Reading through the fourms, it has come to my attention that the marketing effort is behind the development windows. I may be alone in this but it is important to get people interested in using this wonderful platform. Selling to system manufactures is well and good, yet the end-user is the one that will make or break us. There are enough applications, (old and new), for good user functionality now. What is need is a choice on market targeting. The hobby computing market is too small. Games get us children who buy more games. Accounting packages, productivity suites, web creation tools, and desktop publishing get us businesses. Focus can not be maintained with a shutgun.
I’ve only got a small non-profit to work with, but we have given over 600 pc’s to the disabled or terminally ill in the past four years. About 20% of those systems went out with Haiku or BeOS because of their configuration. The rest have been Ubuntu, CentOS, or Oracle Solaris. Only 7 of these systems went out with a Windows® OS.
I’d like to be able to focus on one. Haiku needs more visibility. Please keep it simple.
Haiku is still in the Alpha phase of development so it may be premature to start shipping it with PC to people. That being said, Haiku really does need more apps to be relevant:
Spreadsheet
Word processing
Personal database
Video editing
Are all apps that are missing from the Haiku food chain. In my personal
opinion I think that Haiku would benefit from marketing efforts that
recruited application developers.
Sum-it is an acceptable spreadsheet
Abiword works.
BeAccessible still has plenty of capability.
Both Sybase and Postgress are still out there.
SeaMonkey, InSite, and Globe all work just fine.
The advent of KOffice (with a cleaner install) would also take care of the problem.
I’ve had all of them working at one time or another.
You have obviously taken the time to get to know the software and you mention some great software. Here are my constructive suggestions for the software you mention:
Sum-it - It’s simple, easy to use, but only has add, subtract, multiply, divide last time I looked. If we took the formula capabilities from BeCalc (an amazing OS calculator program) and added that to Sum-it, we would have a win.
ABIWord - the version on Haikuware doesn’t run on Alpha3 release, and the last version ported was something like V0.95. Really old. But ABIWord would be GREAT to have on Haiku.
PostGres - to my knowledge PostGres was ported to BEOS but not Haiku. It should not be a too difficult to finish the port of V8, which is amazingly powerful. But more work needs to be done. And testing. And a nice GUI front end.
KOffice - The TiltOS version of KOffice stopped working with Alpha3 release. I tried it 2 weeks ago. If Kaliber would make an update we would have something pretty cool. But right now it doesn’t work, as far as I can tell.
I think Haiku would really benefit from some new multimedia apps that show off the amazing power of the media server. I think we should have a new developer contest to bring some new talent in.
The Port team does good work (thanks, guys) but there is a lot more work to be done.
And thanks again for bringing this up. It is an important subject we should discuss.
Maybe Haiku could target the embedded electronics / robotics market?
stupid idea… the devs will probably know if the levels of abstraction within the OS architecture lends itself well to this or that… and how best the os handles the resources…