Please make a new software for Haiku, not only a port

People, remember the BeOS times, a lot of unconventional programmers wrote programs for this system, what happened to them, what happened to you? You only rely on program ports, you don’t make your own.
There will be a station in which Redhat is now, i.e. port packages will not be attractive because they are not up-to-date.

Please, I am begging you developers create software for Haiku !!!

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The amount of time and effort required to make just one major application, is often more than porting 20 different existing applications. And in the case of Wine, we could end up with hundreds of thousands more applications that are usable in Haiku, just from the Wine port alone.

New applications are still being made but it understandably takes a longer time to get those out the door. You will not gain much of anything from stopping developers from making ports.

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It is also the lack of developers and they for now really should focus on the OS.

I see nothing wrong in porting applications that would take years to develop, like Inkscape, Gimp and Evolution. These are all very feature rich.

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Like everything, it’s a balance.

  • Native Haiku applications will likely run better in terms of speed and stability, and take up less disk space (due to only depending on Haiku itself, instead of large packages like KDE, QT, which is my complaint of the LibreOffice port).
  • Ported apps are often too large to re-write, and having known applications on Haiku attracts more users.

It all comes down to who is willing to take the time and write the code. There’s still important features missing from Haiku itself, like webcam and USB wireless networking support.

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Respect for you that there is a lot of collision when it comes to ports.
However, it is time to mark that soon R1 (~ 2 years?) and it would be useful to have some software, also commercial (mail order sale via e-shop is not impossible to achieve now)

So true, the platform and the community needs a few really good third party applications that are native and making use of the strong points of the OS. But for that we also need to attract users and they need applications today…

With writing Evolution in another thread I specifically didn’t write Geary, Gnome Contacts and Calendar. Simpler applications should be native. Haiku’s Mail app should have a decent IMAP, but not full Exchange support. The Person app should have more modern features like CardDAV support.

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Wonderbrush is a very good graphic app, i hope that 3.0 is available in short time.

Beam is a realy good Mail app, but need some work to mske it up to date

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I do. Nothing groundbreaking as of yet, but still.
Have you written any apps for Haiku?

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I am planning to make a new native word processor for Haiku but I didn’t really want to say anything until I started making some progress. It is all planning stages now but I have been thinking about it for a while.

My initial goal would be to have similar features to GoBe Productive or Google Docs. Nothing anywhere near modern Word or LibreOffice Writer, at least not for some time. If I could use it to write the Haiku financial report similar to what I released earlier this month and produce a PDF then I would be pretty happy.

I also would like to seriously think about also having sharing and commenting support to mimic Google Docs, but obviously that would need some sort of server support or a fancy peer-to-peer system. I am a big fan of the idea of local first software so this is inspired by that a bit, and of course Google Docs (and I know many here are not Google fans, hence the idea of making this alternative.)

Anyhow it is easy to talk and make promises, and harder to deliver, but I am pretty serious about this and well, letting the community know might help motivate me a bit. Of course depending on how this goes I would also consider then other aspects of an office suite too and maybe even more fully replicating GoBe Productive which allowed intermixing the different parts of the app in one document. But one step at a time.

Finally as far as a time frame to be realistic I would say I’d like to have a rough alpha version within the next year, maybe in time for me to “eat my own dogfood” and use it for the 2022 Haiku, Inc. financial report.

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Very exciting news!

SubEthaEdit GitHub - subethaedit/SubEthaEdit: General purpose plain text editor for macOS. Widely known for its live collaboration feature. has a nifty peer file sharing for people on the same network.

It took me a couple of years to create Medo (a Haiku native video editor), doing a couple of hours per week.

I do have other projects planned, but right now free time is hard to find (changed jobs, leading a massive project, relocation to Europe).

When funding/lottery/retirement happens, I will have more time for Haiku native apps :slight_smile:

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It would be really cool if the standart text view/edit widget would benefit from this!

Fantastic news! Although I’m not sure why, the look of Cinnamon Writer for Amiga / AROS (with the tool panel) really appeals to me, in case you’d like some UI inspiration. :slightly_smiling_face:.
Edit - Best to stick to Haiku UI guidelines, if course…

On mobiles devs have created cross-platform development frameworks - and tried to make the apps run like native ones, e.g., React Native, So like it or not ppl want cross-platform convenience.

For Haiku, wouldn’t it be best to port development frameworks that bring apps with them in order to get to R1 - e.g., Wine, Java, QT, GTK, etc? Look at the public interest generated already for the Wine port. And, afterall, shouldn’t R1 be more of a “public interest” release - e.g., “install Haiku and see what it can do”, rather than “install Haiku and use its native apps”. You need users more than you need native apps. Once Haiku is over the R1 hump then you can concentrate more on native app development.

Maybe a list of minimum apps required to make an R1 release could be a helpful target.

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Yes, but it’s a private software. I’m going to code again. Now that BeBook provides api, it’s easier.

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It’s a files sharing or people sharing? I wonder about this, for some reasons, I like the idea of an enhanced messenger for a community like p2p.
File sharing (sharing) is prohibited in my country by law, time to change that?

It’s sharing the current changes in the document with connected users. It’s a collaborative plain text editor. I used it a lot in college for working on code with team mates.

STLover - native 3d models viewer - https://depot.haiku-os.org/stlover

stlover__f1c07a0c-321e-46df-8be7-3dc6a4f592f5

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The thing is, the main selling point for Haiku is we are building an operating system where a single team controls the whole OS, which allows us to provide a consisten programming API and user experience. Using Haiku to run ported apps completely misses the point, and just makes it yet another UNIX/Linux clone system, which isn’t all that interesting to me. And probably puts pressure on the OS developers to spend time working on features that support these ported apps. So we’re here debugging tricky POSIX compatibility issues, improving functions like mmap and mlock, instead of working on higher level APIs for native apps.

Yes, we get more users. But since our users can just get the OS for free, that essentially means more people to support (that is exagerated, of course, but I think the balance lies this way). So, yes, if we were a company trying to sell an OS, compatibility with existing apps would be a strong selling point. Except we don’t really have anything to sell.

Anyway, it seems I’m one of the few Old Guys here ranting about a dream fron 20 years ago, about how things could have been, and no one really cares anymore.

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It’s not just you that cares, but we are too few to meet all the needs with native software. We can’t write native software for everything. I don’t think we can do an office suite as an example.

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