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Inferno History
Author: Inferno Dev Team
Version: 1.0
Download: none




The life and times of Inferno


What is Inferno
Inferno is a higly modualar image editing package for BeOS. It differs from most image editing applications in that it is designed to be as flexible as posible. The basic core does little more than load and manage 'Tool' plugins. These Tool plugins handle most of the load of image editing. This alows the flexiblity to update, change, replace Tool plugins as needed. Floater windows (ie Layer Window, Color Picker Window) are also plugins. Theses Floater plugins also alow Inferno to be expanded and changed as needed. This simple plugins design does not mean that Inferno is lacking in the basic tools department. The Inferno Team has put together quite a impressive set of base tools (most under the Inferno Sample Code license) so that other may learn from them. Things you come to expect from any image editing tool. Pencil, Brush, FloodFill, Basic Shaps, Zoom and may others. Inferno is designed for BeOS. What does this mean exactly? What advantage does this give us? BeOS is designed in a unique and clean way, its API or object based and the systems message passing and threading alow things that aren't posiblem on other systems. Inferno is build from the ground up to take advantage of these aspects. The Plugin model, The simple message passing, Clean object model all can be seen in Inferno. Infenro also takes full advantage of BeOS's supeiror multi-threading feature unlike any other image editor.

History
Inferno has a simple history. The team on the other hand... Inferno started out as a small project started by YNOP in January 2000. The reasons were simple - a image editing tool that was plugin based - also to learn simple 2D graphic manipulation. In late May 2000 BeUnited started a open sourced image editing project named Photon (based upon a abandoned image editor project). The team was assembled from a handful of people selected by Eugenia. The team spent several months reviewing the Photon source base and came to one conclusion - total rewrite. After a short time a few members from the original Photon team joined with YNOP to create the Inferno Team and started work on YNOP's already started Infenro core. The basic design of Inferno (plugins - parts) alows the work to be done concurrently by many people and not worry about source control, thus the primary development has been via the internet. Inferno team continues to work and improve the feature set and 3rd party APIs for the future.




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