“So… I have finally gotten around to finishing the Haiku tutorial I set out to complete over a year ago. I was hoping to have it done sooner, but I decided to then prolong graduation for another year. However, my thesis project has been a rocking success, and you can finally see the fruits of my labors. This production should be incorporated into the project as official tutorial material.” Okay so yeah it’s a tad bit cheesy, but heck, it’s BeOS, so shut up.
Now that is cool! HaikuOS is awesome.
I for one think what Matt did is pretty cool. He took initiative, learned a lot about Haiku, and produced a cool tutorial. Good job!
Haha I got some weird 80s info video wibe from that.
Anyway… the OS itself is more impressive than the actual user interface which just look plain old and boring but still is the thing they seem to promote the most.
Edited 2011-12-08 00:10 UTC
Hey, if “plain old and boring” means “fast, lightweight and simple,” then I’ll take that any day. “Modern” these days seems to be equivalent to “bloated, excessively flashy, slow, heavily processing (both CPU and GPU) intensive, and needless distracting effects.” I’ll take the Windows Classic interface any day over the one introduced with Vista, and later changed with Windows 7. Similarly, GNOME 2 over GNOME 3 and Xfce above all desktop environments for UNIX-like operating systems.
Tabbed windows are neither old nor boring they are quite handy for linking windows together at will!
Its a good window mangagment method IMO and could work out really well although a tooltip to remind the user of what the join window command is mind be useful. I don’t think it has that.
its copyright is 2012
Yes, Matt lives in some alternate universe it seems where it is already 2012!
That said, think he did that since it’s so close to 2012 and he figured that date would be fine.
Glad to see my work getting some recognition on OSnews.
Yeah I will have to say, it might be a bit campy… but the whole point of this project is to whet nerds’ appetites and get them to explore more. It may not have been perfect, but I worked with what I had and I really liked it.
I respect the courage you display posting such a video on the internet, and the content is fairly interesting.
If I may offer some of my impressions/constructive criticism being part of the “nerd” target audience:
1) I almost reflexively closed the video after encountering the verbal and body language presentation style. (example: “I dare ya!”) I’m not quite sure how to classify it, campy/weatherman/shooter mcgavin? I don’t know.
2) The music transitions between scenes bring memories of my previous employer’s corporate policy/sexual harrassment training videos.
HAHA… nice. Well for this production, I was limited in my selection of music since I wanted to avoid anything that was copyrighted. I found Kevin MacLeod’s work to be sufficient for the task.
http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/
Sure… it’s not the highest quality in the world, but I love being able to use this without going through crazy red tape.
Moral of the story? Just be glad it isn’t Rebecca Black.
Also… I do tend to talk with the hands a bit, and yes the presentation style is a bit energetic to say the least.
Edited 2011-12-08 01:58 UTC
I like the intro song. Really nice sound on that lead synth.
Well… I guess they must have different nerds in different parts of this world. Our nerd group dislikes all video tours with a passion. Its the old ” if we can’t figure out stuff by ourselves, its crap” school. Give us hard facts, searchable, copyable and indexable. Podcasts are just as bad.
I’ve got Haiku rc3 isntalled on a PC sitting right in front of me. I’m an AROS, MorphOS, and Amiga developer however. What could you put into a tutorial that could convince me to broaden my horizons?
About the only thing that Haiku has that AROS doesn’t have is SMP. About all that AROS has that Haiku doesn’t have is a modest bunch of old Amiga software ported to it.
Maybe you could try summarizing some of the stuff in the BeBook for me. I’ve skimmed it and it’s nice and clean and object-oriented. Yet I’ve never gotten into the PE program enough to successfully make a program.
You may use these guidelines as hints in case you wish to make another tutorial.
Pe is really just a programmer’s text editor – if you’re looking for something more substantial that creates a template project – you might try Paladin.
Those are some great suggestions and I’ll put them under advisement for a future revision. Perhaps I might make a separate video geared towards developers eventually, time permitting.
Here’s a nice overview of what Haiku has to offer from a programmer’s perspective:
http://www.osnews.com/story/24945/A_Programmer_s_Introduction_to_th…
Thanks for the article link! It seems to be something I’ve been looking for!
Loved the shirt. But since you are making this for the public could you consider doing it in a nicer pair of pants.
Believe or not there are tons of people who complain about all the problems they have with their OS but will refuse to switch just because of the ragged/faded pants you are wearing.
