Even though there’s nearly two months left until summer officially begins, we’ve already started seeing some encouraging results from Haiku’s inclusion in the ’07 Google Summer of Code. One of the tasks that has been assigned is the creation of a installer for .PKG files, which will serve Haiku as a replacement for the old SoftwareValet application. Lukasz Zemczak, the student assigned to that particular task, has made a blog post on the Haiku website detailing his progress so far (first spotted by DaaT over at IsComputerOn).
In addition to recreating SoftwareValet’s functionality, Lukasz has also been working on redesigning the UI with usability improvements in mind. After some collaboration with the Haiku Usability Team, a refined version of the PackageValet UI was created – Lukasz’s blog post contains a screenshot of the proposed design. It’s looking great so far, in my opinion – and it’s certainly nice to see an application that actually uses less screen real-estate than its predecessor.