i don’t know if this idea has already been suggested.
It would be great to have the possibility to have a version of haiku which could be used as a media player and basic application launcher like a video game console (XBox 360, PS3).
I mean:
If you have a PC conected to a TV. You launch your PC and instead of having directly the desktop of Haiku on the screen, you could have 3 icons:
Desktop : To start a normal session of Haiku with desktop, icons, …
Media: To play musics and video. A basic navigator could be used to choose the media to play.
Applications: To just launch an application in a list. These applications could be video games (or other)(like in xbox 360).
The idea is to be able to start a computer an launch a media or an application whithout the need for a mouse or a keyboard. Everything could be selected with a joystick. The haiku desktop would just be hide (but always available if you select icon 1).
seems fairly easy, single plain desktop, have 3 enlarged desktop icons - one would start some special media player (skin) for easy manipulation with joystick or remote, other would start a game or switch to other desktop with icons for games, third one would start gui again with different settings/profile. so this only would introduce config/profiles for gui to work. it would be nice anyway to have different profiles for gui and one could have the option to choose them from login prompt…
If you know BeOS you know this is very simple to do. BeOS and Haiku boots to a graphical environment with the appserver. It’s just a blank GUI. In the bootscript* it then launches Tracker (Desktop with icons and file browsing) and Deskbar. If you replace those two with something else you have the GUI to whatever you want.
The bootable cds worked this way launching the installer instead of those, and to get the Desktop you can get there by pressing CTRL + ALT + DELETE and press Restart Desktop.
Imagine a XBMC that launches from coldboot in 10 seconds and kicks ass… With script to just exit and boot desktop.
i’m not quite sure whether Haiku is going to be fully multiuser or not, but…
Haiku boots up
nice graphical ‘login’ screen with horizontal-vertical scrolling ‘selector’ like this: http://myyr.restkeskus.ee/gallery/haiku_boot.jpg where one can choose (left-right) the user and enter the password or shutdown, reboot etc (up-down) or choose a user named ‘console’ (or games, picture show, audiostation etc) and enter without password (no keyboard needed, using joystick, pad, remote etc)
game ‘mode’ would present just desktop with (big) icons for games, picture show would present a nice picture/slideshow manager, audiostation would show a cool mediaplayer etc.
PS. My deepest apologies to the REAL developers of Haiku… I guess it must be annoying if You are doing the hard ‘dirty work’ and some n00bs are just posting their fantasies in the forum.
Haiku would surely be perfect for a media server in your livingroom. A Haiku-based “mediapc”-application is something I think is needed sometime (probably not a task for the Haiku project per se). I even started creating a module-based MediaPortal clone a long time ago, but I never got around to finish something due to my inexperience with C++.
Just posting a screenshot for inspiration. I have personally a mediapc, but what I miss is a mediaplayer with a small footprint. I think MediaPortal, XMBC, and like, are way too bloated - and written in what I experience as “slow languages” (C#).
This is something relatively easy to do in Haiku. Some computer makers are starting to integrate a Linux-based similar system in the machine’s firmware so it can start without booting the OS - something I find completely useless, but Haiku can be more effective than Linux here: just make a ready-to-go specialized distribution, easily customizable (no hard-coded “special effects” and such).
These suggestions looks familiar with the description of an about 9 years old project called BeIA (Be Internet Appliances), its basically a BeOS that boots directly to a media/internet graphical shell meant to run on small devices or everything that can be supported, that was an ambitious project from Be corp but it never succeeded to avoid them the downfall. Its so silly to see now that every big company now, or lets say, since Microsoft has invented sigh the Media Center, is trying to make his own MediaCenter thing for dedicated devices or game consoles (who said Sony ??)
Anyway, this is totally possible and even Be/Haiku is the best for this purpose.
