How is the port to Arm going? Any hopes that it will be ported soon?
I would like to use Haiku on an ebook reader.
Now that HP is aborting WebOS TouchPad, why not take advantage of their discount hardware, use it as a base to bring Haiku to a new “sense”?
Haiku screams to begin with. Why not a ‘Haiku TouchPad’?
We deserve it. <— lol that’s just dumb talking.
Because once those bargain basement Touchpads are sold, there won’t be any more? The devs would probably have to put in a year’s worth of work to make Haiku run on this thing: get the onscreen keyboard working, write a driver for the wifi chip and another one for the camera and so on and so forth. Then, by the time they have an alpha ready, the Touchpad is just a dim memory and there are none left for sale. What, precisely, would be the point of that?
Well the big things would be video driver support touchscreen support wifi and sound… there are already drivers for Linux though and android has been ported IIRC so the drivers are probably open but probably not MIT/BSD but that isn’t really a big deal if they are GPLv2 in the Linux or android kernels.
Porting would take awhile probably but its a cool device and would draw attention to Haiku as a viable platform for ARM devices and might bring more ARM developers.
An onscreen keyboard is something that could be used elsewhere though and would be great anyway just something that pops up whenever you click in a text field and takes up minimal screen space and maybe alternate input methods like swipe typing.
All that said its more of an R1+ idea for once Haiku’s feature set is solid though not really tied to R2 still it would be super cool for someone to get interested and just up and do it lol thats how stuff gets done for real anyway!
Actually,this whole Android tablet craze that seems to be taking over retail shelf space in the US made me think back to the infamous “focus shift”. BeOS fans around here surely remember that last desperate “Hail Mary pass” that Be Inc. made after they found that, under pressure from Micro$oft and Apple, they couldn’t even give BeOS away.
The BeIA Internet appliance was basically what these Android tablets are, think Apple Ipad. It was a brilliant idea, just about ten years ahead of it’s time, like so many other innovations in BeOS. Did BeIA have the pop up touch screen keyboard like these Android tablets/Ipads?
edit: Yes it did. See
and
Looking at those photos on flickr.com, I would love to have been the owner of Be Inc.'s IP portfolio. I’m pretty sure it could be used to invalidate tons of patents as prior art or to sue the daylights out of some of these same companies that, are trying all kinds of shenanigans to stifle innovation in the current market. I should have been a lawyer >;-).
But, to get back on topic, the point of that is that many market watchers are predicting the demise of the laptop/netbook form factor, forecasting that tablets will replace them in the long run. If they are right, any moves to advance tablet support will help Haiku to adapt to this market trend.
Alan
“Demise” is putting it a bit too strongly, 6foot3. To use Steve Jobs’ “trucks vs cars” analogy, trucks did not disappear when cars were invented. In fact, there are more trucks needed now to ferry all the cars and car components around. The horse has not become extinct either. Its best days as a mode of transport are behind it, but there is still a respectable living to be made in the horse tackle business. When my sister still rode horses, the farrier would arrive to shoe the horses - in his Mercedes.
I’ve been seeing the “desktop systems will disappear since laptops are so great now” meme since the early 90’s. And I can still buy excellent desktop systems. You can still buy a minicomputer or even a mainframe if you like (today’s mainframes make the fabled Cray One of my youth look like a pocket calculator). Technology doesn’t supersede. It adds on new layers.
Sure, if anyone has the skills and thinks they can pull it off, go for it. Everybody needs a hobby. But just don’t think that more than about 0.00001% of tablet users are going to strip off the existing OS and install iHaiku . BeOS couldn’t do it to Windows. Linux still can’t do it to Windows. And those are systems where changing the OS is EASY. A tablet and its OS are much more tightly bound together.
Tablets are also typical consumer items: you buy it, you use it until it breaks, then you buy a new one. According to a recent report only half of all iPhones brought into the Apple Store for repairs have EVER been synced or backed up after the initial activation. To me that is unthinkable, my iPod Touch and iPad get synced daily. But that is the reality out there: if people are unwilling to plug the gadget in once a week to check if there is an update out there, then what chance of getting any serious number of them to install a new OS? PC users are rabid geeks by comparison.
The way to go in this space is to convince a big gadget manufacturer that you can give them something better than Android, and have them pump out iHaiku gizmos by the millions. Good luck.
@Michel, I was just trying to highlight how “old” some of this “new” stuff really is. The BeIA photo showing what is conceptually a tablet with an on-screen keyboard was dated Nov 14, 2000. That is, an implementation of the BeOS running on a tablet form factor with many of the features we take for granted on tablets these days.
As for the forecasts of 'market watchers", I don’t place too much importance on them. As you’ve pointed out many things that have been predicted to disappear are still around. IMO forecasts that try to predict outcomes more than a few months out are a bit of a crap shoot. You just can’t predict the future.
I was thinking that maybe in the future, Haiku Inc could build their own devices based on Intel and ARM processors. A Haiku tablet sounds awesome in my opinion if they could include YAVTD or something similar. Be had the Be Box, perhaps Haiku could have Haiku Hardware.
