For the uninitiated, here’s the quick 1,000 foot view:

openSUSE Build Service - Take your Linux application.  Put it on their server.  Have their server farm create packages for you for Suse, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc… and it will even provide a repository and download locations for you (so your users can download directly from their servers).  Thus saving countless hours of manually (or semi-manually) building packages for each distro yourself… and saving money on bandwidth.

Suse Studio - A (gorgeous) website that allows you to build your own “appliance”.  Essentially this is a web-based Linux Distro builder.  Add and remove packages.  Change out logos and artwork.  Generate VMWare images, ISO’s, etc.  And there’s even a feature that allows you to test out your pending changes to your new custom distro… right from the website (without downloading a thing).  Awesome.

And today those crazy kids have stepped it up even further with the unveiling of Suse Gallery, which catalogs and showcases the distros/appliances people build with Suse Studio.

Think the possibilities through for a moment.

Let’s say you are a software developer.  You’ve just made an awesome application for Linux.

Now you can set up the openSuse Build Service to build and create the repositories for you.  Then you can go in to Suse Studio and build a custom Linux distro that is focused on showcasing your application (a good way for people to take a big application for a spin).  You can then point people to Suse Gallery to download that full distro to try it out… all from the Suse servers.  And it’s all free.

To go along with the launch of Suse Gallery, they have created “The Disters” awards.

The idea is simple.  $10,000 goes to the most innovative distro/appliance built with Suse Studio (and published to Suse Gallery).  There are two categories: “Open Source” and “Commercial”.  Check here for more details.

All in all this is some of the coolest stuff going on right now.  These projects offer an awesome amount of power for software developers, distro makers, IT guys, power users, etc… and all for free.  Hats off to the team working on these projects.  Incredible job.

If you want the latest episode every weekday, check out this page.

At the time, this open source re-implementation of BeOS, held a great deal of promise: It was fast, visually clean and surprisingly full featured for an “Alpha 1″ release of any operating system (certainly more polished than early alpha/beta releases of Windows or MacOS X tend to be).

Sure, the catalog of applications available for Haiku was small (roughly the same as the applications available for BeOS, as one of Haiku’s goal is to be both binary and source compatible with BeOS… which means most BeOS application should run properly out of the box) — but usability, performance and system features (such as the ability to easily set the priority of any threads within any running application with just a few mouse clicks) made Haiku  (even at Alpha 1) an incredibly enticing choice as a desktop OS… and even more enticing as a way to power Netbooks.

With one glaring problem: No WiFi.

Nearly a year later, we finally get our grubby little hands on Alpha 2… And what are we greeted with?  Oh yes.  Haiku now has Wireless networking support.

It may not be fully featured at this point (it has no WPA support for wireless networks), but the existence of this feature makes Haiku a viable way to power your laptops and netbooks.

Of course, the first thing I did was try to boot Haiku on my Asus Eee 900.  And… it didn’t fully boot.  This was, to say the least, disappointing.

After talking with other Haiku users, and asking around on the Haiku Forum, I came to the conclusion that my particular model wasn’t going to work currently.  A bummer, but I can get over that.  (Though I did come away with the general feeling that the Haiku user community was quite helpful and welcoming.)

And, luckily, I had a few other machines I could test out Haiku with (including my trusty HP Mini 1000 netbook, which ran Haiku splendidly), in addition to running Haiku in VMWare (which works wonderfully, there are even ready to go official VMWare images to allow you to take Haiku for a risk-free trial run).

Once I was up and running with Haiku Alpha 2 I immediately noticed something: Not much had changed.

At least not much that was immediately apparent.  If you take a look at the release notes for Alpha 2, you’ll notice that it isn’t filled with many wiz-bang features — but many smaller items that add up to a substantial improvement over the first release.

Items such as USB mass storage performance, fixes for UDF support and improved localization support complement the countless number of bug fixes that accompany this release.

One of the few distinctly noticeable additions is a brand new WebKit based web browser called WebPositive — which I found to be fast, stable and plenty full featured for the majority of web browsing needs.  With two big exceptions: No Flash and no full HTML5 support.

This, of course, makes watching video online a bit of a problem.  But, aside from that (and, hopefully, HTML5 support will appear sooner than later), the web surfing experience in Haiku with WebPositive is excellent.

