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BeOS Journal #15:
The Stability Milestone
Scot Hacker, ZDNet
10/30/97
When I sat down to write about BeOS Preview Release 2, I thought I would be
most excited about another batch of incremental improvements to my favorite
operating system. While PR2's improvements are certainly substantial (more
on that later), I've got to rant first about a little applet that may seem
inconsequential at first glance, but symbolizes the implications of BeOS'
thoroughly considered design. The applet in question is called
RöColor, from Rö design.
RöColor is a color mixer. Just a little floating window with RGB
slider bars and an alpha (transparency) slider. On the window's right side
is a dual-paned color swatch that shows both the current color, and that
color as applied through the chosen level of transparency. No pull-down or
pop-up menus, no checkboxes or radio buttons, no dialogs of any kind.
Zen-like simplicity.
Okay, so it's beautiful. But what good is it? RöColor utilizes the
operating system's integrated BeMessage foundation as a vehicle for
communicating with other applications. Find a color you like and drag it
off the swatch pad onto the desktop -- your desktop instantly changes to
that color. Was the desktop designed to handle color drops from
RöColor? No, but it automatically knows how to recieve BeMessages from
other applications. It gets better. Drag a color off the swatch into your
HTML editor (h.scribe, for instance), and the HTML hex value for that color
appears, as if by magic. Was h.scribe designed to handle color drops from
RöColor? No, but it was designed to handle BeMessages. That's way
cool, and has huge implications for the future of the operating system
(imagine all of your apps talking to each other this effortlessly, and what
would be possible if drag-and-drop weren't limited to a few operations
specified by the OS!)
Dropping a color from RöColor onto Unix DeskCalc. The
calculator's interface is effortlessly customized, thanks to BeMessages.
RöColor has the added advantage of teaching you about color-mixing
principles while you work. Because the sliders themselves produce real-time
updating of all possible colors given the current configuration, you can
see in advance what color you'll get by sliding any knob to any point,
which helps to illustrate the sometimes unintuitive nature of color mixing.
The icing on the cake is RöColor's classy interface -- an interface
not limited by the built-in look of sliders and buttons typically dicted by
the MacOS or Windows. Application designers working in BeOS are free to use
the API's built-in interface options or to make up entirely new interfaces
as they go along. Of course, sensible designers aren't going to take risks
that confuse and alienate potential users, so hopefully some kind of
natural balance between experimentation and consistency will be maintained.
But I digress. The point is that if you've been reading about the power of
BeMessages and have been left wondering how they can really apply to BeOS
applications, you owe it to yourself to play with RöColor for a while.
Enough about that -- on to the upgrade.
Uptime
I'm not a programmer, but I do know that a common practice in software
development is to get the structure of your code nailed down, then to
remove the scaffolding and support beams from the beta as one of the last
steps before your software goes golden. That may or may not be the case
with PR2, but something has definitely changed in the kernel. Last month,
the words "protected memory" seemed like a BeOS' buzzword that only applied
in theory. In reality, BeOS was crashing on me about once a day. But
suddenly, as if by magic, BeOS has achieved real stability. I've been using
it consistently for a week now, and it hasn't gone down once. And this
under continuous strain -- as an experiment, I fired up Rack303 (a
multi-track emulation of the legendary synsethizer that gave Electronica
its distinctive sound), and got a few groovy sound loops going. Then I
launched a couple of movies and let them loop into infinity, turned off my
monitor and speakers, and went to bed. In the morning, everything was still
humming along -- no memory leaks or anything. This isn't your mother's
operating system -- this is Windows NT / Linux-class stability, where
uptime is measured not in hours, but in days or months.
All of a sudden, BeOS has entered the realm of the Real Players as an OS
you can trust your most precious work to. Stability that surpasses MacOS
and Windows95 exempts BeOS from accusations that it's a "toy" operating
system (yes, I've actually read posts to this effect on comp.sys.be.misc).
Symmetric multi-processing, multi-threadedness, multi-tasking, and all that
other buzzword jazz were in the bag from the get-go. But once word gets out
that protected memory in the BeOS is a reality, a whole new class of users
is going to begin to take BeOS seriously. Viva la stability!
There are other enhancements to the operating system in PR2 as well, such
as support for machines with larger amounts of RAM, enhancements to Tracker
windows, a few new hotkeys, and more features built into BeMail. But
stability is the real milestone in PR2. If everything goes according to
plan, the milestone in PR3 (sometime in Q4 '97) is going to be support for
Intel processors, and you know I'm going to be all over that like a "Be: on
honey. And after that, it's a "BeLine" for release 1.0. There's no turning
back.
On the application front
I'm totally overwhelmed by the amount of BeOS software being released. Nine
months ago it was easy to say you had tried every piece of Be-compatible
software available on BeWare
. These days, I feel like I barely get to try out a third of it --
there's just too much. More than 100 new applications have been made
available on BeWare in the last two months alone. And the PR2 CD comes
stuffed with 40 excellent shareware and commercial apps and demos you can
install without having to download. Without going into detail, a few of the
apps I've been most impressed with this month: LaunchPad (a floating strip
that holds links to your favorite apps for easy access), SineClock 2 (see
last month's entry -- SineClock is now a
replicant), Eddie (a full-featured programmer's editor), Be Asteroids (not
just a complete port, but an improvement on the original), POW (a Web
server far more feature-packed than the built in Poor Man), 3D StarChart
(an incredibly detailed scientific interactive exploration of the heavens
-- has to be seen to be believed), the totally awesome sound player
DualPlayer, and the ever-useful Thread Manager for killing off unruly apps.
Speaking of applications, I see a lot of mail from people wanting to know
when there's going to be a world-class Web browser for BeOS. Now first of
all, NetPositive isn't all that bad -- it serves my needs, and I expect
most people's needs most of the time. Nevertheless, it doesn't yet handle
framesets and a few other types of Web pages. While there's still no word
from Netscape about a Communicator port, the enterprising authors of Opera are taking pre-orders for a BeOS
version of this incredibly sophisticated browser. Why Opera isn't already
more popular than it is probably has more to do with a lack of marketing
muscle than anything, but if you haven't seen it, you should definitely
take a look. It takes up a whole 2MB installed. It's configuration options
put Microsoft's and Netscape's offerings to shame. Opera was doing style
sheets a year ago, when the big boys were still squabbling over who had the
fastest table-rendering engine. And you wanna talk about fast? Opera is
seemingly unbeatable. Support high-quality alternative software development
-- register your support for
the BeOS Opera port.
Final things
I've started up an online datatabase of user-contributed Tips and Tricks for BeOS.
It's pretty small right now since it's just been born, but I'd like to grow
it into something substantial. If you've come across some little hint
that's gotten you over a BeOS hump, please contribute!
The BeOS wishlist has been updated.
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