Hallo Haiku fans!
Today I want to share my latest project which I’ve been working on for the last few months.
It’s a native Usenet newsreader,based on Item combined with code from Haikus built-in Mail application.
I’ve reworked and modernized the code to make use of modern Haiku features such as the Layout Kit,Locale Kit and of course system colors.
It’s not finished yet,in fact I think there will be a good number of bugs you may encounter,and lots of missing features,too.
But with the recent addition of a bundled article viewer (as said,based on Haikus Mail app),it does now at least have all basic functionality to be somewhat useful,so I think it’s the right time to show it here.
What is the Usenet?
If you’re younger than 30 or so,there’s a good chance that you’ve never heard of the Usenet before.
That’s unfortunate,because the Usenet is a really intersting decentralized forum network based on an open standard.
Think of it like Reddit,but there’s no single company that owns all of it,no advertising,and you can access it using a variety of native client applications on different operating systems,rather than a massively bloated and slow web interface.
How can I join the Usenet?
Access to the Usenet isn’t bound to a specific company,instead you can freely choose one of many independent but connected servers to access the whole network,like you can choose one E-mail provider and still write to users of all other servers.
Some free text-only servers:
- https://eternal-september.org (The one I’m using)
- nntp4.net Usenet Newsserver
- https://open-news-network.org
Besides that,there are numerous paid servers which offer access to binary downloads and faster speeds,but that’s not so interesting for BeGroups primary use-case as a forum-like experience,not a downloader.
What’s interesting on the Usenet?
That depends on your interests,there are groups about almost everything,from technology to politics and more.
While a big part is English,there are also groups in other languages.
If you care about Haiku and/or BeOS,here are some groups you can have a look at:
- alt.os.haiku
- alt.os.beos
- comp.sys.be.help
- comp.sys.be.misc
None of the Haiku/BeOS related groups are actively used currently,but we can change that,it only needs people who post some content.
Where can I get BeGroups?
The BeGroups project can be found on Codeberg.
There are currently no ready to use HPKGs as the project is still in early alpha stage and I don’t feel like calling the current situation a fixed version that I can release as-is.
Trying it out is easy if you use a recent Nightly,however,as the Makefile contains all instructions for creating a package in a single step.
git clone https://codeberg.org/nikisoft/BeGroups
cd BeGroups
make package
And install the resulting .hpkg file.
Feedback welcome 
Thanks for reading my introduction,it got longer than I initially planned,but there was so much to say.
As always,I’m happy about feedback,be it feature requests,wishes,ideas or bugs.
You can reply directly here or use the issue tracker on Codeberg,I’m flexible with that.
Contributions/Pull requests are also more than welcome
Edit: Just got feedback that it doesn’t build on Beta5.Seems there are some API changes with the BObjectList,so you have to use a Nightly to try it.
).
