A CD with BeOS/Zeta-related information is in the planning stages as donationware. It offers information in different languages (German, English, Italian, French, etc.). The content includes BeOS programmer interviews, magazines, and further BeOS-related articles. Think interviews with developers, Technoids, the BeOS Bible, etc.
This could be interesting, depending on wether the BeOs Bible gets on.
I foresee financial trouble though.
Yeah, finances have never been a strong point of any Be-related project.
Except for Haiku, where the money collected has been put to excellent use.
I had tried to program some software for BeOS about five years ago, and found too little documentation on the API. All I ever seemed to find were articles about the nature and style of the system, and not the nitty-gritty details I was looking for (how a BMessage works, etc). Its about time that someone collected this information and translated it – so much German and French stuff I could never hope to understand. It may be late in the game (to say the least), but finally the community seems to be unifying its developmental progress (slowly but surely). BeUnited.org was nice, but so rarely updated that its not of much use lately – this is problematic of many BeOS sites (beFaqs comes to mind). I LOVE this platform, while it is old – it smokes on my 766Mhz Athlon and I use nothing else when it comes to audio playback and encoding (oggVorbis+BeOS rules).
Hmmmm… did you never look at the Be Newsletter archives? The Be Book is all you really need… along with the articles in the Be Newsletters; which I might add, includes a beginners tutorial. Also, the “Programming the Be Operating system” has been available for a while in PDF for free, though not 5 years.
I have the actual dead-tree version of “Programming the Be Operating system”, but I could use the PDF. Where could I get it from?
PDF downloads:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/beosprog/book/
http://haiku-os.org/downloads.php?id=5
Whoops – you beat me to it
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/beosprog/book/
Are useful but imcomplete.
I am writing a new sound driver for BeOS 5.0.3 and am running into problems that some files and headers are missing from the IDE/BeBook but looking a open source downloads it is clear Be developers have access to.
I saw the same problem with my Analog/Digital Scope program. Parallel.H is not in Be headers that come with the compiler and BJoystick() does not work exactly like the BeBook claims it does.
Anyone who has read the annoted BeBook at http://www.beunited.org/bebook/ can see there is a need for more information.
I was able to come across the Be Newsletters, which were some help (despite having to dig through about 100 articles to find what I needed).
Although, I think it would have been a great benefit to the community for the API to be indexed and organized similar to the way Sun laid out the Java API and framework at java.sun.com or even Microsoft’s MSDN (though less intuitive). Scrounging around for scant bits of specifications is a nightmare.
Woo, hoo. BeOS, Can’t wait to write software for that OS!
is good publicity, and BeOS needs all it can get.