Finally got some WalterCon 2005 images from user "mikesum32" who attended. For your viewing pleasure: http://haikunews.org/images/waltercon2005/. I merely unzipped the archive he emailed my way, so any and all freakiness displayed by the pictures are not our responsibility. :)

I found and cleaned up the WalterCon 2005 logo you see here, from one of the included images in the waltercon2005.zip archive.

Note the WalterCon logo. It rocks! Michael Phipps reports that the t-shirts were a big hit, and wants to thank both Chris Pallace (www.chrispallace.com) and Mugs 'N' More in Rochester for their ultra-fast turn around on the design and the printing.

Over at the official Haiku OS website they have brought online the Haiku Build Factory, originally developed by user "Sikosis", team leader of the Preferences Team. In addition to showing recent updates to the Haiku SVN Repository you can see the build log, download Jam Packages, and in the future (hopefully?) download Build Images for testing purposes.

Now on to some BeBits updates...

BeScreenCapture has received a flurry of updates recently, with versions 1.3.1, 1.3.2 and 1.3.4 being released in the space of just over a week. Most notable in spite of numerous bugfixes is the addition of a Deskbar icon for controlling recording functions, as well as allowing the clip color depth to be independent from the depth of the screen, so you can use most codecs (which usually only support 16 or 32 bit) with any screen configuration.

The main purpose of BeScreenCapture is to capture the content of your screen and save it to a "movie", using any movie format supported by the OS. It uses BDirectWindow for minimum CPU-usage.

What BeBits roundup would be complete without mention of at least one fun hack-n-slash game? Linley's Dungeon Crawl is a free and portable roguelike molded in the tradition of the early greats of the genre: Rogue, Hack, and Moria.

The player guides a single character deep into a subterranean complex to retrieve the Orb of Zot, fending off many horrible and hideous creatures along the way. Once retrieved, the player must return both character and Orb safely to the surface world. This port is built from the current 4.0.0 Beta source tree (via FTP).

The same developer who ported Crawl also took the time to port ULarn, a dungeon type adventure game similar in concept to HACK, ROGUE or MORIA, but with a different feel and winning criteria, recommended for beginners new to rogue-like games. Both games are ports so any and all bug reports should be mentioned for reference purposes in the talkback sections at each BeBit page, if required.

Remember is a very simple but potentially powerful application that uses Tracker for its frontend, letting you create future Events that you want to be reminded of. Need to remember something later? Simply navigate to the "Events" folder linked on your desktop (or go to the folder manually). There you can right click and select "New" -> "Event". Then you can edit the "When", "Where" and "What" attributes. Tracker allows you to enter relative dates/times like "30min" or "tomorrow 20:00". When the specified time of an event passes, an alert is displayed. You can then choose to keep (Enter / Escape) or delete (Delete) the event.

Several developers enviously expressed their jealousy in the Talkback comments at having their idea so scooped from under them. :) All kidding aside, and as one commenter pointed out, perhaps it would be groovy if all interested developers spent a little time together on further fleshing out the idea.

FloppyCopy is an application that, you guessed it, allows one to copy to/from a Floppy Disk in a manner of ways. One can make an image or write from an image to a floppy. Some people have reported having trouble mounting and using floppy disks with the BeOS, so an application that caters specifically to floppy operations might be warranted. One can also browse the Haiku SVN Repository and help make Haiku's floppy driver even better, if desired.

Michael Pfeiffer has added a slew of improvements to BePDF recently, in additon to a few bugfixes to boot. The most significant improvements are in my opinion adding support for file attachments, and upgrading to the new FreeType 2.1.10 font rendering library. Michael includes a note to modem users:



Mozilla Thunderbird has been updated to 1.0.2-1 (20050323) (from March 23rd, 2005) which sounds old, but in reality is only 3 minor releases behind the official 1.0.6 that is out now. Please be aware that this is the work of "Netvampire", another developer who also ported the source from Mozilla for BeOS BONE or Zeta users. In July Elliot Rosenberger decided to halt his porting efforts, and we have been in somewhat of a void ever since.

As always, we encourage anyone who tries out new software to please report any and all bugs or issues by posting on the Talkback pages, in addition to emailing the author. Without your kind support, willingness to test, and patience, our fine developers would have a much harder time at tracking down those pesky bugs.