So, ReactOS 0.20 was released very recently, the guys seem to make strides. NewOS had a new version too. Syllable is set for a new release, 0.4.1, in two weeks time, with lots of changes on the desktop part of the OS. Kurt Skauen, the AtheOS creator, is now presumed alive, he was just flying around! The MenuetOS web site has lots of new screenshots, they now have implemented skinning. SkyOS now has a sound API, based on OSS. FreeType 2.1.2 was released, and it is presumably much faster than before. A new IDE for Linux, named Anjuta, seems very interesting too, while mySQL, Lua and GnuCash had new versions too. On the downsides, we had Maarten Hekkelman quitting the Pepper business, while the guy who released ReBorn 1.0 just a week ago – a ReBirth clone, we were the first to report on it -, was instructed from Propellerhead Software to remove ReBorn from his site. Sad.
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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That’s a <explitive> shame about Pepper. I downloaded the windows version a couple weeks ago (last I knew it was MacOS only), and had procrastinated on registering it.
I’m just curious and wondering, not meaning to start anything… were people registering and passing out their registration codes? What sort of negative feedback was it getting?
From what I know, there were some people who were whining about open sourcing pepper for linux and bsd, while there were some mac users who were a bit unhappy from pepper version 4 vs 3.
I wish that Maarten reconsiders. Pepper is a really nice app.
anjuta was around since gnome1.4….
I meant that there is a version 1.0 now…
Well it’s good to hear from Kurt, I’m very happy for him. I worry some people never leave their computers. Also he has a really spiffy dare i say cute plane. I think his note says it all about the project and his views. I would be very disapointed to if i saw someone had taken off with something i started and do as they have. Though this is the way the GPL works, maybe he will relicence now. I wish more people had stuck to relizing it was his hobby not really somehting he was doing for others. Hopefully we will see it come back to life as it looks like it will. any rate wellcome back kurt!
Yeah, I read the news update on his site a while ago. It’s nice to hear from him. I’d love to be able to fly
Well he put it under the GNU GPL and decided to take a very long break. A lot of love AtheOS and wanted to see it go on. That’s why there is Syllable.
Does anyone still have the latest versions of Pepper (4.0.6) for FreeBSD/Linux (x86 and PPC) that they could send to me since he pulled them off of his site? It’s a real shame to see a great app like Pepper being put to sleep
Thanks
Also, Pepper does not run on Jaguar 10.2. It loads and after a bit of time, it crashes all by itself.
Last month I bought Gobe Productive, only to have them open source it this week. Earlier this week I bought a multi-platform license for Pepper, mainly for Linux, only to have Hekkelman not only stop development, but also take down the download for the Linux version hours after I lost the original when I reformatted to try the new Mandrake beta (I’ve got the registration code safely backed up, but never figured the actual program would be eliminated from his site).
I gotta tell you, I’ll think twice before I pay for anymore proprietary software.
Ok, I regard Maarten as a good online friend, but part of the bad sales (if that was the reason of quitting that is) is Maarten’s fault. Maarten did absolutely nothing to promote his product. I tried to help, I made a couple of articles and a competition on OSNews, but it takes more than that. I told him that he will have to upload his demos to download.com, freshmeat.net and 5-6 more other places, places that people go to download software. He did not listen. He only put it up on VersionTracker a year ago and that’s the whole deal of what he did to promote it. How did he expect people to learn about his software if he wouldn’t move his fingers a bit to just submit it to the online software repositories? He could also write to 2-3 more online publications asking for a review. These things help greatly to bring the word out. If Maarten thinks that everyone knows already of Pepper and hekkelman.com, well, he is severly mistaken.
And yes, I still like and respect Maarten. But just coding it and fixing the bugs is only half of the work needed to make a product successful. And what I suggested to do, would only take him 1 hour in a weekend.
Hi Eugenia!
And BlueEyedOS? You don’t saw?
Michael VinÃcius de Oliveira
BlueEyedOS webmaster
it’s a shame that the reborn source will never be released. it would have been cool with a BeOS port. however, why would anyone want to make an interface similar to ReBirth? why not make a good interface instead? computer UI’s can be a lot better and flexible than the one in ReBirth, cause that one is just an icky replica.
