Thanks for the heads up on the guest addition source being on the Oracle server. Wish I’d been a bit more selective. Just kicked off the svn download for “additions”. This is going to take a while.
Its been a long discussion to a very thoughtful post.
my 2 cents.
First off, Mac OS X has a very nice feature called Spotlight. I guess that has been taken into Windows 7 and other OSes. you press Apple + Space button to bring a small unobtrusive search window on the top right corner. Type anything you want on the system (well mostly documents, emails or frequently applications) -> highlight the item you need and press enter.
The biggest plus for Mac OS is keyboard navigation. You can do almost everything with the keyboard. No need to open Finder->scroll->double-click.
I found this an issue in the current version of Haiku i have installed on VMWare Server. I can navigate the menu folders via arrow keys. But pressing key on selecting the required application does nothing. It simply reloads the last menu folder.
I found this OS while casually surfing. I am impressed by the crisp UI and would love to see how the development progresses.
While I agree that Haiku might not be for tablets, but it should take into account its installation on a laptop. That means support for myriad devices: flashdrives, external HDD, wifi cards, sound cards, graphics cards, etc.
For Haiku to truly shine and be accepted, driver support is a big stepping stone for Haiku to gain popularity.
I personally would like an OS that I can grab from internet, burn a CD, pop it into a laptop cd drive, install and find everything is working as expected. I don’t find this for OSes like *BSD or Mac OSX (yes, I tried to install Mac OSX from retail CD onto my laptop, din’t quite get it right, though).
And personally, I cant just install a single application in Linux or *BSD, I have to get plethora of other supporting packages. Just last night, I was trying to get Empathy on an OpenBSD installation. It fetched some seemingly irrelevant stuff!
I hope this never happens to Haiku.
Good work! Thanks to all the developers who are working so hard.
@leavengood and other developers, Please spend time with you family. Haiku development is important, Family is MORE important! 
I was a Be programmer way back when - I even had a BeBox (which I sadly sold… ). I am really happy and impressed to see the work that has been put into keeping the spirit of BeOS alive. It was really exciting to be part of something new, and rather frustrating when they stopped making hardware, then shifted to Macs, then to Windows. It was hard to watch, and while I had intended to write software for the platform, I gave up with the constant strategy shifts.
I’d love to get into development again, but without an IDE, this may be over my head. I have not looked at the APIs yet, but the original Be APIs were awesome. I learned to program in a GUI, so working from the terminal is a challenge in itself. I miss CodeWarrior!
I haven’t been able to get the current nightlies up and running on any device besides VirtualBox, where it runs perfectly, and fast! I understand the challenges of drivers, and that said, it would be nice if there was a hardware maker who could put together a cheap box made with parts that would run the current version of Haiku, much like the original BeBox concept… I’ve never built my own computer, so I wouldn’t know where to start. But if there were a list of recommended parts even… I’d go for it.
I think e-mail is another show stopper for a lot of people. The integration of e-mail into the tracker is a beautiful concept, so the thought of going to a standard 3-panel e-mail program seems kind of sad. The browser works great!
I think the point I’m trying to make is there are a few key pieces missing before casual programmers, or even casual users can use Haiku… but I’m sure that isn’t lost on anyone.
Sorry for rambling, and I hope nothing said here sounds ungrateful… a sincere thanks to all the devs who have kept this alive. Outstanding work and I am very impressed!
Saw this today. It may/or may not, be something that Haiku could fully support. It may be worth keeping an eye on.
I also wonder about the AMD Apu line up. AMD seems a little more open source friendly and there are fewer chipsets for this line of cpus, making it a smaller target.
But anyway, it may be that VIA might have something for us AltOS geeks coming soon.
David