SkyOS Archive

"The SkyOS service collection has been extended with a web server service. Thanks to Gareth Owen (developer of ghttpd) and Cody Mays (ported ghttpd to SkyOS) you can use SkyOS as a web server now. The web server configuration is done with the common graphical service configuration plugin for the System Manager. Using Nvu and Firefox you have great tools available to develop and maintain websites from within SkyOS." A screenshot's here. This web server and the service plugin will be made available in an update package, available via the SkyOS Software store.

"This release features new core components like the integrated mouse gestures, new Font system and API, new applications (Pixel Image Editor, ...) and various driver/system updates as well as more than 200 fixed bugs reported in our bug tracking system." In addition, the SkyOS team has decided that the version numbers got too confusing. Therefore, SkyOS v5 will now simply be named SkyOS. I might even start missing the "SkyOS v5 Beta 8.4 Alpha 1 of the 3rd Beta Released" headlines. In any case, here's the changelog.

"This is a true gem for developers. SkyOS got a lot of under-the-hood work, the Integrated Streaming System and the networking stack have been reworked, the API has been standardised, missing libraries and functions have been added and a lot of bugs have been resolved. I think what we're seeing is a quasi-feature freeze. This actually serves its purpose, SkyOS is now much more stable, reliable and responsive than before."

Support for mouse gesture recognition has been implemented. By using the System Manager "Gesture" plugin you can add, remove and configure your own mouse gestures. Whenever SkyOS recognizes a conigured mouse gesture, the desired action is performed. You can select from many pre-configured actions like: maximize/minimize window, close application, launch application, etc. The entire gesture recognition is fully intergrated into SkyOS/SkyGI as a service application which can easily be enabled/disabled. The obligatory screenshot.

SkyOS Beta 8.5 has just been released. New features include the Indexing Service, an SQL based file attribute and content index service which makes it possible to find your files in a fraction of a second, better developer support, and a lot of bug fixes. NVU has also been ported and is available in this release. You can read the changelog here. Update: Screenshots gallery by OSDir.

There is a new video of the SkyOS IndexFeeder available on the SkyOS website, which consists of two parts that show how to perform queries for file meta data and file content using the viewer, and how the Open/Save dialog makes use of the IndexFeeder in order to find documents very quickly, regardless of where they are stored.

This is a new video available on the SkyOS homepage, showing off the new indexing service. This service (which continuously runs in the background) will examine all new or updated files on a SkyFS volume. For each file, the plugin-based Index Feeder will try to extract as much information as possible from the file. This information will then be attached to the file in the form of attributes, which makes it possible to quickly search for it by using the SkyFS Index and Live Queries. It should be noted that what is seen in the video is only the back-end controls for the indexing service; for the final release of SkyOS, the controls will be implemented system-wide within the SkyOS GUI.

In the next beta of SkyOS, users can look forward to seeing a completely re-designed Viewer. The new Viewer will take advantage of the powerful features of the SkyFS (derived from Haiku's BFS), including extremely fast searching and organizing of files, on-the-fly filtering of files and folders within the Viewer, fast insertion of meta-data into multiple files, and more. Update: Screenshots!

GI3D, the native SkyOS 2D/3D Hardware acceleration interface, has allowed for an much requested feature in SkyOS: screensavers. The entire screensaver framework is plugin-based, and even supports OpenGL screensavers. Additionally, GI3D brings to SkyOS translucent windows and full alpha blending.

Query support has been implemented into SkyOS. Queries can be initiated through either the Viewer, or directly through the command line.

Robert Szeleney has just released the long-awaited beta8.3 to the SkyOS beta team. This release includes major upgrades to the operating system as a whole; including important ports such as FireFox and ThunderBird.

While everybody was out partying and what not this New Years eve, Tech^salvager decided to sit down and write a review of SkyOS beta 8.2. Read the review here.

Follow the development of a native SkyOS application from the ground up in the first 5 chapters of Pig!. This tutorial is for both C++ beginners and experts, and illustrates a variety of design topics such as message dispatching, error handling via exceptions, and auto-destruct GUI widgets, all with source code examples. The Pig! application is based on the Humble Framework: a rapidly growing class library of C++ classes that is intended to help programmers get a 'head start' on creating native SkyOS applications; this framework is fully documented, open source, and currently contains over thirty unique classes, with more on the way.

"There are a lot of misconceptions and false sentiments surrounding SkyOS. And every time someone mentions SkyOS, these same old misconceptions bubble up. In this article, I will try to contradict them and explain why they are untrue." Read the rest here.