So Haiku is fast.  Stable.  Nerdy.  Fun to use.  Visually pleasant.  Virus free.

But where does that leave us?  Is it a system that I would use in place of Linux, Windows or MacOS X?

For a general web browsing, email, word processing, retro-gaming (some great emulators are available) machine… yes.  Absolutely.

For a cool system to tinker around, and be generally nerdy, with… without hesitation.

At this point there are only three issues that need to be resolved before Haiku can be easily recommended to anyone for a working machine:

1) Either full HTML5 or Adobe Flash need to be available within the default web browser.

2) Continued improvement of general hardware compatibility and WiFi support.

3) More third party software.

It’s a tall order, to be sure.  But one that I believe the Haiku team can accomplish.  (In fact, I’m so confident in that, I’ve already announced that the next version of Illumination Software Creator will build Haiku applications.)

For me, Haiku isn’t posed to replace Linux on my desktop any time soon.  But on a netbook or a secondary machine?  Absolutely.

This review?  Written and posted in Haiku.

This Friday we’ll be taking your calls on the weeks topics (or any topic you wish so long as it’s interesting!) at 7am Pacific Time over at http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/live.  And, of course, you can tune in at that very same location, at that very same hour, every weekday for that day’s live show.

Yes, my name is in the title.  And, yes, that was my idea.  What can I say?  I like my name!  (Besides… my ego is ginormous.)

In this first episode, I give a quick little intro to the show and talk about the recent UFO sightings in China… along with some obviously man-made (but very cool looking) crop formations.

The show is live, Monday through Friday, at 7am Pacific Time (That’s 10am Eastern, 2pm GMT).  You can watch it (and hang out in the chat room) over at http://jupiterbroadcasting.com/live.  If you miss an episode, you can download them from http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/.

Video RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ldf-video

MP3 RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ldf-mp3

And, yes, the show is in black and white.

No gradients.

No matching color schemes.

No lists of images that go “SWwoosSHH” when you click right and left arrows.

Text.  Black.  White.  Done.

Welcome to the new Lunduke.com.

Being as I develop another visual software development tool (Illumination Software Creator), I’ve received a rather hefty pile of emails from people asking me my thoughts on it.

Let me be frank: I couldn’t be happier about it. I am, in a word, thrilled.

Any tool that helps to make computing fun and accessible to more people is A-OK in my book!

Along those lines: I don’t view App Inventor as a direct competitor to Illumination Software Creator in any way.

Google’s Android App Inventor is really a pretty standard development environment.  It includes a nice, straight forward visual designer to lay out the look and feel of your application.  And, likewise, it includes a pretty straight forward, run of the mill, programming language.

The key differentiator, from “standard” programming tools, being that you don’t actually type your code, you drag and drop pieces of your code and lock them together.  (The “code editor” is based on the, very cool, Scratch — which is focused on making it easier to teach children programming and logic.)

Illumination Software Creator takes an entirely different approach — self contained “blocks’ that can be linked together without any restrictions.

In this regard using Illumination to create an application is much like playing with lego building blocks.

Whereas using Android App Inventor to create an application is much like… well… programming an application… with a mouse instead of a keyboard.

The approach of the two is almost night and day different… and both are worth while in my opinion.

Android App Inventor even has the, extremely cool, feature of being able to live debug your applications on your phone as you build them.  I declare that “Super Neat-O”.

Overall, I am overjoyed.  An attempt at bringing Android smartphone development to anyone who has an urge to tinker.  I love it.

Another big plus, in my book, is that App Inventor is supported on Linux, Windows and MacOS X (just like Illumination Software Creator).  Cross platform support is a big deal in my mind.  Providing people and organizations with the freedom to choose their own platform is critical.

Which brings my to the big downside to App Inventor — It is focused on one single target platform (Android).  That really is my only big complaint, and is a key piece what will, in the long run, dramatically limit App Inventor’s usefulness.

That’s really the key big difference between App Inventor (Android only) and Illumination Software Creator (Mac, Windows, Linux, Nokia Tablets, Adobe Flash/Flex Websites and, soon, Haiku-OS).

