March, 2008

David McPaul, on behalf of 3ivx Technologies Pty. Ltd, has just announced on the Haiku mailing list the release of the latest version (5.02) of the 3ivx MPEG-4 ASP video decoder and encoder for the BeOS R5 platform, including an experimental 3ivx decoder for Haiku. Available on the 3ivx website, this release includes many bug fixes, frame accurate seeking, experimental support for mp4 files and aac audio, and a Haiku version of the 3ivx decoder. Haiku versions of the 3ivx decoder and aac decoder are expected to be supported in the future, and a Haiku-specific 3ivx encoder will be released once encoding support is added to the Haiku Media Kit. This is an exciting development, and hopefully just the beginning of a bright future for Haiku in the area of media format support.

It's been almost one year since we announced our conversations with ACCESS Co. Ltd. targeted at releasing legacy BeOS related documents, and today we are happy to inform the community that this project has finally arrived to a happy conclusion: the BeBook and all the Be Newsletters are now available online. As an emerging open source project, documentation for Haiku is still hard to come by; and while our Documentation Team works on creating Haiku-specific material, the BeBook and the Be Newsletters will provide valuable reference material for all developers, new and experienced alike. We want to express our gratitude to ACCESS Co., Ltd. for supporting our project, particularly to Director of Open Source Technologies David "Lefty" Schlesinger, for personally following up on our request. Special thanks also go to community member Simon Kennedy, for nicely formatting the documents for us.

We are very pleased to announce that, for the second straight year, Haiku has been accepted as a mentor organization for the Google Summer of Code. The student application period will start soon, so if you are a student who would like to work on a Haiku project for the GSoC 2008, please check out our List of GSoC Ideas and Students: How to Apply pages for detailed information on how to apply. If you still have any questions specific to GSoC after reading these pages, please contact the Haiku GSoC administrator (Bruno Albuquerque). If you have any general questions about Haiku and want to start familiarizing yourself with our community, which we encourage you to, please join the Haiku development mailing list and also feel free to stop by the #haiku IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. Our friendly community members will be glad to help you out in pursuing a Haiku project for the GSoC 2008 and beyond.

The good news following our recent presence at the SCaLE conference and the great exposure that it resulted in continues to pour in. Haiku has now been invited to have a booth at the LugRadio Live USA 2008, the first LugRadio live event to be held in the US. Needless to say, we could not refuse the irresistible offer. The event will take place in San Francisco on the weekend of April 12 and 13, at the The Metreon entertainment center located at the heart of the city (map).

LugRadio is an event that covers a range of topics about free software, Open Source, digital rights, technology and more. Combined with a compelling list of speakers, exhibitors and birds of a feather sessions, this event is said to offer what feels like a combination of a rock concert and a computer conference. To bring this unique atmosphere to San Francisco, LugRadio Live USA 2008 USA will have around 30 speakers including Miguel de Icaza and Ian Murdock, over 20 exhibitors, an eclectic range of BOF and other sessions, and the live recording of LugRadio in front of an audience.