OSUser: BeOS Journal #4 - Genesis of the BeOS

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BeOS Journal #4: Genesis of the BeOS Scot Hacker, ZDNet 02/14/97 Watching the birth of a new operating system gives me some of the sense of awe that comes with learning how planets evolve. First, a long gestational period occurs as the infrastructure of a planet is created by unseen forces -- swirling gases and dust slowly taking shape. Then, in the blink of a geological eye, primitive life forms gain a tenuous foothold in the harsh environment. Suddenly, a critical mass is reached, and life explodes in a evolutionary firestorm all over the planet. The quiet formation of the planet might be compared to the time that Jean-Louis Gassée's team of developers spent locked away in a Menlo Park dugout -- generating the oxygen, lands, and seas of the BeOS. The second phase is mirrored by the appearance of small swarms of developers scrambling to take advantage of the new biosphere, wandering the surface of the new planet and slowly but steadily evolving small Be applets into usable productivity apps. The third phase, in which the public "gets it" and begins using the BeOS for its daily activities, has not yet occurred. But the pieces are falling into place for life to evolve in this still-rarefied environment. I've spent the past week downloading and installing as much BeWare as I could get my hands on, trying to get a sense for where on the evolutionary ladder Be application development really lies. The truth, of course, is that it occupies many rungs of evolution simultaneously. There are small, dedicated companies devoting large chunks of their budgets to BeOS app development. There are established software companies devoting small reservoirs of money to what may amount to a gamble on the future. And there are thousands of developers in the field creating everything from full-featured word processors to ports of relatively obscure UNIX utilities to applets the likes of which I've never seen before on any platform. I'm going to mention just a handful of noteworthy programs, but I want to emphasize that this list just represents the tip of a massive iceberg -- most BeWare is still submerged, waiting for the planet to warm up a little (think DR9). Most of the software I'll talk about here is available from the Be FTP site (ftp.be.com/pub/contrib) and from the BeWare section of Be's Web site (http://www.be.com/BeWare). Current Be users are especially FTP friendly, since the bundled Web browser NetPositive, as of v.72, doesn't support file downloading (v.80, available on the MacTech CD, does). Niche needs are meant to be filled, so Tim Stack wrote HTTPget, a tiny utility consisting of a small window into which you can type the URL of a file that NetPositive won't handle. A SaveAs dialog appears, and you've got your file. Instant gratification. One of my favorite utilities is actually a pair of small OS enhancements -- written by two different people -- that make navigating between graphical and command-line interfaces nearly seamless. Laurent Domenech's TermHere is a Browser add-on (note that on BeOS, as on NeXTstep, the term Browser refers to a GUI version of the file system) gets you to a command line representing the current directory from any point in your Browser navigations, saving you a lot of typing. This may sound like a small, ultra-geeky nicety, but command-line paths can get pretty hairy pretty fast. The utility's twin cousin, Scott McLean's "GUI", does the exact opposite, opening a Browser view from any point on any command line. For instance, from `/boot/system`, typing `gui fonts` will open a graphical view of your fonts folder. GUI will also open applications and files in the same way. A query I posted recently to `comp.sys.be` inquiring as to who was developing e-mail packages to extend the functionality of BeMail yielded no less than four different developers working on different types of mail packages. And there is no lack of add-on Internet utilities out there, either. Several news readers, a whois utility, an IRC utility... the list goes on. One of the flashiest utilities I've come across is Hiroshi Lockheimer's screen-saver daemon, which sits quietly in the background until needed, then calls on one of the dozens of saver modules out there; new modules seem to be appearing almost weekly. Many of them appear to have been ported over from UNIX systems, while others are written from scratch for BeOS. Most of them are pretty stunning, and the level of complexity seems to be increasing logarithmically as time passes. Okay, so screen savers are just eye candy, but they're also a great demonstration of the raw graphics power you get with two fast processors and a radically efficient OS. Speaking of graphics power, Pierre-Emmanuel's BetMap is one of the first stabs at creating a full-on graphics-manipulation program for BeOS. Or at least it's one of the first to be released to the public (it's been rumored for quite a while that Adobe has a couple of BeBoxen for development purposes, but they've been mum about announcements of any potential Photoshop port). While it's no Fractal Painter or Photoshop interface-wise, BetMap does let you open up an image and draw or paint in a limited fashion, or apply one of the many filter modules that ship with the program -- brushes, filters, patterns, and pens. Some of these modules you've seen before in other imaging apps. Others create effects quite unlike any you've probably ever seen. And the structure of the program invites developers to create their own add-in modules to help grow the functionality of the program. The author promises support for channels and other features in a future release. We're also starting to see an ever-growing number of small-but-useful image handlers and translators. Just as I was wrapping up this column, news came across the BeMail transom about another full-featured paint and photo-manipulation program, this one called Glass, by Philip Brayshaw. Glass isn't available for download yet -- Philip is announcing a future release with a page full of fascinating screen shots and descriptions. The program takes Photoshop's layering scheme one step further by creating "stacks," which are sets of image layers and "composite" layers. The composite layers will function like filter spaces that you can manipulate with any of the tools in the application's toolbox. The creative potential of images created in Glass is stunning. This is the kind of software that Jean-Louis was referring to when he noted that BeOS would be made successful by the "lunatic fringe" of programmers. To me, one great thing about BeWare is its open nature. How many times have you downloaded Mac or Windows software that came complete with source code? This practice is common in the UNIX world, where a larger percentage of users are also developers keen on tweaking, honing, and growing software, and then sharing the results with the community. The same is proving true for BeOS, and most of the software I've downloaded ships with complete source files. If you're just dipping a toe into the icy waters of programming, as I am, opening these up in the Metrowerks IDE for study is a great learning experience. I've got to admit I've had a few difficulties getting some BeWare to work. After following instructions in the README files to the letter, I've been faced with "Error launching application" messages a little more often than I'd like -- I think I'm missing some kind of magic bullet here. If you've got one, please send it on. Then again, it's a good reminder of just how rudimentary life can be when your entire operating system and all the software on it is pre-beta. When software generates this kind of message on your Mac or Windows machine, you just get cranky. But somehow it's different with BeOS -- the excitement of watching the evolutionary process in action on a brand-new planet outweighs a lot of headaches. |
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