BTW, did Propellerhead have some kind of deal with Roland?
I agree with Eugenia on the whole Pepper deal. I probably wouldn’t have known about Pepper if I hadn’t been a BeOS junkie. By making your apps available on several large software websites you get a lot of good advertising for free with a minimal effort. Which makes me wonder why he didn’t bother? Unless he didn’t really want to sell Pepper that is. *sigh*
First of all, Pepper 4.0.6 does run on MacOS X.2 if you remove your preferences first.
That said, yes, sales were less than I had expected. Eugenia suggested posting Pepper on Freshmeat and some other Linux related sites but I decided against it. The reason is simple, I had a thousand downloads and two sales of the Linux version. A FreeBSD site maintainer contacted me about Pepper and then purchased it with a stolen creditcard. And I got a lot of flack for being so bold to try to sell software for Linux. That was enough to completely lose interest in Linux as a target platform.
MacOS X sucks. I really loved MacOS 9 and before and had hoped for some miraculous OS, the nice and intuitive GUI of MacOS combined with the power of Unix. What we got was a pile of shit. I won’t go into it deeply, but the design is crap and it will never become good from a technical point of view. Developing Pepper I spent most of the time working on that MacOS X port and I still got most of the complaints about this one. Then MacOS X.2 came and I had to start all over. Something broke in me, this was too much.
The Windows version is the one I use myself mostly since I found out that Win2k and WinXP aren’t that bad actually. In fact I consider those OS’s the true successors of MacOS, much more intuitive and user friendly and then fast and stable. I decided it was a good idea to have Pepper on Tucows and submitted it. Four weeks later I got a rejection, the nag screen prevented them from testing it (!!!). So I changed the nag scheme on Windows and resubmitted. Even asked for an InDepth review paying a USD150 hoping that would help. Not exactly, the reviewer was not able to launch Pepper on his machine claiming it crashed on his Win2k machine but ran fine on WinXP. He refused to review it until it ran on his Win2k box. Meanwhile another reviewer at Tucows _was_ able to run Pepper on his machine and rated it too low to be included.
The problem with an application like Pepper is that many people were following it but didn’t buy it yet since they thought that I should implement just this one more feature. Now I get mails telling me I shouldn’t have stopped since they certainly would have bought it.
The argument that I didn’t do enough to promote Pepper isn’t entirely true, Pepper is reviewed by many sites and several paper magazines. I could have done better though, that’s true. But I’m not a salesman and didn’t have money to hire one. I’ve been trying for ten years to build a business around shareware. There comes a time when you have to consider whether it makes sense to continue or do something else.
And it feels good to finally be able to say that MacOS sucks without being afraid to lose sales. 🙂
Maarten, thank you for your comment here. However, Pepper is not available on Download.com, which is the main Windows software repository. Forget Freshmeat, I know how Linux users are, but what about Download.com (and a few other Windows-related repositories)?
Sheesh, the propellerhead bozos make me ashamed of being swedish.
It seems that every time the topic of AtheOS or Syllable comes up, at least one person will comment that it was “unfair” for Syllable to have forked the AtheOS code.
“It was Kurts hobby” they’ll say, “His baby! Can’t you see that?” Then somebody will leap to the defence with a cry of “The code was under the GPL! Aha!”, which is true, but in itself is not a justification, admitedly.
So, I am going to try and explain exactly why I forked the code and created Syllable.
Let me first say that I respect Kurt. He is a brilliant coder; what he has done with AtheOS is an amazing feat. No one can ever take that acheivement away from him. Ever. If I was half a good as coder as Kurt, I’d be off making my millions
When Kurt was activly developing AtheOS, everyone respected his wishes. We didn’t try to hack on the source, we all stuck to hacking applications. A lot of us stuck to hacking applications, in fact, and this is the crux of the matter: AtheOS ceased to be “Kurts baby” the instant other people started to activly support it.
AtheOS was around long before OpenBeOS, remember. When AtheOS 0.3.7 was released, there were over 200 applications on Kamidake, and around 1000 people subscribed to the mailing list (At an estimate). Upto 40 people were actively developing code for AtheOS. That is a community in anyones book.
