’s time to summarize the developments
in the fields of package management for Haiku.
This lesson is one of several which delves into the art of control writing for Haiku – not just a quick-and-dirty hack on an existing one, but writing a new control which rivals existing ones in quality and features. Learn how controls handle drawing themselves and write a basic color display control.
Programming with Haiku, Lesson 17
The Google Code In is now over. I’d like to thank all of the students, and the Haiku mentors, 30 in all, for all their hard work. I’d also like to thank Google, the Melange team and Carol Smith for running GCI. Haiku had over 150 tasks completed by students!
Many of the tasks completed for Haiku were for translations. In all, there were about 65 translation tasks completed, nearly completing 12 different languages, and partial coverage on 7 more. One student, when we couldn’t find a mentor to cover the Romanian translations, went out and found a mentor, and then she proceeded to translate all of the apps and preflets that are in HTA, all while she was also doing tasks for several other orgs. In case anyone is interested in working on the translations there is still a lot of work left to do on some of the less common languages. If you are interested in helping out, join the Haiku-i18n mailing list. To work on the localization of the system, go to HTA, register and get started. To start a new translation team for the user guide, read Starting a new translation.
Haiku get's a couple of new screensavers, several new translators for many languages, and some more i18n'd applications and preferences thanks to GCI students.
Most people think of fonts as merely a means to an end, but in this lesson we will take a crash course in typography and the very basics of displaying text in Haiku. Also included is a review of the second unit, lessons 6 through 15.
Programming With Haiku , Unit 2 Review Programming With Haiku, Lesson 16
The following is a first draft of how package management on Haiku could look like. I’m more than sure that there are aspects missing here, but we need to start the discussion somewhere …
Several people have already added their ideas on package management to the wiki article. Additionally, many opinions have been stated in comments to my first blog entry.
I have tried to incorporate most ideas mentioned into this draft, but due to the sheer amount of contradicting views, some sacrifices have to be made.
“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."
Starting my month of paid Haiku-work today, I was quite astonished to see the many emotional comments that have been added to the announcement. Clearly, the topic seems to be one of heavy likes and dislikes …
Having read all those comments and most of the discussions we had earlier (on the wiki and on the mailing lists), I felt the need to start my blog with the quote given above - as, for me, that pretty much summarizes what there is to say about package management …
