July, 2008

LinuxWorld Expo 2008 Free Pass (850KB PDF)In February of 2007 Haiku exhibited at SCaLE 05, making its first appearance ever at an open source conference. Since then, Haiku has made appearances in many open source events worldwide. One big event that we have been targeting since last year was the LinuxWorld Expo; unfortunately, both this and last year we were unable to get a spot in the .Org pavilion. Fortunately, that's about to change. After some perseverance, creative thinking and thanks the good will of IDG World Expo (the organizers of LinuxWorld) and the ReactOS project (with whom we will be sharing the booth), we are excited to announce that we were able to obtain an exhibit spot at the LinuxWorld Expo 2008 to be held next month in the San Francisco Moscone Center.

We have secured a full-sized 10x10 spot (booth #1617), where we plan to showcase Haiku for the full duration of the expo, that is, August 5, 6 and 7. Our plan is to demo Haiku on two or more PCs, one of them hooked up to a projector which will display its image on a screen hanging from the booth backwall (like here). We will also hand out fliers and possibly a CD with a VMWare image, and sell Haiku t-shirts (if allowed) to raise funds for the project.

The Motivation for a Layout System

One of the major complaints that any serious BeOS programmer would eventually make about the GUI classes in the Be API is the lack of easy font sensitivity. What this means is that if one designs a GUI using the system default fonts and then a user of your application changes their system fonts to be much smaller or larger than the default, the GUI will likely look bad (especially if the font size is larger.) Things that were previously aligned may not be, and likely text labels will run into other components or even disappear into the side of the window. This is especially true in fixed sized GUIs like dialog boxes and configuration panels. See Figure 1.