Now, when Kurt “disapeared” and development stalled, the heart of the community was ripped out. You can’t have a community without the core around which the community is built. It was sad to see a lot of people who had once been active members of that community bleed away to other projects. A lot of people who had invested a lot of their time in AtheOS started to see their efforts become meaningless. Worst of all, an Operating System with a massive amount of potential began to die.
I love AtheOS. To me, it has the potential to be the perfect Operating System. Really. But without active development, it just isn’t going to fulfil that promise.
So we had a dead OS, and a dying community. That sucked.
I spent a good month agonising over wether to fork or not. It wasn’t an easy decision. Being the project manager for Syllable is also a lot of work. I have a full time job, too, and I have to spend most of the rest of my spare time on Syllable. Even then, there isn’t always enough time. However, we now have an active and vibrant community again. A lot of work has been done between Syllable 0.4.0 and 0.4.1, and in a very short space of time. That, to me, indicates that there are a lot of other people in the community who wish to see Syllable succeed. So at least I’m not alone, here.
Kurt had every right to go off and do something other than develop AtheOS. At the same time, we as a community had every right to continue development ourselves. So please, do not trivialise the decision to fork AtheOS. It was not an easy decision, and it is not an easy job.
All the best to Kurt, and I hope that he continues to work on AtheOS when his enthusiasm returns.
Now, can we please lay this down to rest, please?
“Well it’s good to hear from Kurt… I think his note says it all about the project and his views. I would be very disapointed to if i saw someone had taken off with something i started and do as they have.”
Jeez, ya know, the guy doesn’t even own a PC anymore, so what can he possibly be pouting about.
And pipe down Vanders, nobody even mentioned you 😉
There are about five gazillion better developers than you saying how much better OS X is for development than OS 9 and before. Sounds like you have a real problem. I guess professionalism and Maarten Hekkelman don’t go well together.
Jared
Hey, it was implied in the original sentence. Not to matter the number of other comments, posts and email I have seen from various places which run along similiar lines. That was simply the straw that broke the proverbial camels back, as it were. So, yeah, I ranted. I feel better for it now, anyway
Reading Maarten Hekkelman’s comments were interesting. It makes me wonder if there is a place for commercial software in the GNU/Linux world.
Good luck Maarten.
So nobody has the BSD/Linux version of Pepper that they could e-mail to me?
Email Maarten. If you bought it, then he should be able to send it to you via email. I mean, come on, you bought it!
A picture of Syllable desktop is put up here( http://syllable.sourceforge.net/screenshots/latest/desktop_latest.p… ) for all of you to see. This version was probably the most time consuming one yet!!!
Nice clean look 🙂
But what does the “S*B*L” at the lower right stand for?
It is S*L*B, not SBL (with three Ls – but this background image is automatic rescaling from the 1024 version of the background image, making the 3 LLLs not render sharply – Rick?). It stands for “SyLLaBLe”.
Can I make a suggestion? That you do some research on the science of user interface design. There really is a science to it you know and it’s extremely important.
Kevin
How difficult/easy will it be to change the look of the Syllable Icons? I don’t like those KDE/WinXP-looking Icons. I’d rather use the Gnome Icons.
Thomas
Just a note to everyone. These borders, menus colors, colors, decorators, etc… are not the default ones
. They are for my computer. The defaults ones haven’t been chosen yet!!!
Kurt wrote:
Right now I don’t even have a PC to do any AtheOS development on as my main PC broke down a few months ago and I won’t get it fixed or buy a new until the expenses on my plane and license fall below the pain limit
As a gesture of gratitude for the creation of AtheOS, perhaps we could club together to provide Kurt with a new PC.
I hope that Kurt will rediscover his enthusiasm for the project, and that he and the Syllable project will find a way to work together.
How difficult/easy will it be to change the look of the Syllable Icons? I don’t like those KDE/WinXP-looking Icons. I’d rather use the Gnome Icons.
Right now; extremly difficult. In one or two versions time, very very easy
We’ll be adding an icon server, which will centralise the handling of icons for the entire system. You’ll be able to change your icons by selecting a new set from a list (Really!)
