Rocklyte Systems is a New Zealand-based software engineering company and creators of the Athene operating system and Pandora Engine. Athene is an object based operating system that is being developed for use in PC's and embedded systems. The user interface is completely rewriteable and is capable of emulating other interfaces such as the Windows and Amiga desktop environments (developing your own, custom desktop GUI is a matter of writting a script!). The Pandora Engine is an all-purpose object oriented SDK, aimed at assisting developers in all areas of the technology industry and it also the base of Athene. The engine is based on Modular Object Oriented technology, which allows you to create true object oriented programs using almost any language. Athene and Pandora are available for both Windows and Linux. Read more for an interview with Rocklyte's Paul Manias and two new screenshots, showing AtheneOS running under its newly released Windows version.
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Damn OSnews. If you keep having all these neat articles, I'll never find time to study.
There seems to be a very disproportionate amount of NZers developing languages and OSes these days 
The REBOL list is inundated with us so are the dev forums for lots of other 'fringe' (ie non linux, non windows) coding areas.
Personally I'd rather use REBOL/View over Athene any day - all those loverly little gui things like blurring, gradients etc are already there. Also Carl and Holger have mentioned on the Rebol mailing list that the next version of REBOL/View with Alpha blending and lots of other goodies is almost done
Heh.. sorry Rocklyte, I'm a GUI freak
The Solaris X-server can now support many graphics cards because it has an interface for XFree86 drivers. OSKit Mach can support many devices by using Linux 2.2 or FreeBSD drivers. Could a version of Athene for the Linux framebuffer, or a native Athene OS, get its hardware support this way?
Have any of you played around with this? Both the interface and the DML scripting system. How responsive is it? Is it interesting? Does it seem like a pretty interesting and complete API/package, or just like some weird markuplanguage visual basic?
I played with it, but not extensively. Why don't you download it and check it out yourself? It is only 1.1 MB and it is available for both linux and Windows with an easy setup mechanism for both platforms.
This sounds like a nice way to deliver applications to users from within a hardware and OS-neutral environment. Given that, it sounds like they are trying to do a lot of the things that Sun originally set out to do with their Java platform. Any thoughts on how Athene/Pandora's approach compares to Sun's -- in particular, how this system will avoid the pitfalls that seem to have marginalized Java into just server-side-scripting and toy applets?