On second thought, maybe keep the pants – I am not sure people who base their OS on your clothing is worth chasing.
great work Matt
I too cringed at the market-speak and musak.
But at least i got to see the new TileStackDecorator thingy in action
(something every wm should have imo!)
What did you expect? This isn’t a commercially paid and sponsored gig. This is a grassroots effort to try and get Haiku some of the attention it deserves.
Incidentally, the Stack & Tile interface is quite remarkable and well integrated. I’m glad Haiku finally supports it.
Edited 2011-12-08 03:46 UTC
What kind of ship are we running here requiring Flash or H.264?
Well, that would be Vimeo being Vimeo.
After Chrome has dropped H.264, they will not even offer support for the majority of web browsers by using that video format. But re-encoding is oh-so costly for a website which can afford to distribute billions of high-quality videos per day at no cost, right ?
Edited 2011-12-08 07:12 UTC
Agreed, why not put it up on Youtube were it will be available as webm. It’s not as if Haiku will ever get offical flash support.
Apart from that I thought it was a fun/campy introduction to Haiku with no pretense of being objective.
WebP is supported on the OS level, WebM isn’t done yet.
Webpositive needs to use the WebP translator though.. /me takes notes.
Yes I know webm isn’t supported by Webpositive, but quite certain it is what will be supported natively (if it ever gets video support that is).
Anyway, HTML5 and webm support would make Haiku much closer to a first-rate citizen on the web. Also personally I don’t believe we’ll ever see lots of native productivity applications on Haiku (sure hope I’m wrong though) so if we can tap in to web versions of such software it will make Haiku alot more viable for day-to-day use.
Chuck Testa!!!
(that made me giggle… reddit fans know what I’m talking about)
Thought you’d get a kick out of that. :p
Matt, great job on the tutorial! I’m glad to see that you got the final edits done and got it released to the public.
So what Haiku has to offer is:
– My computer, My Documents and Recycle Bin on the Desktop. But not just as nice looking icons, NOO sir, they are scalable vectors…..and look horribly teared
– A taskbar with a systray that you can put in different locations
– A menu structure that requires lots of scrolling clicking
– Windows with tiny titlebars that make dragging them hard, but docking them easy (this was the only cool thing in the video)
– You can start and stop a task and see how many resources it uses
– It has cool applications….like a really basic browser, a really basic email program, a really basic paint, spinning teapot, another 3D demo that didn’t really seem to do anything and a mediaplayer that seemed to play really choppy (might have been the capturing, encoding or vimeo)
and it has an installer that makes you do partitioning yourself and then just copies files and changes the MBR
It all just looked like 15 years back in time, but with support for multiple cpu’s (but hardly any real hardware) but not multiple users. Multi-tasking, but no security and no applications.
Who would actually benefit from this OS even if it was done today? Just people that liked BeOS back in the day ?
Well, in general you are right.
But some enthusiasts (like myself) not only judge by features, but also by the feeling this OS gives. Of course it looks somewhat dated, lacks many useful applications, is still aplha etc. But nonetheless, it is fun to use! And stack&tile is a great addition
On my netbook (Acer one a110) it boots and operates really fast. And now that WPA2 is supported, I can use wifi as well. It is nice to play around and brings back the fun in computing; you are in control. But it is nowhere near as useful as Windows/OSX/Ubuntu.
Nice video btw.
So you are running it on actual hardware, not just in a virtual machine. Could you describe which hardware works and which doesn’t? I am most interested in Video, Audio, Wifi and USB, but of course LAN and SD-cards working would be nice as well.
And thanks for confirming that this is a “it makes me feel good” OS. I have used BeOS in the past but never got around to doing anything more than putting pictures and videos in the “flipbook”, watching many spinning teapots, wondering how I could get my sound to work…..and then rebooting into Windows to actually get work done, play games and browse the internet and read my email (analog modem, but still)
I wonder where do you get this idea from (yeah sadly all the videos you see on the net are captured from a host os and vm), just come over at the annual gatherings and you’ll see 80% of the people running it on real hardware. I’ve been using it without much problems on bare metal for 3 years. It’s even one of the main purposes of this OS, to get most out of your hardware, having everything as fluid and snappy as possible.
You know, it’s a usable open source OS. That by itself is a great achievement. It isn’t perfect, but some people already have everything they need with it today. Others see great potential in it. Some just enjoy hacking on an ambitious yet focused project with a very open and friendly team.
