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With the reopened discussion today about several former Be engineers not being happy with Zeta, at least there are people out there who feel the total opposite. Choulth for one. Today, he put a nice photo on his Zetablog showing what he received by pre-ordering Zeta:

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yellowTab announced today the inauguration of their Developer's Corner.

As in the old Be, Inc. days, Dev's Corner aims to be a place to gather coding articles, where everyone interested can gain, by reading them, coding experience and expertise.

The first article is signed by Alan Westbrook, yT's CTO, and relates to Zeta's Locale Kit, so head over and enjoy the reading.

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An entirely new concept with a lot of potential is BeClan, based entirely on the way the BeOS community works in order to support and stimulate development for the BeOS platform.

The aim of BeClan is to form a clan indeed, a central website where developers can consult experienced BeOS developers, find people to help them with artwork or beta testing, and where there is an extensive collection of documentation, answers and freely available code snippets.

Especially since the concept is brand new, there is still a lot of work to be done. There is a great need for entirely different skills. You could think of web developers, documentation writers, contributors of code snippets, designers... the whole lot. Interested? Join the mailing list or at least pay a visit to the BeClan website!

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The BeOS Journal has interviewed former Be-engineer Dianne Hackborn, asking questions for the larger part submitted by users. You can read it here.

Dianne Hackborn among others talks about how she ended up working for Be, what she thinks about Zeta, and how her work for PalmSource is different from working at Be.

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"To be truly free in the 21st century, we have to ignore the flashy graphics and really get inside our computers"

Dylan Evans
Thursday November 6, 2003
The Guardian

Read the complete review here

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Just thought this was interesting; some day, but it's too early to say when, everyone will be able to just stick it when making a phone call, the UK Telegraph and others report. The largest Japanese mobile telecommunication company, NTT DoCoMo has developed Finger Whisper, a wrist-band device that uses the human body to make phone calls.

Finger Whisper converts sound waves into vibrations that are being transmitted through your hand bones into your ear. As bones transmit sound vibrations better than air, the quality is even expected to be better than with cell phones used these days.

Here, use my phone!
As the wrist band contains no dial buttons, the microphone supports voice recognition so you can dial a number out loud. But as if that weren't enough, the researchers are trying to also make sound being picked up by interpreting the moves of the muscles around the mouth, using ring-shaped detector electrodes on thumb, forefinger and middle finger that would be resting on one's cheek and upper lip. The final goal would be interpretation of brain waves, but the danger in that could be the other person to hear your innermost thoughts.

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The makers of BeOS MaX uploaded the updates for BeOS MaX v2.1 and MiniMaX v2.1 to v3 today.

The updates come as SoftwareValet packages and amount to 82 MB for the MaX edition (download) and 7 MB for MiniMaX (download).

NOTE: The posting of this article, along with updating it with a message that BeOS PE MaX is legal, has led to an entire thread of posts. My personal opinion is that MaX can well be considered legal. However, it seems like the opinions are quite divided over that. All in all, I think choulth put it nicely: "Most of us gave a shiatsu if it is illegal or not - we downloaded it because it was the easiest way to get an updated BeOS."

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Submitted by Koki, review by KiM.

JPBE.net posted a review by KiM on their website about the second edition of JPBE.net in Akihabara. I've tried making sense out of it using Babelfish but that didn't really work. Thanks to Koki, here is the English version. Hit read more!

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After more than 7 months since the last update, Marco Nelissen released a long awaited new version of SoundPlay. Quite some issues seem to have been resolved, not to forget that several new features have been added. Here's the list from the Soundplay page at BeBits:
  • New data-input architecture for better streaming and smoother playback from FAT filesystems
  • Fixed problems when using multiple LiveEncoders
  • LiveEncoder can now stream title-info to clients
  • Fixed scripting bug
  • Fixed recent-menu so it doesn't overlap its parent
  • Allow spaces in winamp skin path- and file-names
  • Fixed background color of deskbar-plugins
  • Fixed ADPCM decoder
SoundPlay 4.8 is downloadable as Intel Version and PowerPC Version.

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Every company releasing an operating system tends to make mistakes. MacOS 10.3, for instance, can make data completely disappear, for which there had been a patch available for quite some time, but Apple forgot to put in.

When the Zeta RC1 master was brought in for duplication, yellowTAB knew that there were some flaws in it. Because it would still be some time before RC1 was actually going to hit the customer's doormat because the CDs were still to be pressed and shipped out, they spent the time well in order to create Patch 1. IsComputerOn has had a sneak preview. Care to read more? (or read it in French or Japanese...)

NOTE: Eugenia of OSNews has the world premiere (read it here). I feel that both Eugenia and I shed some light on different aspects and that both are definitely worth a read.