Beyond a handful of bug fixes and general usability improvements (like keyboard shortcut displays)… there is a new Desktop Accessory (which are like little applications that can run at the same time as other little applications on those systems)… that can control audio playback of a connected AppleCD drive.
That’s right. A graphical audio CD player. For an Apple II.
While there is some significant and excellent work being done, the team calls out a great deal of work ahead of them:
“Beyond upstreaming what already exists there are many additional things we want or need to work on to make the mobile experience really awesome, including:
Calls on the lock screen (i.e. an API for apps to draw over the lock screen)
Emergency calls
Haptic feedback
PIN Unlock
Adapt terminal keyboard layout for mobile, more custom keyboard layouts e.g. for URLs
Notifications revamp, including grouping and better actions
Flashlight quick settings toggle
Workspace reordering in the overview”
And that’s the good news.
Now. For the bad news: You won’t be able to get this running on actual hardware any time soon:
“The main question we’re being asked by everyone is “What device do I have to get to start using this?”, which at this stage is especially important for development. Unfortunately there’s not a great answer to this right now.
So far we used a Pinephone Pro sponsored by the GNOME Foundation to allow for testing, but unfortunately it’s nowhere near ready in terms of hardware enablement and it’s unclear when it will be.
The original Pinephone is much further along in hardware enablement, but the hardware is too weak to be realistically usable. The Librem 5 is probably the best option in both hardware support and performance, but it still takes a long time to ship. There are a number of Android phones that sort of work, but there unfortunately isn’t one that’s fully mainlined, performant enough, and easy to buy.”
Oh well. Still good to see progress with GNOME Shell Mobile. Even if it’s not really usable yet.
uses Quake SW renderer + blitting to WatchKit surface (~60 fps, 640x480, larger res can run on lower framerate, tested up until 1024x768)
touch + gyro + digital crown controls
new AVFoundation audio backend (quake to Watchkit audio buffer copy logic), as Watchkit does not support CoreAudio
high pass audio filter to remove clicking on Watch speaker for some of the low frequency quake .wav samples
some smaller modifications and code updates to glue Quake 1 c code to Objective C and Watchkit
The developer notes that you cannot get this on the Apple App Store. Because, presumably, it’s way too cool for Apple to allow on the App Store (they’d previously banned iDOSBox — a DOS PC emulator because, I assume, it was too fun and provided too much happiness).
In this month’s Haiku activity report, there were a number of bug fixed and tweaks documented. The biggest noticeable improvement to Haiku OS, this month, being significant improvements to HiDPI display support and scaling across the system.
The truly big news, however, was buried at the bottom of the update. It appears the Haiku team is eyeballing an official “Beta 4” release very, very soon:
“Are we beta4 yet?
The only remaining true “blocker” issue is one more WPA-connection-related one which I will likely fix this month (if I can manage to reproduce it.) There is also another blocker related to performance problems on 11th-generation Intel CPUs, but nobody has replied to korli’s request for testing in some time here, so that may be kicked down the road due to a lack of testers. Otherwise, there does not seem to be anything else remaining.
So, likely at the end of this month or the beginning of next, I will begin the beta4 release process. If you know of any other critical regressions from previous releases or other problems that deserve to be fixed before the beta, speak now…”
Someone created an OpenStreetMap client for AmigaOS. And it actually looks pretty sweet. (Ok. In all fairness this is not new. But it’s new to me — and it is so incredibly cool that I simply had to share.)
MUIMapparium supports multiple Amiga (and Amiga-like) systems. Including builds for MorphOS and AROS.
