OSUser: BeOS Journal #19 - Be Developers' Conference 3/98

GAMES UTILITIES INTERNET | HOME GRAPHICS BUSINESS | WIN 95 TOP TEN JAVA |
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 #19: Excitement Builds at Be Developers' Conference Scot Hacker, ZDNet 03/20/98 The Be Developer's Conference (March 19 and 20, Santa Clara, CA) has come and gone, and I've returned more excited about the potential of this new OS than ever. So much information and so many exciting demos went down in two days that there's no way I can cover it all, so you'll have to live with my bullet-point coverage of the most salient points. Intel's Claude Leglise opened the general session with a talk on Intel's enthusiasm about working with Be (they sent engineers to Menlo Park to help with the initial port of BeOS to x86 architecture). The Wall St. Journal recently reported that Intel owned a small piece of Be, but the exact nature of this relationship is still not fully understood. Regardless, the weight and importance of a partner like Intel cannot be underestimated. Leglise' presence was, of course, timed to coincide with the official release of BeOS for Intel processors. From a marketing perspective, this announcement is probably the most important Be has ever made. Given the enthusiasm Be has generated on the PPC side of the equation, becoming compatible with the other 97% of the market is bound to be the booster rocket Be needs to take them into high earth orbit. From a technological perspective, Be also has many new advantages to explore. Competition in the Intel space has driven the speed and capabilities of hardware forward far further than in the PPC world (for all subsystems other than the CPU itself). AGP video, 100MHz bus speeds, and cheap, ultra-fast IDE drives all point to rocking performance advantages in this new territory. The release CD was distributed to developers at the conference, and will be for sale to the general public on March 31. The PPC version of R3 will be available April 20. Pricing has been set at $99, with an introductory price of $69 good through mid-May. Three companies dedicated to full-time development of high-end Be applications showed their wares. Adamation has been hard at work developing their suite of multimedia development tools: ImageElements, AudioElements, StudioA, mplay, and more all work together to offer a high-end dream platform for those looking to do Avid-level multimedia production on consumer-level hardware. BeatWare has been doing a ton of work on their own BeatWare Paint and Mail-It tools. Their upcoming Freestyle feature allows users to custom-configure the user interface and dialog controls on the fly, while their new Relay technology will make Internet document sharing (including whiteboarding) a breeze. BeatWare's Paint is really starting to mature, and is showing great promise as a high-end imaging application. Finally, Gobe unleashed Gobe Productive, an all-in-one word processor, spreadsheet, drawing application, and presentation software suite. If MS Works is a Swiss Army Knife, Gobe Productive intends to become a "Swiss Army Chainsaw." All three companies have been working extremely hard to create exceptional applications, and are proving that it's very much possible to build apps for BeOS that simply aren't possible on any other platform. We'll try and get some full reviews into this space before too long. One of the most important technologies debuted at the conference was a new API call -- BDirectWindow. This technology essentially allows developers to send video streams directly to video hardware, almost entirely bypassing operating system overhead. The result is a radical jump in video frame-rate and smoothness, while simultaneously leaving the system's CPU(s) free for other tasks. We were treated to some jaw-dropping demonstrations of buttery smooth video streamed from DVD in a 640x480 window and, later, the plotting of (hold on to your seats) 20,000 stars in a galaxy formation, the whole thing rotating on its axis, and rendered at an incredible 60 frames per second. The demonstrator then opened up five more windows just like it, keeping the DVD window running, and then fired up a few more windows showing a separate demo. Performance had to be seen to be believed. The implications of this new call for gaming, home/professional video editing, and for the MediaOS in general should not be underestimated. This is important stuff. It was revealed that 18-19,000 Be applications and utilities are downloaded from BeWare every week. Since BeWare has until now consisted almost entirely of Be applications for PowerPC users, we can expect this number to grow almost logarithmically in the coming months as the library is populated with Intel binaries. Be has reached a 5-year agreement with Metrowerks to take over management of their development environment. In addition, the cost of the full, registered version of the IDE came down in price drastically, to $129. Several interesting demos were shown of ways in which GUI applications can be controlled via scripts. Be does not plan to release a "blessed" scripting language like AppleScript or REXX. Instead, they've provided a powerful and pervasive framework of "hooks" which can be referenced by scripts of the user's or developer's choosing. They've also intentionally left the field wide open for third-party developers to build a user-friendly scripting interface. Expect some interesting developments here in the coming 3-6 months. A schedule was announced for upcoming BeOS upgrade releases. We should see R4 in September 1998, with support for reading FAT16 and FAT32 drives, Secure Sockets Layer, Universal Serial Bus, composite s-video, color printing, and a new media kit. R5 is slated for Q1 '98, with support for NTFS, BFS support under Windows, FireWire, mpeg2, pcmcia, and more. To complement Be's own Internet software distribution strategy, StarCode showed off their SoftWare Valet product. Valet makes it easy for users to make sure they've always got the lastest available version of a product, and easy for developers not to worry about managing the distribution channel. Valet's server component manages version control, serial numbers, downloads, and secure credit card orders, while the client sits peacefully in the background of the user's machine making sure everything is up to date, alerting users when upgrades are available, and launching PackageBuilder to perform user-friendly, elegant software installations when necessary. I think StarCode has seen into the future of software distribution and is on to something important here. Wrapping up the conference were the announcements of the annual Masters Awards winners. There are too many winners and runners-up to mention in this summary -- read all about it here. A well-deserved congratulations to all of the winners. Special mention was made of third-party Be news site, BeLeadingEdge. If you're interested in keeping up with all things Be, bookmark this one -- the site is updated several times daily. All-in-all, another exciting show celebrating many major milestones for Be and lots of promising technologies. It's going to be a very interesting year. |
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
GAMES UTILITIES INTERNET | HOME GRAPHICS BUSINESS | WIN 95 TOP TEN JAVA |