& yes, we havn’t chosen a set of default icons/colour schemes/window decorator yet. Theres very little point in doing it until we have the icon server done
“We’ll be adding an icon server, which will centralise the handling of icons for the entire system. You’ll be able to change your icons by selecting a new set from a list (Really!)”
Yay. Wow. Yippee-skippee. That’s much better than working on internet connectivity or other basics.
Look Vanders, you’re entering that phase where people of questionable motives are going to start requesting idiotic enhancements to sidetrack developement from things that are expedient and needful. That’s good in a way, because that means microsoft/linux lurkers have taken notice of your project and seek to subvert it because it’s been judged to be viable without owing anything to them, and they want it to owe something to them. That means you’re on the right track. But those of us that are hanging on your every announcement with trusting anticipation don’t care about Gnome or any other linux crap. Your correct response should have been to tell the baiter to go download some new skins for the OS he already has and pee off. I remember when DR released GEM under the GPL, as soon as it started evolving the programmers started getting requests for utterly worthless features like the ability to run windows screen savers.
Please, please don’t let your project be sidetracked with worthless stupidity. Please don’t waste your effort on icons and skins and wallpaper and screensavers and media players. The internet is the future AND the present too, basic connectivity is what people expect. That should be your priority, not “icon servers”. I am astonished.
And to whoever suggested buying Kurt a new PC as a reward for selfishly dissappearing without explanation and then snivelling when he discovered that the world went on without him instead of awaiting his second coming, go right ahead. I don’t buy gifts for rich people that have their own freakin’ aeroplanes and expect us mere humans to reverently wait for them until they return to earth from the heavens like gods. He put his stuff under GPL, and that’s the end of it. Nobody’s stopping him from continuing his project to his own tastes, nobody’s stopping him from continuing to play with it as his personal ‘hobby’. But he involved others, and some of them went on without him. For him to imply that they ruined his ‘motivation’ and are somehow responsible for his inability to pursue his own project was really weak. Sissy.
Nice troll bait.
Especially about Kurt’s plane.
You know airplane doesn’t really cost so much – it’s in the range of new BMW or Porshe. Buying a used and needed to repair will cost much less.
The suggestion to buy him a PC is a stupid one. If not insulting. Don’t you thnk he cannot fix his PC if he wanted to ? It’s all question of time which is in turn question of priorities. He is not in coding mood, get over it.
He wanted to prove himself that he can make a decent OS and he did. That goal was achieved, he moved on to next one – flying. I guess it’s nice to have no responsibilities.
Stange comment from Maarten – I believe he is good programmer but then BeOS was too damn complicated with it’s multithreading, MacOS OS X doesn’t fit too. And AFAIK in Linux he didn’t use Qt or any other window API, developing his own widgets. With this approach he may be in wrong business – developing applications for existing OSes, may be he should start his own OS.
Good luck to Syllable team – recreating development spirit is worth the actual release.
I wish Eugenia made a page with links to latest news articles sorted by OS.
Nice flamebait. Shame you’re wrong. You’ve forgotten that there is more than just one developer working on Syllable; I have patches from lots of people coming in at a good rate. We have a big enough developer base to be able to work on stuff like an icon server and the kernel, and the desktop and a port of Mozilla…etc. etc.
By the way an icon server is important. Once it is complete, it allows us to complete the GUI classes that use icons. As it happens, libatheos (The GUI library) is mature, and there is only a handful of high-level classes which we still have to implement. Once we’re done, we can declare libatheos stable and leave it alone. That means we have a stable binary interface to libatheos (Very important) and we can also concentrate on other things.
As it happens, there was an email anouncing a patch which adds raw socket support. This will allow us to support DHCP, which should be ready for Syllable 0.4.2. The patch still needs some work, aparently, and 0.4.1 is technically in a feature freeze.
You sound like you’re geniunly interested in Syllable; why not get involved? At the very least, read the mailing lists, read the Wiki page, keep abreast of developments. You’ll see exactly how busy we are, and you’ll also understand exactly what we’re doing here