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Thought Experiment: The Ultimate Creative Content OS
Dave Girard has written a lengthy description of how to design the best possible operating system for creative pursuits (video editing, photo manipulation, and sound editing, in particular) — at least the the best possible one he can imagine by selecting from the best tools and behaviors that he finds in Mac OS X, Windows, and (mostly Ubuntu) Linux. He makes a compelling case for the OS (or at least a GUI on top of it) having baked-in support for a wide range of image formats and codecs, and makes some pointed jabs along the way at what each of these three big players do wrong.
is paper-and-pencil-OS, or PPOS.
Aside from a couple of things (not sure how 30 bit monitor support would work here), it sounds like he's describing KDE.
Of course, in the real world, KDE is awesome for more advanced tasks like creative designs, but the limited support for the most used quality creative software keeps it down a lot...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
"BeOS was optimized for digital media work and was written to take advantage of modern hardware facilities such as symmetric multiprocessing by utilizing modular I/O bandwidth, pervasive multithreading, preemptive multitasking and a 64-bit journaling file system known as BFS. The BeOS GUI was developed on the principles of clarity and a clean, uncluttered design.
The API was written in C++ for ease of programming. It has partial POSIX compatibility and access to a command-line interface through Bash, although internally it is not a Unix-derived operating system."
There's a reimplementation, Haiku
https://www.haiku-os.org/
This is not a signature.
Thought experiment, what if we completed the pro feature list of the main linux multimedia apps and optionally ported them to a BeOS derivative (haiku)?
You see, thinking is easy.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
~sigh~ this is addressed in the first paragraph of the article. I guess it was too easy just to jump on that fairly minor point though rather than actually comment on the article at length. Slashdot at it's worst.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
Oh great, an _additional_ item to install serially after you get a basic Windows running, with its own installer and set of annoying dialogs. Not like it wouldn't be better to have file formats supported natively, PDF support, something like VirtuaWin or Expose, and Microsoft dev tools included rather than a £17,000 extra to make WIndows within spitting distance of everything else.
No they're not. They're meant for the tasks at hand.
You mean to tell me the OS running a point of sale terminal and the OS running the systems at the airport should both be set up to run nethack? Or that a Wii U is supposed to do actuarial tables?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
If I copy huge files, while doing video processing, running a VM, and switching from one tab to another in the web browser, the system become quite unusable...
He could still be responsive with dynamic I/O priority handled by GUI and kernel.
What we lack most is some intention-aware GUI and OS kernel, working together so that the right process get the right priority and that I/O bottlenecks are handled gracefully.
Content creation activities are often I/O and CPU demanding, and even on creativity praised OS such as Mac OS we have this big problem of I/O channel unawareness.
Example:
One need to be able to start a huge file copy with a background intent so it will be throttled when the user starts a video effect preview which writes temporary files on one of the same disks of the copy.
The GUI gives the video preview higher priority, even on I/O, and the kernel detects the bottleneck on one of the disks and decide to almost freeze the file copy.
But then the user start the full video rendering in background, the GUI assigns the lower priority and the file copy resume to full I/O speed.
A true OS aimed at "creative" in my opinion needs much more than this. To name a few things:
- OS level handling of color information and an OS API/CMM which every application accesses and uses (no app-specific color management and no app-specific algorithms and "rules". Same for printer drivers
- specialized file system which offers the possibility to actually have "asset" folders. Not the possibility to create a folder and name it assets, but an actual logic to files stored in it's parent folder which different applications again can understand and access. Same goes for projects. The OS has to understand what we are working on, and not give us the possibility to think up our own project folder structure, which is different from company to company to freelancer
- integrated, transparent versioning of projects, their main files and assets. as simple right click => "create versioned directory/project", with an OS API which the applications hook into. the file manager needs to have the possibility to easily roll back the whole folder including assets to version 06, for example, without losing other version. easy ability to branch from one version to another and develop them simultanously. this needs to have a very good UI so I can QUICKLY find what I am searching for
- these functions need to work on network shares, with multiple users, and need an easy export/import feature, so I can export/pack the project, send it to an external, and get the new one back, and I can quickly and easily import it back in.
