Premonitions of a rising sun

Back in the 90s, BeOS had many very faithful followers in Japan, both end users and developers. You can still see on the web photos of how people lined up late at night to get their hands on BeOS 4.5J released by PlatHome, the BeOS distributor in Japan (more pics here). Japanese developers also contributed a good amount of software for BeOS back in those days, some of which has made it into the Haiku code base (ie., the Canna Japanese input method, the MuTerm terminal on which the Haiku terminal is based, etc.). The Konatsu font used in Haiku to display Japanese is also an original creation by Masuda Mitiya, originally designed specifically for BeOS. Sadly but understandably, not many of these former BeOS fans remain active today; in fact, only very very few.

I was one of the founding members of the Japan BeOS Network user group (JPBE.net) in Japan, which we created in 2003 mainly in response to the appearance of ZETA. Back in those days, when Haiku was still at a too early stage to have any appeal, ZETA gave the JPBE.net members hope that BeOS could survive and even evolve. As time went by, our hope gradually changed into to the realization that ZETA was not what we thought it would be, and that realization eventually changed into the final disapointment brought by the sad unraveling of ZETA and yellowTAB. The end was particularly nasty in Japan, where the ZETA distributor sold the shipped product but never had the decency to pay royalties to yellowTAB. Not that this was the direct and only cause of yellowTAB's demise, but in the eyes of Japanese users, this did add a large dose of extra drama to how ZETA went down in history, making the disapointment even greater. The "ok, I've had enough; I am moving on" feeling was quite prevalent.

Fast forward to 2008. Haiku is now not that far away from it's first alpha release. People are testing and playing with it in VMs and on real hardware. The (developer) community has been growing, and development is probably more active than it has ever been in the history of the project. Once deemed to be a crazy and perhaps even naive dream, Haiku is definitely becoming more like a viable catalyst of what was once thought to be a lost case. And people are starting to take notice.

JPBE.net group photo at Kansai Open Source Forum 2004

Many in the community know SHINTA (second from the left in the photo), a Japanese developer who has authored a good number of applications for BeOS and ZETA over the years. SHINTA is one of those who has taken notice of our project's progress, and has recently jumped onto the Haiku development bandwagon. This is great news in multiple respects: SHINTA is not only one more important developer to join forces, but he can also bring a much needed perspective and knowledge relative to requirements specific to handling Japanese in our OS, including but not limited to things like double-byte character handling, encoding and localization as well. He is also the author of the port of the excellet Anthy Japanese input method to ZETA, which would be really nice to have in Haiku some day.

SHINTA considers himself an application developer, and apparently never expected to become involved in the development of an OS. His involvement is nevertheless proving very beneficial: as he works on trying to get his BeOS/ZETA applications working in Haiku, he us uncovering bugs in Haiku, reporting them to Trac and even submitting some patches too. I know little to nothing about software development, but SHINTA's blog posts have given me a nice insight into how an application developer can also contribute to the development of Haiku. Perhaps what SHINTA has been doing is not very unique from the POV of an app developer; but somehow he seems to be very proactive in uncovering bugs and helping fix them when he can; and his articulation of his involvement through his blog provides a great example of how others can follow suit and become involved.

I am really happy to see SHINTA has decided to become involved with Haiku. I really hope that he keeps making contributions to the Haiku codebase and that someday he becomes a member of the Haiku development team. Hopefully he can also become an inspiration for other Japanese developers to join our project. SHINTA san, arigato & ganbatte kudasai! :)