As a one time BeOS user (distant Haiku admirer) and current WebOS user this discussion intrigues me. First let me say, I think that any effort to port Haiku to the now discontinued, but insanely cheap, Touchpad tablet would be a waste of Haiku’s limited resources. In the near term (10 years is relative :-)) Haiku development has to focus on strengthen core functionality and stability of the platform, so Haiku matures enough to reach R1 status first and foremost.
That being said, I think active discussion of Haiku post R1 is constructive for the evolution of the OS. Everyone has an opinion concerning what the next big thing in computing is and how it may or may not transform computers as we know them today. While I don’t believe that the desktop is on deaths door, I think desktop user habits will be influenced by the new mobile computing trends.
6foot3 post concerning BeIA being ahead of it’s time got me thinking. Even though Haiku is geared toward the desktop, some of BeOS/Haiku core technologies would translate well if re-purposed for mobile netbook/tablet/media consumption device operation. I am not advocating another “Focus Shift” (shutter), just acknowledging that it could be beneficial to keep an eye on how latest mobile computing concepts to see how they may be integrated into Haiku. By staying abreast of what may be just over the horizon, Haiku has better chance being a relevant OS in the future.
Besides the BeOS, to me WebOS is one best OS I have ever used. My opinion is based on the core functionally delivered by the OS, not functionality extended by needed axillary applications (or lack there of in the case of Haiku and WebOS :-). There is an elegant consistency across the both platforms. Not a pieced together framework.
I think there are some aspects of the WebOS (or other new mobile OS) that the Haiku project may benefit in the future adapting.
How about a Haiku version of Synergy? WebOS Synergy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webos#Synergy) transparently compiles e-mail, contacts, and calender information from multiple sources into single concise collections. Data source and physical location of the data is irrelevant. Could Haiku somehow implement a similar level of synchronization by leveraging Haiku messaging and live queries to merge local and online data from the Services kit, E-mail kit (mail_daemon), Contacts kit (People File/vCard file) and some type future Calander/Task kit (Task File/iCalander file) into single repositories organizational information?
I have an old BeOS related post I saved from years ago (which was likely from one of the now defunked BeOS forums) that discussed in detail a similar concept concerning media file. Instead of having media listed per physical localation or file type in tracker, use BFS live queries to categorize and list general media types in views (e.g. Music, Video, Image etc). I’ll have to dig it out and it post here.
Good post!
I feel like moving to a new platform is a good idea. I personally would purchase something like the ASUS Eee Slate EP121 if that meant I could run Haiku on it. It’s the best of both worlds: mobile AND powerful. It’s a very solid platform that would be able to run Haiku for years to come, and be of quality enough that it would last years, and give developers a piece of gear that is a complete, standard, “focused” build target. Instead of trying to support too much hardware, choosing a new standard platform every few years would be best; it makes sense if completion is the goal.
I supported BeOS as soon as I got wind of BeOS 3.5 was in Alpha for PCs. I spent over $1K in order to help push BeOS development along. I really loved it. Then Palm came along and killed Be along with some others. I could point fingers… but that’s history. I supported SkyOS as soon as I got wind of it too. I spent a more modest amount of money on it. I was very hopeful for its completion, but alas… that’s history.
Haiku is my last hope. I’m not going to stick another dollar into an OS unless I see some real targeted moves. In my humble opinion, Haiku should be planning to integrate into some hardware to become a nice appliance. I don’t care to recapture the past of BeOS, with the exceptions of 3dmiX, Chart, People, and Mail, with my choice OS.
In summary, Haiku + ASUS Eee Slate EP121 = 1 happy arctic wolf.
[quote=6foot3]
edit: Yes it did. See
http://www.flickr.com/photos/84822102@N00/172029218/in/photostream
and
Alan[/quote]
Wonderfull memories came up by seeing those.
And not mingle too much, but yes Be inc visionairy were 10 years ahead.
and
I still have 2 of those and a CRT-based (think original iMac) iPad. Apple is still being sued over the name!
See these images I’m always more convinced Jean-Louis Gassée had the Dr. Emmett “Doc” Brown’s DeLorean… he sees the future!
Be Inc. was very ahead of its times:
- Multiprocessor support when the majority of PCs had 1 CPU only
- Pervasive Multithreading: all other OSes was (and some are now, sadly) monothread by design
- The use of C++ for write an OS (Win9X don’t know in which language is written… I do suspect C)
- The co-ehrent & simply to use API
- The death of the Terminal (!)
… and now these images… well, we now know who bought the DeLorean after the movies 
[quote=DLazlo]http://www.flickr.com/photos/84822102@N00/172029218/in/photostream
and
I still have 2 of those and a CRT-based (think original iMac) iPad. Apple is still being sued over the name![/quote]
I have a Compaq IA device, the white one and this is still running BeOS Bone’d version. use it as a de luxe photo frame.