OSUser: BeOS Journal #20 - Tractor Apps

Join now for free
| Search
Products OSUser Windows NT Win95 Reviews Win95 Tips Win95 Downloads Windows 98 MacOS BeOS Other Windows CE NOSUser OS News Site Guide
Advertisement
Also on ZDNet PC Magazine Labs PC Week Labs ZD Internet Labs Benchmark Tests Company Finder Mac Products Downloads At Home Learning ZDNet University LearnItOnline Magazines
BeOS Journal #20: Will Tractor Apps Pull Be Forward? Scot Hacker, ZDNet 05/07/98 Windows is like oxygen to the modern computing world -- taken for granted, omnipresent. Although there are at least half a dozen serious operating systems available that work on the plain vanilla x86 hardware sold at your local CompUSA, Fry's, or neighborhood shoestring computer store, you'd hardly know it by reading the ads in the Sunday paper. People argue over which HTML editor or video card is the best, but operating system wars -- to the extent that they still exist -- are practically moot in the public eye. The population, for whatever reason, does not tend to consider alternative operating systems as viable. After all these years, Linux is finally beginning to get a little mainstream press, and that's mostly a direct result of Netscape's recent endorsement of the free software model. There are reasons for this, of course. For one thing, it's convenient when your neighbors and coworkers speak the same language. If Windows had never been born, the public (in concert with forces of natural selection) would have chosen another system around which to grow the computer industry. It probably would have been MacOS, but who knows? OS/2? FreeBSD? Linux? NextStep? Solaris? Something else entirely? To most people, it just doesn't matter. Most people use computers as a means to an end, to get their jobs done so they can go home and enjoy more interesting pursuits. Their needs are general, not specific, and Windows is the world's general- purpose operating system of choice But there is a population out there that welcomes the opportunity to run multiple operating systems on a single hard drive. To them, operating systems are choices, and choice is a good thing. Just as one may keep several word processors laying around, each of which serve different needs, these people may boot alternatively into NT, BeOS, or Linux as needs dictate. Each operating system has its strengths. Rather than competing in the arena of the general purpose operating system, which would be pointless (if not suicidal), Be has chosen a niche in which no other OS truly excels -- multimedia and audio/video content creation and consumption. Here is a processor- and bandwidth-intensive arena where existing operating systems most clearly show their limitations. In other words, by excelling at multimedia (which, by the way, dovetails nicely into all the DVD, cable modem, 1,000-MHz full-screen -video computing tasks of the coming decade), Be provides a good reason for users to power down and reboot into an A/V-optimized OS. None of this, of course, implies that BeOS is incapable of also being a good general-purpose system, just that that's not their target. No one can live in an OS devoid of e-mail, spreadsheets, and word processors. There's an obvious market for those applications on BeOS, and in fact enough general productivity applications exist on BeOS right now that many people (including myself) get their daily work done just fine. But no matter how painless Be ultimately makes the installation process, most people will never install an alternative operating system out of simple curiosity. What's needed now are "tractor apps" -- applications so compelling that people will carve out a new partition on their hard drives because it's worth it. Applications that make people say, "I didn't know a personal computer could do that!" Applications that are unambiguosly unique, with features not available on any other platform simply because no other platform includes the infrastructure necessary to support what they want to achieve. These are the applications that will pull Be out of the "geeks only" realm and into the future. Rave reviews of raw performance and a logical, untangled "fresh start" approach aren't themselves enough to keep the company in high-earth orbit. Smarty-pants naysayers are fond of insisting that Be will never make it unless Adobe ports Photoshop or some such. Wrong. While the endorsement of big brandnames are undeniably important to continued success, a port is a port. Photoshop was architected for a different -- and far less capable -- environment, many moons ago. Very little of its code would take advantage of the unique features that BeOS has to offer. Don't get me wrong -- I'd love to be using Photoshop on BeOS -- but why would someone repartition their hard drive just to run the same software they've already got? They wouldn't. Not in statistically significant numbers, anyway. To seduce users into trying on a new operating system, you've got to show them something that's never been done before, on any OS. You've got to show them that the computing world hasn't become boring simply because the industry has reached an evolutionary plateau -- it's become boring because we've maxed out the technical capacity of our existing operating systems. So who's going to build the apps that have what it takes to make customers regard BeOS as a relevant alternative? Go to a trade show or users' group and watch a 15-minute BeOS demo. Have a look at what pioneering companies like Adamation are doing with multimedia. Their StudioA package is bringing real-time editing and video rendering to CompUSA hardware. Check out their ImageElements and AudioElements graphic- and sound-processing packages, which enable users to build sophisticated networks of transformative media effects as if they were hooking up Erector sets. Like a hybrid of scripting and sculpture, Adamation tools are as powerful and useful as they are fun to use. Go have a look at what Gobe is doing with their Gobe Productive integrated suite, combining spreadsheet, imaging, word-processing, and presentation software into a single, simple interface, playing the chainsaw to Microsoft Works' Swiss Army Knife. Check out BeatWare and the interface innovations coming to their high-end producivity applications -- users will be able to tweak the appearance and function of their products' sliders, dials, widgets and knobs on the fly, the UI flexing to accomodate the user's creative process. Check out the SoundPlay audio file player, which lets you stack half a dozen (or more) sound files of differing formats on top of one another and play them simultaneously. Slow some down while you speed others up. Play your MPEGs backwards. Fade them in and out with independent volume controls. Save the whole collage to disk for posterity, then reboot into Windows and try the same thing. If you're a developer, don't miss the demonstrations of the new BDirectWindow API, capable of bypassing almost all operating system overhead to write vast amounts of data directly into the guts of the video card while simultaneously utilizing practically zero CPU cycles. Be still has a long row to hoe, but they've constructed a mighty appealing platform on which the next wave of innovative developers can strut their stuff. Every indication is that you're going to start seeing the fruits of all this labor in a much more public light before long. Who's going to build the tractor app that convinces you that BeOS is worth a partition? I don't know, but it's worth keeping an eye on www.be.com to find out. |
Complete List of OPERATING SYSTEM REVIEWS
| Operating systems aren't built in a day. Here's a quick list of what's not quite there yet.
| Get the latest BeOS headlines from ZDNN
| PowerMac users, download the BeOS Preview Release 2 for free.
| Talk with other BeOS users on BeBuzz, the Be message board.
| Network OSs
| Items below are available at NetBuyer.
| Operating Systems