OSUser: BeOS Journal #15 - The Stability Milestone

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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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