Submitted by “The Haiku Project had its annual conference in Orlando this past weekend, and though I have little experience with BeOS or Haiku, I decided to attend and write about the conference because it’s 20 minutes from my home. It’s called WalterCon because ‘Walter’ was one of the proposed names for what was to become a free replacement for BeOS. Be, Inc. may be dead and gone, and the BeOS source code may have been sold and warehoused, but the spirit of Be lives on in Haiku and WalterCon. If only it had a little more developer support, you’d be hearing about the Haiku operating system a lot more often. Heck, you might even be using it.”
sorry but the link don’t show anything interesting
Edit: Oops, darn Adblock
Edited 2006-10-31 20:01
Any news on the new icon set?
Thats a good question. Its not like its critical to the OS but it will help in building its own identity and sadly enough, pretty does help sell an OS
And the winner is… Stippi.
Meh.
/me voted for ponkan
Stippi? Ugh, seriously? That’s very disappointing.
I thought Honey was the best looking set of icons out of all of them, and to that end buries most of what I’ve seen for KDE, Gnome, and Windows. It looked polished, professional, and to the caliber of the OS X icon sets.
My problem with icon sets is that the majority of them look too cartoon-ish….way too bright, little shadowing, thick outlines…..not my cup of tea.
I hope the guys (and girls) at Haiku decide to release all the icon sets when they ever get around to R1. That way we can customize to whatever we want.
And, yes, I know an OS is more than a pretty face, but that face is what we users have to get up to every morning. Like dating an ugly woman…..
…”dating an ugly woman….” Hehe right, but remember, isn’t the not-so-beautiful woman better in that she doesn’t have such high standards ?
Edited 2006-11-01 15:12
That isn’t true, I have a friend who really likes ugly women (he thinks of them as exotic) but still can’t get a date even though he is not bad looking at all.
Well back to icons, I’m surprised Honey didn’t win. I voted for it and thought it was definitely the best looking of the bunch. Maybe they should have a second round, top 3, one vote.
I’m with you dude, let’s petition. Power to the people….hate to the white man! Err……wait a minute.
Seriously, I do have a question, if they went through all the BS of having a contest and voting and yada yada….but may or may not even use the set….what was the point? I mean, I did like seeing all that the icon artists came up with….but the winner should be just that….the contributer of the icon set.
That’s my feeling.
HA! Ahh, yes. Personality means a lot as long as the lights are off.
And the winner is… Stippi.
Meh.
/me voted for ponkan
AFAIK, the Haiku Team said that winning the contest did not mean that they were going to make your icon theme the official one nor include every single icon in the final release. The real goal of the contest was to get some clues about what style would the public like to see in the default iconset and then make the icons, based on that feedback.
I don’t remember, but they’re likely to have said this in the mailing list, not the website nor the forums though. Even having a PR team, the actual relationship with the public is still an issue to adress for Haiku.
Anyway, IIRC, you weren’t supposed to vote only one theme…
According to…
http://haiku-os.org/node/244
…they would announce the winner of the Best Rated Icon Set Award at WalterCon. Maybe the did, and we just don’t know yet.
Stippi’s set won, more info @ iscomputeron.com
I liked Zumi’s and McIntlock a bit better btw but it’s not about the winner but it’s more of a desgine recommendation I read.
I like what I see of Haiku but there is a TON of things to do before it catches and passes OS X.
Like what? Well, applications. And not applications like they are done with Windows in the scatterbrained, nothing connects to each other way.
Why do I like Macs more than OS/2, Haiku, Windows, etc.? It’s the way that iLife applications take advantage of each other.
For instance. I can make a movie with my video camera and import it into iMove. I can also have digital still pictures that I’ve imported into iPhoto. iMovie knows about iPhoto and I can VERY easily edit the movie and include still pictures in the movie.
Want to add music? No problem. iMovie knows about iTunes. Don’t have the song you want in iTunes and know how to create your own music? No problem. Create your own music in GarageBand and export it to iTunes then find it inside of iMove.
All done editing your movie including music? Time to create a DVD or QuickTime video. No problem. iMovie knows about both and it is very simple to start the process of creating one or both from iMovie.
The other option is using Windows with different programs that know nothing about each other. Sure you can do it but it scatterbrained and kludgy in comparison to Macs.
Sure you have more software choices in Windows. That’s because you NEED more choices.
Haiku is eventually going to get there and if it does I’ll dual boot my Mac with Haiku or even run it in a virtual machine. It still has a long ways to go to catch up to Macs though and Apple isn’t sitting still.
I look forward to running Haiku in the future. I won’t be giving up my Mac for a long time to come though.
As for right now? I’m heading off to teach a class using a PowerPoint presentation on my Mac. Why not use Keynote? I could import the PowerPoint presentation into that and run it no problem. Someone else created this though and it’s fun showing that I can use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on my Mac. Not that I often do. I’ve got better tools not made by Microsoft. Gota run.
While I understand that Apple’s suite of applications is aimed at people who aren’t really into customization and having lots of options, there is a flip side to your argument.
Having an integrated multimedia stack is cool, but it lacks flexibility. For instance, does your iMovie know anything about codecs/containers? Can it allow me to implement a Xvid/MKV combo? Does iTunes support any other formats other than those embraced by Apple? Does iTunes have a whole range of encoders? Can it encode stuff in AC3 5.1? I am also not really impressed by your description of iPhoto and iMovie integration. What makes you think the same isn’t done in Windows. What’ the difference between starting up an image editor and then importing it into a movie as opposed to loading the image editor form within iMovie?
While you don’t seem to think choices are important, many other people do. Not many standalone support the .mov container. It’s a whole different story with .avi and .divx containers….
