Suggestion Box

Ran across this forum when I found a post from 2012 about the possibility of porting FLTK to Haiku. Was wondering if anyone got anywhere on the project. I've been looking at some of the different ways to run FLTK 1.3.2. It can be built without X using nano-X. There's a DirectFB port of an older version (borrows some ideas from nano-X). Someone mentioned a Symbian port in the other thread.

If there was some type of lightweight library that provided some of the basic X11 functionality on top of something like SDL might be much easier to port projects like FLTK. nano-x has nxlib to provide most of the Xlib compatibility. Was recently talking to another developer who mentioned sdl2tk has some X11 compatibility functions. Was curious if anyone besides me would be interested in a project like this.

I also remember coming across a post about webm-player for Haiku and using it to provide a lightweight webm viewer. Looks like a really nice option for webm playback, but it doesn't have any sound support built in. Was curious if anyone had looked into adding sound support to the code or found another lightweight (preferably SDL based) webm player. Also, if anyone's interested there's a lightweight theora player at the icculus site and a lightweight flx/flc player at the libsdl site.

Seeing as we're probably still at least a few decades away from final release, I thought I'd share some of my thoughts with regards for some of Haiku's built-in apps.

'TV' is currently an app that is capable of capturing RF signals sent through a TV capture card. So while it isn't limited to analog TV content, it isn't particularly useful today with the advent of digital camcorders and high-definition equipment.

I can see this functionality being merged in a new app called MediaCapture, which does what it says: capture realtime audio and video from outside the system. We could port Easycap and other Digital Video drivers from the Unix world, plus support for any HDMI/Component capture cards that exist, and use them all in this one app. We could even combine SoundRecorder's functionality and, on top of this, have support for digital audio interfaces. There would be settings for sampling rates and bit depth accordingly.

Finally, an API could be produced so that if a third-party developer/company wants to make an app with this functionality, they could utilise the tools with minimum effort.
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It is debatable whether CDPlayer and MediaPlayer should be separate or not, but one thing I do have in mind in support for DVD movies being built-in to the system. I'm not sure what the situation is with regards to licensing, even though there is open-source decryption software available. In any case it makes sense for CDPlayer to be renamed 'DiscPlayer' so as not to be limited to the RedBook Audio standard.

As a set of C developers, Team Black Fox very much appreciates the work of Haiku, I (Black Fox, founder) use Magnussoft Zeta currently on my legacy x86 boxes. Haiku does intrigue me, BUT there are a number of things I'd like to suggest be made priority:

Multi-User support - Magnussoft Zeta's 1.51 release supports this - I think adding that as well as a root/baron user would vastly improve security and familiarity. In Haiku's current state, this aspect reminds me of DOS or AmigaOS, two OSes that do not support multi-user.

LLVM support - as a C developer I HIGHLY prefer to use Clang/LLVM as I find it handles errors better. I tried compiling it on Haiku R4 but because the main compiler is GCC 2.95 it refused to build. I could not find a way to use GCC 4, but that may be just me being stuck in UNIX land where you can change environment variables easily.

x64 support - I think after the x64 port is usable ( currently it kernel panics ), you should change the primary focus to that, but thats just my opinion as most users have legacy x86 boxes as secondary machines. In my case, I keep hardware till it fails catastrophically or I sell it, but I am not the norm, I suppose.

Anyways, love the work thus far. I hope to contribute some software, but I'm the only developer who shows interest outside of UNIX/Linux currently.

~Black Fox