[openbeos] Cosmoe is back

  • From: Bill Hayden <hayden@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2007 07:26:30 -0500

Well, I couldn't stay away. My lengthy hiatus away from working on Cosmoe is now over, and I am back in full force! For those of you not familiar with Cosmoe, it is a BeOS API (or Haiku API, if you will) environment running on Linux.


Over the last two months, I have rigorously improved Cosmoe 0.8 and also synced it up with the current svn version of Haiku. The result? Things are looking pretty good. Mind you, this is still (lo, these many years later) much more of a technology demonstration than a full-fledged GUI at this point, but I think Cosmoe has come a long way. To be clear, this is not a "fork" of Haiku in any way. I use quite a bit of Haiku code, but I don't intend to take it in new directions, only to wrap it for a Linux host. I hope to work more closely with the Haiku folks and foster a symbiotic relation with the Haiku project. Cosmoe uses the same license as Haiku.

Cosmoe currently runs in an SDL window under X until full graphics driver support can be achieved. Here is a current (cropped) screenshot:

http://www.haydentech.com/cosmoe.png

As you may notice by looking at the screenshot, text is not justified correctly, i.e., text which should be centered or right-justified is always drawn left-justified. This is one of the last few problems I hope to iron out before releasing 0.8. Oddly, the code for fonts, Painter and everything else text-y in between is AFAIK 100% synced with Haiku, yet Haiku doesn't appear to have this bug (that I know of). Hopefully some Haiku folks will weigh in on this point.

I hope to put out a source code archive in the next few days once it's suitably cleaned up for release. If you would like to test the current release and provide feedback before it goes out to a wider audience, please contact me off-list.

Thanks,
Bill Hayden


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