FOX is a C++ based Toolkit for developing GUIs easily and effectively. It offers a wide, and growing, collection of Controls, and provides state of the art facilities such as drag and drop, selection, as well as OpenGL widgets for 3D graphical manipulation. FOX also implements icons, images, and user-convenience features such as status line help, and tooltips. Tooltips may even be used for 3D objects. FOX stands for Free Objects for X. It was first developed under Linux, but it has now been ported to many flavors of UNIX, plus WindowsNT/2k/XP/9x/ME. After 4 years of development, Jeroen van der Zijp released FOX Toolkit 1.0 just a few days ago. FOX Toolkit is the third big cross-platform open source C++ toolkit, after wxWindows and Qt. In related news, Imperial Software Technology announced that it is now shipping X-Designer 7: Enterprise Edition, a major new version of its GUI builder for Motif, Windows and Java.

"Mac OS X gave us a host of interface enhancements, for better or for worse. Some are seemingly frivolous, such as the whiz-bang animations that dominate Aqua, and others haven proven truly useful, such as the Finder’s column view. Personally, I dig it all." The article at O'ReillyNet discusses the main Aqua enhancements, animated window resizing and the drawers.

David Chester has hacked through the Xft library and he achieved an incredibly good quality on antialias rendering under XFree86. With this "hack", at last, XFree can deliver similar aesthetic results with the MacOSX or Windows rendering engines. Check the two screenshots "before" and "after" at his page.

February was a month of rapid growth for Lycoris. Its flagship product, Desktop/LX, has been selling well and attracting worldwide partners. In addition to favorable reviews in the Linux world and surrounding tech community, Lycoris is responding to users' needs by providing Hewlett Packard PCs Pre-Loaded with Desktop/LX. OSNews will be featuring a Lycoris review in the near future.

"Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications today unveiled the P800, the company's first multimedia communicator sporting tri-band GSM/GPRS and integrated Bluetooth, a 208 x 320 pixel resolution color touch-screen, and a built-in digital camera. Running Symbian OS 7.0, the P800 is the most advanced GSM-based communicator in the world to date, and bears the potential to give Nokia's 7650 some serious competition - although the smartphones don't really compete in the same class." Read the rest of the report at InfoSync.

IBM developerWorks has come out with three articles on OpenSSH, a free version of the SSH protocol suite for network connectivity. The first discusses RSA/DSA authentication, the second introduces ssh-agent and keychain, while the last goes over Agent forwarding and keychain improvements. Its a great resource for someone who needs some encryption.

"Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that the software giant would have to withdraw the Windows operating system from the market if a federal court approves sanctions being sought by nine states in its antitrust case, according to depositions released Monday." Read the rest of the report at News.com. Our Take: A non-development or withdraw of Windows and its support can hurt an immense number of companies, which can have a huge impact to the economy in many countries. I still can't get it. They are fighting Microsoft for the browser case, instead for its dirty business practices. It's comically tragic.

ClosedBSD is a firewall and network address translation utility which boots off of a single floppy disk, and requires no hard drive. ClosedBSD is based off of the FreeBSD kernel, and uses ipfw as it's native ruleset management system, and natd as it's network address translation utility. ClosedBSD also features an advanced ncurses based configuration manager (screenshots) which allows you to seamlessly configure your firewall ruleset using protocol filters, port forwarding, and network address translation mechanisms through a simple to use menu interface. DHCP is disabled for this beta release.

Carson Reynolds writes: "One of the more memorable architectures and operating systems of recent history were the Symbolics Lisp Machine and Genera Operating System. The systems featured such interesting novelties as 36-bit wide processors, hardware support for LISP interpreters, and open source (circa 1986). Those still pining might consider trying to get their own Symbolics system."

"When Mary gets home from work and goes to her PC to check e-mail, the PC isn't just sitting there. It's working for a biotech company, matching gene sequences to a library of protein molecules. Its DSL connection is busy downloading a block of radio telescope data to be analyzed later. Its disk contains, in addition to Mary's own files, encrypted fragments of thousands of other files. Occasionally one of these fragments is read and transmitted; it's part of a movie that someone is watching in Helsinki. Then Mary moves the mouse, and this activity abruptly stops. Now the PC and its network connection are all hers." Read more about an operating system spanning the Internet that would bring the power of millions of the world's Internet-connected PCs to everyone's fingertips.

Microsoft Corp. today announced that the BMW 7 Series, the line of cars introduced last month in the United States, features Microsoft’s real-time embedded operating system, Windows CE. This announcement comes shortly after Microsoft’s Automotive Business Unit launched Windows CE for Automotive v3.5, the newest version of its telematics software platform based on Windows CE, and announced an end-to-end solution to enable the auto industry to cost-effectively implement and maintain advanced automotive telematics. Siemens VDO Automotive AG, the preferred navigation supplier of BMW, is using the Microsoft Windows CE operating system in the Control Display, which is part of the innovative BMW iDrive concept.

WinTasks 4 Pro is a Windows adminstation utility developed by LIUtilities in Sweden. It runs on all major flavors of Windows, however, it is mostly recommended for use on NT/2000 and XP systems. WinTasks is able to list the processes (tasks) on your running system and allows you to manipulate them according to your needs.

"The rift between IBM and Microsoft over Web services widened further over the weekend when Web services evangelists from each company clashed over the relative merits of .Net and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) for building applications that can talk to each other over the Internet." Read the rest of the story at ZDNews.

"Even computer programmers can sometimes let their emotions get the better of them. 'If I made a great product, and Microsoft offered me a lot of money, I would spit in their faces,' says Brett Slatkin, a student at Columbia University in New York. His colleagues roll their eyes and accuse him of being stuck at the 'hippy stage.' But when talk turns to the serious business of programming, they are of one pragmatic mind." Read the rest of the story at MCNBC.