Friday, March 20, 2009

Catch the logo

Today I wrote a small demo that uses the touchscreen to move around a bitmap window.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Anubis on ARM ?

Not exactly but a beginning of a technology that might be used in Anubis, especially on small devices. I talk about graphics subsystem which displays on the fbdev device in linux.

bbrv blog

:)


anubispngarm

A photo on the first try on displaying a Anubis logo on the ARM board , gives a good look of the board itself.

Anubis logo movieclip


A very low quality movie on three Anubis logos scrolling on the tiny lcd (you can only see white rectangles , but they are logos I promise :))

Saturday, March 07, 2009

My take on the "A#?" future

When I look back I see a computer platform that was superior to every other. It had amazing hardware and a fast multitasking operating system. It could have been the standard for personal computers. But it failed , not only because commodore was doing bad things , but mainly because of IBM. IBM was the main factor in computer development , and when it launched the idea of the "pc" not even Apple had a chance.

Anyway history moved on and after many turns we ended up with three "A" platforms plus emulators. We have the official AmigaOS , MorphOS and AROS.
I think that this actually is a good thing. It gives the users the possibility to pick whatever they like and gives the developers the opportunity focus on different areas. I think that the classic "A" platforms listed aboves still have a important role to fill together with emulators.

I for myself is a happy MorphOS user and I have no intention to leave that platform.

However as a developer I have decided to go in another direction.

I still believe that the "A" way of doing things is something that users want. But I also believe that the OS base is very outdated and suffers from several weaknesses. So I have decided to go with the Anubis project.

Anubis aims to be a "A" like system but with the Linux kernel as a foundation. I really don't want another Linux distribution , but a new OS. I hope that old "A" users will feel at home in the Anubis environment rather than Linux users. This is a requirement for me.


+++

New versions of SimpleMail for AROS

I will soon release a new version of SimpleMail for AROS , with various improvements.

* Use of the "new" SimpleMail listclass
* Enabled the quick search functionality
* Updated to the latest version
* PPC version now available , currently only on hosted , I still have problems with
native

* .. and .. more

screenies , first from x86 , the transparency comes from 3d effects in linux the other is from ppc/hosted showing SimpleMail and AMosaic.


smnew

arosinterppc

Not official

My posts here does not necessarily represent the official Anubis team, it is only my thoughts and experiments that may become a part of Anubis or not.

Tests with xcb

This is a old screenie showing my test windowmanager built with xcb and cairo/xcb.


anubis red and black

fbdev graphics subsystem

I have started to write a graphics subsystem for fbdev the linux kernel framebuffer.
So far I got:

* Bitmap abstraction
* Object oriented using ObjC
* Automatic expose handling
* Display server with client lib communicating over UNIX sockets
* PNG loading with libpng
* Font rendering with Freetype
* .. and some more stuff..
And of course a couple of screenies, stay tuned for videos showing animation and stuff :)

fttest

fbout