What matters is the direction the project is taking and that it can live long enough to get there
I believe both points are covered.
I get the idea about lots of unsupported hardware from news items on OS News where it is mentioned that “Haiku now supports USB”, “Haiku now supports Wifi (unsecured only”, “Haiku now supports WPA2”, “Haiku now supports printing”. I also base it on all those demo’s in virtuals, even in this video. And I base it on the extremely limited list of compatible hardware on a couple of the searches that I did: http://haikuware.com/hardware/ and https://www.haiku-os.org/documents/hardware. And OF COURSE there will be a lot of people that are actually coming to Haiku meetings that are running on real hardware.
And I asked “Who would actually benefit from this OS even if it was done today?”
Your answer basically says “it is good enough for some already, it will probably get better and it is a great achievement”. That doesn’t answer my question “who would benefit?”
(and I personally wouldn’t call an OS without multi-user and security “usable”)
I’m not saying it runs everywhere like Linux based OS’s, just saying that hardware support is much better than one would think by looking around like you did. USB is here since ages, the rest, although nice additions, isn’t vital for my use case, though you must admit having well supported wifi support under linux distros is pretty recent too. Make your own opinion, the hw compat lists you cite are either not really maintained or explicitly non extensive.
I’m sorry, i believe i answered the best i could to your (rhetoric) question, by saying “I” benefit from it and i know personally other people that do too, all for different reasons i tried to summarize. Anything else on my part would be pure speculation. Other people “benefiting” from it please speak up!
The project doesn’t try to define a “benefiting target”, the only reliable target is the guys using it and developing it at the same time. They are making things nice for themselves and sharing to people alike, not trying to “take over the world” or reach some hypothetical market or people.
Just tried it, and still not impressed:
– VERY first impression was positive. quick boot and video, sound and wifi were recognised. Mounting an NTFS-disk as read-only worked nicely.
– Then things went sour. I started the teapot demo, got somewhere between 400 and 600 fps. Adding a teapot slowed it down to 200, expanding the window to 1024*768 and having 4 teapots made it slow down to 20. A mouse-over the teapot aread makes it slow down to 5 fps…and then crashes the app. It couldn’t even be closed with the taskmanager only a restart killed it
– None of the other demo’s were impressive and the chart-autodemo just opened a huge black window
– Opening a picture folder with images and double-clicking an image opens a pictureviewer (nice). But going to the previous and next image scrolls to that file in the file-manager which really slows down the pictureviewer when the file-manager has to scroll
– I couldn’t get the docking to work, I guess that is not finished yet and requires some configuring
– Connecting to a WIFI with WPA didn’t work and according to the releasenotes it isn’t supposed to work
– Connecting to a WIFI without any security also didn’t work, effectively keeping me off the internet
– Sound ….. never heard anything even when playing an mp3
total testing time: about 60 minutes
conclusion: more hardware support than I thought, but supported hardware is not really supported (wifi, sound), the most famous demo is buggy, and I don’t recognise any of the old BeOS “superior multi-threading” support and super-responsiveness. Quite the opposite actually, it seemed that 1 task (filemanager) had a huge influence on another task (pictureviewer)
Test done on a Dell Latitude with an i7-2760 2.4Ghz (8 cores) and 8GB and both an Intel HD video card and a NVIDIA NVS 4200M
I like the effort that people put into some new ideas, but I also mostly agree with some previous criticism: After this video, Haiku got less interesting, not more.
After all this time, it still seems very basic and not much more usable than BeOS back in the days. Yes, you can play around and send emails, but thats it.
I don’t quite get why people insist on building or working on a new OS when the most important feature they consider are scalable icons and tabbed windows. Just take your favorite Linux WM and hack away…people might actually start using your software..
You don’t need to run away and build a complete OS with Apps just because you don’t like the FHS. The only reason to work on this OS is to increase your knowledge without the pressure of getting criticized on LKML, or to understand parts that are too complicated in practically deployed solutions, or just because you want to build your own OS.
In any case, looking for users to migrate to that systems seems completely misguided. Any mobile phone OS is more capable than Haiku today. Sorry. 🙂
Hate to bust your bubble, but Haiku is still in alpha state. Obviously there are many OSes more capable than Haiku at this point… because they are more or less finished. Still… no need to needlessly rag on an OS still in early development. What it is able to do now is quite good as it is.
Holy hell, you can even browse the internet, downloading this OS now, it’s a no-brainer!
Your sarcasm is pitiful.