Usability is one of my pet topics. Although less so now that in years past, it is all-too-often ignored or not given enough priority. This lesson scratches the surface from a developer’s point of view. I’m no usability expert, but I do know a thing or two. This lesson is a must-read for any budding developer, and by the end of it, we will have a good real-world program to show off which is just shy of being ready for a release.
The first milestone of the ext3 implementation was to have read support. Since ext2 read support is already implemented, the only missing feature (as far as I can tell) for ext3 read implementation was support for indexed directories. In ext3, indexed directories use a tree structured called HTree. This tree has a fixed depth and its keys are file name hashes. Each node of the tree is a file system block inside the directory file (ie. linked by the directory i-node).
'Me' and 'We'. They're the same thing, just with a slightly different way of looking at it. There's always something to do, some way of helping further the Haiku Project ... though it's not all glitz, glamor, and fame. In fact, a good portion is, well, it's tedious; it's boring; it's stuff we'd rather not be doing. For a volunteer based project such as ours, that can be a death sentence for those tasks.
This lesson continues with delving into the Storage Kit, reading and writing files. We also start writing code for the final project of the Learning to Program With Haiku series which will be developed over the course of several lessons.
Learning to Program With Haiku, Lesson 21
Here is my first blog post about my progress so far for my gsoc project, a little later than it should be, but at least it's here!
So, what have I been working on? Two things, basically: archiving with cross-references, and view-less layouts.
I've been chatting with my mentor and things are getting revised fairly quickly, so instead of writing about implementation, I'll write about the ideas and results of what I'm working on!
Extending the media kit with the ability to read DVD is a challenge, but a unique opportunity to learn about the kit architecture and Haiku software integration. This time I’ll be talking about my actual first development steps concerning DVD support.
The first objective of this project is to give Media Player the ability to play DVD’s. Here’s a quick introduction of the tools I chose for the job.
Moving on from exploring the Interface Kit, we turn our attention to the Storage Kit in this lesson. We take a look at the kit from a broad perspective and also begin using some of its many of the classes. We take a break from writing GUI applications and, instead, write a console directory-listing program using C++.
Learning to Program With Haiku, Lesson 20 Source Code: 20ListDir.zip
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.
Ten years ago when I first started to learn to write code using BeOS, I had a lot of questions that I couldn’t any documentation to give me the answers. Luckily, there was the Be Code Talk mailing list and kindhearted members of the community, like David Sowsy (Animaxo, Vesa Accepted). Resources are one of those things that eluded me. Eventually I figured them out, but Lesson 19 lays some of it out in plain conversation.