Please stop pretending that the Apple way is the way to go. It works for you if you are willing to let Apple tell you how to get things done. Doesn’t work for me and 95%+ of the computing world.
Haiku should aim to create it’s own workflow style and not become a copy of OS X. You like the way OS X works? Use it!
Your elitism doesn’t add much to your argument. While I hate MS software, just being non-MS isn’t good enough in my books. I like powerful and customizable application which are well made allow me to things the way I need things done.
It -IS- the way to go for me and increasingly more people. We are tired of too many choices, most of which don’t buy us anything other than being different.
You want something different? Great. There is nothing stopping others from creating software that works in the formats that you want. Even Apple can’t stop other companies from doing this. And if someone comes up with a package of apps that uses your formats I just might switch to that IF it “just works” like Apple’s apps do. But if they are like Windows apps, no thanks.
Well the truth is though that the BeOS and therefore haiku style of doing things is to make as much as possible completely interchangeable, utilizing various “kits” for all applications to leverage. according to my understanding it’s kind of in the middle-ground of these positions. Really each of the applications have no real knowledge of each other. What they do have knowledge of is these system wide “kits”. So something along the lines of the ilife integration could be done, but it would likely be done at a lower level than it’s done on macs and therefore you’d have the same integration, without being locked into one program, which is much better in my opinion.
I mean like, CD/DVD images, not screenshots. I know Haiku itself doesn’t offer them, but I was wondering if anyone’s got an image file I can use with Parallels?
http://haiku-os.org/downloads
Yeah, I saw those, but I’m looking for something that works with Parallels, and the haiku page clearly say that they don’t offer CD/DVD images yet.
http://forum.parallels.com/post14827-14.html
Edited 2006-10-31 21:56
Quote from the article:
“I’m not necessarily an open source advocate,” Michael Phipps told the attendees. “Open source is a means to an end. It’s the only way for BeOS to continue development.”
This does not come across as a very wise statement coming from the leader of an open source project.
It’s slightly out of context. My point was that OSS is not the only way; commercial apps have a lot to offer.
Why is that ?
it looks like a very realistic and wise statement to me :
it says that they didn’t choose open source for Haiku for political reason (freedom, etc..) but as the most efficient way to get the job done…
There are many reasons to choose open source other something else. This is just one of those.
Just out of curiosity where did they get the name Walter for this and as a possible name for Haiku?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_The_Operating_System
Thank you. I did a litte more reading and on the Waltercon FAQ they mentioned this:
Why is it called WalterCon?
The name WalterCon comes from Walter The Operating System, a fictional name once proposed for the Haiku project. The name was a pun based on a Garfield and Friends cartoon, and has become a well-known joke in the community. See Wikipedia for more information.
Remember kids, reading is fundamenental if you want to answer your own questions
Michael Phipps seems to be advocating continued Haiku development in the only way possible…via open source.
It doesn’t _really_ matter whether you are an Open Source advocate, zealot, hater, fence-sitter, whatever, continuation is what is ultimately important to the project.
I would agree, being both an open source avocate and leader of an open source project would appear (publicly) to be appropriate but the philosophical positon of the project leader should, I imagine, be taking second place to the overriding need to coax more developers on board.
Me. Still get those same fuzzy feelings I used to get reading about the release of R3 :o)
You actually agree with the point that I was trying to make: if you want more developers on board, you need to understand and cater to their motivations, not just you own (even if they differ).
only idiots want to work for free.
Haiku at this point is still a charity project.
I, like so many other devs would love to make a living off it, not just do it for free.
Phipps dedication to see it through to a viable product platform is very admirable. Some day if the project doesn’t _need_ to be open for continuance, you can bet there’ll be all sort of people contributing their butts off trying to ‘earn’ a paying position with a company that uses Haiku. It happens in projects with stable products like BSD, why not Haiku when it matures?
Until then I’ll keep hoping to cast off my day job as a consultant and actually build something I care about… someday.
> only idiots want to work for free.
I am sure you have made the many non-paid open source contributors very happy with that statement.
Nothing wrong with making a living with what you like, but it is not money that drives most of the contributors to open source projects. If everybody thought like you, there would be no open source movement in the first place.
You have never done anything just because?
So if you donate money to charity then you are an idiot because you had to work for the money you just gave away. Which means you just “work(ed) for free”.
Or what about hobbyists wanting to improve their coding skills?
Or doing something for just helping someone out?
“I, like so many other devs would love to make a living off it, not just do it for free.”
So I am going to assume you code. Ever make a quick program to get something done at your house and then shared it with your buddies? I guess you have never done that before since everyone who “works for free” is an idiot, right?
Dude you don’t have any idea what drives an opensource programmer or what they get out of it, so please just back off with the personal attacks.
Only idiots make generalized assumptions about others.
Tell you what. I’m not a coder, well at least not enough of one to want to do it for a living, but I would imagine any submission to projects like this could be considered resume material.
If I could code well enough to submit to OS development I would jump on it in a heartbeat and code anything I could for free.
Besides, don’t you think if Haiku gets far enough along they may start paying people for their time if they’re good enough?
“reading is fundamenental if you want to answer your own questions”
While the oral tradition has been with us since we learned how to grunt.
Anyway, IIRC, you weren’t supposed to vote only one theme…
I liked and voted for a several of the sets.
Ponkan, Zumi, 575, Stippi, and Honey all had their good points and at least one or two good icons.
I was there, but late on Friday.
It’s Stippi. That’s what I was told. What this means, I do not know. Maybe an icon contest 2.0. Who knows ?
I would like to see a Mondrian, or actual picture for the image icon.
A red smear doesn’t do it for me. I also like the flag for compressed files.
What Haiku really needs is to become more stable.