- fonts are assets! not something you hide somewhere in the OS folder. also, and I mean it: some kind of DRM fonts, so I can send out copyrighted fonts to an external which will only work inside the project folder I just exported and sent him. - integrated time logging. set up OS wide rules which applications to log, and when to stop logging (after x minutes without mouse movement etc.). easy export of "how long did I work in project XYZ, on file XYZ, in application XYZ". Again, has to work with multiple users over the network
For most of these functions, there is a solution, sometimes even a close on in some OS (Timemachine, Shadow files) etc., but you have to piece the stuff together, and most of the times, one component or another breaks the concept due to an update, or it simply is to cumbersome for some people to handle and again the whole thing breaks down. or it is damn expensive. Many time loggers come to mind, which scan window titles to try to find out which file you are working on, and often break with new versions of applications or foreign versions.
Such an OS would be a killer app/OS, but it will never exist. If market share is low, the big apps won't be ported. And if the big apps are not available, market share stays low.
And I don't think it is possible to create such a thing as a framework layout on top of an OS...it would not feel intuitive enough, and would not hook deeply enough into the inner workings of the OS.
The only company who could pull this off is Apple, but if they would have wanted to, they would have done it already as the last three major OS versions where quite lackluster IMHO when it comes to innovation.
regards
tuo
It depends on what you mean by 'OS': Should the POS and the server be running nethack? Obviously not. Is there any particularly good reason why either device should be running an OS that wouldn't support nethack if it were installed? No, not really (and, in fact, both of them probably do).
As for the Wii U, I assume that if Nintendo felt like releasing a sequel to 'Dr. Mario', where you play as Actuary Wario and attempt to manage the risk pool of Dr. Mario's patients, it wouldn't be the OS that stops them.
It's titled as being about operating system features, but it's almost entirely about application level stuff such as codecs and user interface.
Sorry art folks, you shouldn't ask for a new OS for every different use case. What you want can and should be achieved with UI tweaks.
I agree. I actually RTFA and it feels like he's asking (and answering) the wrong question.
Like if you were to ask: "What is the best kind of paper to print targets on to improve your firearm accuracy?" instead of asking "What is the best ammo/gun/sight to use to improve your firearm accuracy?"
I don't think the OS is the thing to streamline, the actual creative software UI is more important.
I work in both Adobe Creative Suite, and Autodesk 'Smoke,' and they both have a fairly good interface for previewing and moving between applications and/or file/media types.
Smoke runs as a sort of single application, and you just click buttons or swipe between pages of apps. However you can easily move from paint to video editing to sound mixing, without leaving the main program. The UI is consistent from module to module. Smoke has (in the past) been ported for IRIX, LINUX and Mac OS.
In the Adobe CS you still have to launch different apps, but a good deal of file manipulation "common ground" is had in their 'Bridge' app. Moving media between apps is also streamlined, you don't need to render and export/import to move a project or media between apps.
Right now is Windows. Final Cut Pro was bastardized into Imovie pro. and Linux has absolutely nothing that is useable.
Windows has a lock on it as the only platform that runs AVID and Sony Vegas for the only two professional platforms for video editing and After Effects as the ONLY EFX software platform that is useable.
And this makes me sad. All the Linux options are utter garbage or for making videos of your cat, none are usable for a feature length film or even a professional looking TV show.
The only good option is to use Blender, a 3D graphics program to do some video editing by using one of it's side functions, but it is unusable for anyone doing professional work or needs to collaborate with others OR work with large projects, Blender chokes hard on anything large. And the problem is that 99% of all the developers out there are far more interested in ooooh shiny features and not basics that need to be 100% reliable.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You don't need an OS for that. What would be needed would be an application suite that handles everything on his wish list seamlessly. It could run on any OS.
Mod parent up. I came here to say this. BE is still used today to mix audio since its a real-time OS and very capable of doing things other OSes of the its day just plain were not up to.
The interface is ultra minimalistic and it follows a lot of what an awesome OS should be.
With a dual-boot setup, this machine was also my first foray into Linux outside of a virtual machine.
He also just kind of lumps all Linux distros into one, it's not until the last page that you get to this:
Things that are coming in Ubuntu are meaningless to me because all the programs I use that have Linux versions require RHEL-based distros.