(That screenshot on the right is Illumination Software Creator… not App Inventor.  That’ll give you an idea of the workflow and design differences of the two visual programming tools.)

I certainly understand Google’s interest in furthering and focusing on Android, I just find that limitation… limiting.  This is the same basic limitation that, say, using X-Code to write iPhone applications creates.

What happens when you want to run your software on another platform?  Can’t.  Stuck.  Time to re-write from scratch (or mostly from scratch).  I am lazy.  I don’t want to have to re-write something I’ve already written.

But, that aside, App Inventor looks great.   I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to dabble in Android development.

That is, of course, until Illumination Software Creator releases official support for building Android apps.  Then using App Inventor will be just plain silly.

Sure.  Version 2.1 will bring some cool graphical capabilities (drawing and whatnot) to the awesome-est, cross platform-y-est, visual software creator out there.  (Name one other tool that lets you build Python desktop and mobile application, and Flash web applications, without writing a single line of code.)

Sure.  Version 2.1 will be a free update to all existing users.  Because we love you guys.

But there’s one feature  in 2.1 that… well… we kept a secret.  And we think it’s pretty gosh darned awesome.

For the full details… you’re just going to have to wait till the beta version is available.  For now, here’s a little teaser:

And you can do so from the comfort of your Linux or Windows desktop… in a completely visual way.  (Heck, most of the people using it have never programed software in their life!)

But let’s kick it up a notch, shall we?

As of today, Illumination Software Creator 2.0 is available.  And it is awesome.

For two big reasons:

1. Adobe Flash / Flex

That’s right.  From that same project file that you’ve already been working on, you can now build an Adobe Flash powered rich website.  With a single click.

Built a cool puzzle game and want to share it with the world?  Just click the build menu item and presto — you’ve got a Flash based puzzle game… complete with a snippet of HTML to drop into your blog.  Easy as pie.

2. MacOS X

For those of you using MacOS X… we didn’t want you to feel left out of the party.

So now Illumination runs great on MacOS X as well as Linux and Windows.

Think that through for a second.

A tool for creating software.  That doesn’t require that you write any code.  Is 100% visual and can be picked up and used by anyone…

That runs on Linux.  On Windows.  On MacOS X.

And builds software for Flash powered websites, every type of desktop operating system we can think of and nokia internet tablets.

That.  Is.  Cool.

To go along with all that goodness, we’ve revamped RadicalBreeze.com to have a nice new look and easier navigation.

And, of course, this brand new version is a free upgrade to each and every Illumination user.

Haven’t purchased Illumination yet?  Now’s a good time!

And, if you want to chat with other Illumination developers, the official forum is the place to be.

Here comes the good stuff.

Illumination Software Creator 2.0 Beta 2 for Linux is available!

This Beta 2 release adds the ability to build Adobe Flex (Flash) web applications from the exact same projects that you’ve already created.

Ah, the glory of building applications without writing a single line of code, then having them run on Linux, Windows, MacOS X, Nokia Tablets… and now in your websites via Flash.

The big changes in 2.0 Beta 2:

• You can now build Adobe Flex - Web applications!
• The “Run” toolbar button now has a dropdown next to it that lets you choose which type of application (”Python/GTK-Desktop”, “Adobe Flex - Web”, etc.) you would like to run.
• A new Illumination Preferences window that allows you to set the location of the Flex SDK (necessary for building Flex applications).
• The Window Editor now has a new menu item that allows you to copy the layout of one “Design For” build target to another.  (For example, you can copy the look and feel of your Flex application from your Python Desktop application, etc.)

Illumination 2.0 Beta 2 is only available for Linux at the moment.  Windows and MacOS X versions are on the way shortly!

For download links see the Illumination Beta Info page then see here for information on installing necessary files to support building Adobe Flex applications.

Here’s a quick example of a project created with Illumination and built for Flex (you can download the project itself here):

Pretty cool, right?  That project took maybe… 6 or 7 minutes to throw together.  And the resulting applications run great on my desktops, the N900 sitting on my desk… and you can see the resulting Flex application right there.

So check out the Beta release.  Join the official Illumination Forum.  And pick up a copy of Illumination from the online store. ]]> http://lunduke.com/?feed=rss2&p=1267