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First Look at YellowTAB's Zeta
Gentu writes "Great news for the BeOS fans. After Be sold its IP to Palm, many said that the BeOS was no more, but a new startup company from Germany, YellowTAB, was able to get hold of Be's source code and form the future of the never-released BeOS 6 ('Dano'), under the name 'Zeta'. YellowTAB added a lot of new goodies to the OS and brought it up to speed. OSNews features the first ever preview of Zeta with a lot of good information, along with some screenshots."
Who are these people to review anything, if their review consists of skimming the surface and focusing on their pet peeves? Thats how flamewars start - bickering over window managers. Let's talk REAL functionality, things like auto-detection of hardware, capabilities of the install kernel, etc.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I am frankly sick of her crap. She has become the Jon Katz of interface design analysis. If Slashdot insists on licking her ass every week, they should make an icon of her, so I can put the topic on my ignore list.
Amiga at least was something sometime.
BeOS still is a "never has been".
Why do the old systems go to Europe to die? Arn't the Germans responcible for keeping the Amiga alive?
Nice clean interface - in fact, it has the only Drag'nDrop GUI I've ever seen that I would be willing to call uncluttered. Amazing API (if you program). All sorts of tiny little details that you can't really put your finger on
I like BeOS because, in my opinion, it is well-concieved. It has all sorts of problems with drivers and application support, but then again that's how every OS starts out. BeOS had something that can't be added later - generally well-thought-out design. You can't add that in as an afterthought.
The GUI which was interesting 5 years ago no longer is unique - it's now a commodity in the days of KDE/GNOME. So what market is this OS appealing to? Businesses? No apps. Home users? They won't pay. Embedded Systems designers? Possibly, although Linux is free. I'm not trolling - any idea?
As you can tell from the nick, I was a BeOS user back in the day. Technically, it was way ahead of anything at the time:
1) The kernel was extremely low latency, and the scheduler was superbly designed for user responsiveness. This was at a time when the low-latency and preempt kernels simply didn't exist, and we were putting up with the 100ms+ second latencies of kernel 2.2. While Linux today has caught up with and surpassed the latency targets, it (even in 2.5) still hasn't managed to reach the same quality in the scheduler.
2) The GUI was very fast and responsive. The theme I use today (dotNET on KDE) is probably similarly complex to Be's native look, but BeOS was still faster, even though I ran it on a lowly 300MHz PII, and I run KDE on my 2GHz P4. It was heavily multithreaded, which made a world of difference for a machine under heavy load. In BeOS, an app's GUI would never freeze up while the app did some background task. This was at a time when GTK 1.2.x and Qt 2.x weren't even thread-safe! Even today, KDE and GNOME have yet to make use of multitheading as effectively as BeOS did half a decade ago.
3) It had a very fast journaled filesystem, with attributes and live queries and everything. This was at a time when ext2 would nuke your installation after a bad crash.
4) It was pretty. It was simple, without being austere, and had a colorful asthetic. It had fully-antialiased fonts back when we had Win9x's "font smoothing" and Linux user's were just happy to be finally able to use TrueType fonts.
5) Long before OS X came around, BeOS had the power of Unix with the simplicity of a Mac. The shell was extremely well integrated with the GUI, and you could even script GUI events from the command line.
6) The API was awesome. It was simple, well designed, and well documented. This was back when GTK+' s documentation consisted of source code.
Of course, these days, Linux has come a long long way from what it was then. It's got a kernel much better than BeOS ever did, KDE and GNOME are catching up in the GUI department, XFree86 has fully accelerated OpenGL, and is getting nifty features like XRender and Xr, FreeType/Xft has some of the nicest looking antialiased fonts out there, etc. But BeOS has stagnated for years, and is much the same now as it was then. It's still quite impressive, but not as shiny as it was in its heyday.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
i found this a bit of an odd request...
6. No fix for the numlock bug which makes BeOS to not remember if the NumLock was set to ON in the previous booting. Sounds trivial and stupid but really annoys a lot of people.
now i don't know about you, but i generally don't know the state of Num/Caps/Scroll lock every time i reboot my computer. the behaviour i DO care about is that they are consistant every time. numlock status is a CMOS-level (its been there for YEARS!) consistant feature.
so i read the whole review with a pinch of salt if somebody wants their numlock status to persist after reboot, really...
Ever heard of the Edirol - Roland UA100, the iZ Tech - RADAR 24 & the SX-1 Integrated Audio Production Station? They all use BeOS
Don't you guys steal enough from others already? Every damned GUI I see for Linux always wants to look like something else with Windows XP and OS/X being the top two cloned interfaces.
I remember when Be Inc. went under. The largest reaction in the OSS/Linux arena was "so what?", the second was "Will they release the OS under GPL so we can rape and pillage their IP?"
This isn't a troll, this is a serious concern of mine. Don't copy BeOS, don't copy Windows XP, don't copy Mac OS/X! Do something ORIGINAL! Do something new that is Linix/OSS from the ground up. Stop playing catch up and take the lead for once!
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.