First, some specific examples would be nice. I've never had this problem and unlike most Linux users, I deal with the world of making "creative content" more than maintaining servers or hacking out code. Most Linux programs don't seem to care about what distro you're using. Ubuntu Studio is my OS of choice for the creative stuff. I used to use Mac OS X but it's just pointless now because there's a free alternative for everything I do on Linux.
I use Mint for the standard OS stuff. The Red Hat distros I always viewed as more server-oriented, which is why I found this statement to be so bizarre. Ubuntu Studio is tailored to the creative types so he should have reviewed that distro specifically. He mentions Ubuntu here and there throughout the article, but from his statements it's very apparent that he's using the standard distro with the Unity interface. The applications that Studio comes preinstalled with can be manually installed on Ubuntu, and the XFCE interface it uses can also be installed on Ubuntu, but what makes studio unique is its low-latency kernel.
That's not to say that Ubuntu Studio is the uber-creative OS this guy seeks. I'm an amateur musician and when I need to do image manipulation professionally it consists of little things (I'm not creating 3D models, animations, etc.). Maybe the professional creator who "works efficiently at an almost pathological level" needs some of the advantages of Mac OS X and the propriety software available on it, but it would have been nice if he had at least singled out the Linux distro that's attempting to compete and only used that one as a comparison.
As an amateur, Ubuntu Studio fits my needs perfectly and allows me to avoid the high costs of buying OS X software. The OS X software does look nicer but that's not worth anything to me as it doesn't alter the end result. Comparing Ubuntu Studio to OS X for me is like comparing my made in Mexico Fender Jaguar to a custom shop American Jaguar. Sure, I had to change the pickups to get an optimal sound, I had to adjust the neck a little to get the action just where I wanted it, but it was still a way better deal than forking over several times as much cash for the custom shop guitar. The custom shop guitar would have all sorts of little cosmetic details that would really impress people who see it, but when people listen to the final recording they can't tell the difference.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
I was going to say BeOS as well. One interesting thing was their codec API. All you needed to do was drop a codec binary in a directory and any program could now open that file. So if you wanted to play mp4 files through your favorite video player, you simply dropped an mp4 codec in there and any video player could now open those files. The idea was to move all media processing into the OS API so building applications was more modular.
Another interesting thing was that audio CD's were mounted as a directory full of wav files with CDDB data that you could simply encode or play directly or drag and drop into another folder.
It also used a microkernel (Though JBQ once told me directly that it was marketing BS and wasn't much of a microkernel) and ran most of the OS in user space including drivers. You never had to worry about trying to run new beta drivers, just copy them over and restart the corresponding server. If the driver crashed you were informed via a message box with a humorous Damn button instead of an Ok button. Though, it was also a drawback as the networking server in user space was notoriously slow. So slow that 100mbit cards couldn't push more than 10Mbps. Though its strong point was multithreading and parallel processing built into the API. It scaled nicely with multiple CPU's (I ran mine on an Abit P6 with dual 333MHz celerons OC'd to 450MHz) and there were reports posted of it running on quad and octal Xeon systems playing two dozen videos and all the demo apps without the machine breaking a sweat. You also had the pretty sweet Pulse application which was a CPU monitor which also allowed you to switch CPU's on and off. Before R3 you could actually turn off all of the CPU's and crash the system :-).
Some of this might sound trivial by todays standards but they were doing this in 1998. Before Microsoft got its shit together with 2000 (NT 5) and before MacOS X. In fact, Be was founded by ex Apple employees and BeOS was supposed to be an alternative to MacOS on the old PowerPC Macs. It was very efficient and made old Pentium 133MHz systems with 32MB RAM feel fast. But its closed source nature coupled with user space networking made it slow to adopt new technology. It was a nice OS with a pretty cool community. Too bad its pretty much dead.
Sorry, but pointy jabs at OSes are well deserved in this case (ex-film industry guy here). Linux is used extensively within the film industry, but each studio requires a small army of linux gurus to patch and modify the OS and kernel just to keep the OS from constantly falling over. Whilst none of the gurus complain (they get paid a healthy salary), it's a real shame that an artist simply cannot perform these tweaks themselves (recompiling a kernel is not for the faint of heart!). You'll also find a few Mac pros knocking about, but there the problems are just plain ridiculous. The lag between new OpenGL version & GPU features, v.s. the adoption into OS X is just insane. If you're predominantly linux, with a few hundred mac OS X boxes, it's kinda nice to be able to provide the same toolset to users on both platforms (As an R&D programmer, my role was to help improve the performance of art tools). Sadly, if you have OS X in the mix, this becomes extremely unpleasant. You end up with the high performance version on linux (leveraging any GPU feature available to give the artists the ability to work on scenes with hundreds of millions of polygons), and then you have the crippled OS X version that craps out after 10 million (even though the GPU used in both machines is identical). Windows isn't without it's problems (being effectively stuck with a single user->single computer mindset), but at least you can still exploit the underlying hardware. The reality is, if you're a creative professional, working with computers is still a massive ball-ache. It's a shame that people who write the OSes haven't really put much consideration into figuring out how their users actually use the things.
Of course, KDE isn't an operating system.
That depends on how you define "operating system". I'm aware that some define OS as kernel, but I was under the impression that KDE on Linux felt like KDE on FreeBSD. I read the article, and only a few items related to video drivers or multitasking performance would need direct support from a kernel.
If the driver crashed you were informed via a message box with a humorous Damn button instead of an Ok button.
Sounds like XV. Not officially updated since 1994 and still one of the best image viewers out there. It had "Bummer!" and "That sucks!" buttons for write errors such as disk full or permission denied.
And they were right. It's not OK.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
An OS's primary goal should be to manage the hardware
The screen is hardware. A window manager application divides it into areas for applications. The disk drive is hardware. A file system divides it into areas for documents, and a file manager application allows arranging and locating these documents. The "OS" of the article refers not to the kernel as much as to window manager and file manager applications and system-wide libraries that support audiovisual creative use cases.
What I noticed is that the so-called 'creative types' who use OS/X tend to produce the same work. They use the same software with the same methodology that produces roughly the same results. Instead of thinking about the result and trying to get to it, s/he wonders how the proprietary software X, that everyone uses, can get to that result. Heck, maybe the best way to get at the answer does not even require software. We have centuries of design and there are some wonderful concepts that people developed without proprietary software crap or pricey, boring crapbook pro. Maybe what we need is to get creative. There are ARTISTS who made great work WITHOUT a computer. When I flip through contemporary design books, much of the stuff tends to bore me out of my skull. I love Anime for instance, but notice that the designs now tend to be the same. When it was free cel, hand drawn, you tended to have more variation in style. Same with music, as a electronic music enthusiast, new albums sound same-ish because the same damn software and plugins are deployed. The great masters of sound produced with analog limitations, but somehow had richer, more varied textures than what I hear today. Look at King Tubby and Lee Scratch Perry who had to build their own equipment, and now how many "dub" electronic artists try to reverse engineer that sound through computers. I am not anti-computer, but really, stop making it the default approach every damn time.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
Why is it that people think creativity applies exclusively to art? "Creative types"? I've seen scientists who are way more creative when doing science than most "creative types".
I mostly used BeOS in grad school because I liked alternative operating systems, but several times I'd try to port my work to Windows or Windows NT and find myself astonished at how impossible my this stuff was to do on other computers at the time (late 1990s.) NT's architecture and event processing often prohibited the sort of real-time audio and video apps I was writing, and the API standing between me and the data was much more restrictive.
In retrospect, I think a number of my research successes were accidentally due to using an OS that would let me implement some really nutty ideas.
It wasn't the closed-source nature of it.
It was stupidly bad business decisions, because they were counting on Apple to buy them out.
Back when Apple was shopping around for something to replace Classic MacOS, they strongly considered buying out Be. But Jean-Louis Gassee (the CEO, and former Apple lead) decided he's get greedy and demanded that Be was worth $300M. After all, who needed what Be had? Apple.
Unfortunately, Apple called their bluff and decided that Be wasn't quite worth that much, and since Gassee and Amelio couldn't agree on the price, they left the bargaining table. In the end, a Steve Jobs made a very compelling argument to purchase NeXT and its technologies outright, for a whopping $450M (and Jobs would help see the transition through and all that stuff).
Of course, this spurning by Apple hurt Be quite badly - they were hurting for systems and all that, and the dot-com crash pretty much did them in.
Things would be different today had Apple and Be actually managed to come to an agreement....