Steve And The BeOS - Jan. 5th, 1997
I've started to use Claris HomePage 2.0b1 for MacOS for these pages, simply because typing all those anchor links in HTML is painful. I've been somewhat astonished by the response the site has gotten, thanks
to Macintouch and the news group.
I'll try and keep this information as fresh as possible.
Table of Contents
- Tips
- Fonts
- Workspaces
- File Compression
- Database Bugs
- Searching
- New Mindset
- Real Multitasking
- MIDI
- Edit's Weird Saving
- Programming all the way down here?
- User Response
- Crashes
CMD-` switches between this and the previous Workspace you were using.
You can change the look and feel of the scroll bars via the Scroll Bars Preferences panel. However, the changes will not take effect until you close and reopen each window, resulting in a user interface that has different scroll bars in different windows! This should be fixed.
The fonts in BeOS appear to be some form of outline font. The speed of font redering is amazing. A sample Font Demo application allows you to change the size, shear and rotation of the words "Be, Inc" You can do all three as fast as you can the move the mouse!
However, when using small point text, such at 14pt or smaller, the text often lays out poorly. I'm guessing this is because the hints are just not there for the smaller point sizes.
In MacOS, QuickDraw will favor a bitmap font if it has one. This is super, but does not allow for glyph modification such as shearing. I think QuickDraw GX has a lot of hints for small points to ensure it looks good.
I'm told that the BeOS workspaces come from X-Windows. I dunno, but they sure are neat!
Basically, imagine having up to 32 virtual screens, each with its own resolution and desktop color. Each workspace can have its own set of windows, documents, etc open. You can tailor one workspace for a work report, another for code development, etc.
Then it gets cool. Be supplies a nifty little application called Workspaces, which gives Workspaces a graphical user interface. You get a window of (in this example) 3x3 mini-representations of your workspaces.
This is nice, but the big deal is that the mini-screens are live! You can drag a window from another workspace right into your current workspace. You gotta see this demoed at MacWorld if you are going. Its too cool.
My only gripe with Workspaces so far is that BeOS does not remember which documents you had open at restart time. You can spend a lot of time setting up 9 workspaces only to crash, or need to boot MacOS, and lose all that work. Granted, the Mac does not do this either, but it would be a nice option. :)
Be needs some help here from the folks at Aladdin Systems. I know, they want to use the Unix tools Tar and gzip to appease the geeks, but at the minimum they need a GUI on this process.
Tar, which stands for Tape ARchive, is an age old archiving program that can archive files and their hierarchies, etc. Think of it as Stuffit without compression.
gzip is a compression utility. Its the compression part of Stuffit.
So you download the hot software MIDI synthesier that Be released. You get a file like midi.tar.gz. You need to now launch a terminal window and:
>cd "Geek Files"
>/bin/gunzip midi.tar.gz
>/bin/tar xvf midi.tar
Needless to say, I'm a Geek and this is too much for me on a day to day basis. :)
While showing BeOS to a friend, we found that the database queries are currently broken in some circumstances.
We made a new Person record and added his name and company. However, no Query would find him, neither by name nor company. Only the 'Find All Person' query worked.
We then decided to muck with the default Mailbox query, which is "Find Email where Status = "Read" or Status = "New." Since you can edit a query right in the query window, we deleted the "Status = Read" expression. Sure enough it changed. Then, we typed the expression back in and the query failed.
We then make a new Query via the Find dialog for the same data and that worked fine. Copying and pasting the query still didn't work. Oh well, I didn't want that Mailbox query anyway. :)
With all of the other wonderful features, I was kinda bummed to see that I could not search files for text, nor could I search the bodies of email.
One of the interesting apsects of an OS like BeOS is the new mindset you have to get into when using it.
For example, I was installing CodeWarrior DR2 from their CD and was patiently sitting around witing for it to finish. Then it donned on me, "You dummy! This OS is cool!"
So I started playing movies, editing my First Impressions file (this entry specifically) etc.
Another example is the menus. On MacOS, if you bring down a menu, everything stops while you brain fart on what Font to select. Not in BeOS. The movies still played, the animations still ran.
Did I go gaga over true premptive multiasking yet? Unix folks, don't send me email, I know. :)
Everytime Retrospect 3.0 starts in the background of my 8500/120 and kills my keyboard for 10 seconds, thus losing keystrokes, I know that I cannot wait for a real preemptive OS on my Mac.
The BeBox (Be's own computer) has MIDI ports on it, but the Power Macintosh does not. Not having serial drivers for the Mac yet meant that you could not play MIDI under BeOS.
But, Be has released a wondeful software MIDI synthesizer. You can get it from the Be web site.
Get the large, 4MB version. Its worth it. For some fun MIDI files, check out my friend Chris' web site.
Don't drag that Edit document to the Dock! Apparently when Edit saves a file, it saves it to a new file, deletes the old one and then renames the new file.
This has the sideffects of having the file move in the Browser window and being removed from the Dock!
My suggestion to the Edit author would be to duplicate the original, save into the original and if it goes OK, delete the duplicate.
Programming All The Way Down Here?
Yeah, I know. Sheesh.
I wrote my first BeOS Application yesterday. It simply puts up a window and thats it. I used John Wette's example Loop application for some neat tricks. Check it out.
I got BeOS with the CodeWarrior DR 2 package, so I tossed the CodeWarrior installed by BeOS (I'm not sure what it was) and installed the new version.
The compiler is pretty much the same as the Mac version, with the excepion that some options are in the "main menu" to the right of the Be Menu, while others are in the project windows's menu. Be really needs to clean up their menus.
The compiler works great, allowing you to compile up to 4 files at once, each in their own thread. When that 6 604e prcoessor box shows up, this will be sweet... :)
The debugger was, well, buggy. CMD-R for Run and CMD-S for Step did not work. You could select the menu items, but thats a pain. This will probably be fixed in the next release, I hope. <hint, hint>
AppSketcher, Be's equivilent to Metrowerk's Constructor, was included on the Be CD, but I have not toyed with it yet.
My first app will be one that takes my Now Contacts exports file and imports it into the BeOS Database as Person records, hopefully with some additonal fields like Address 2, etc.
User response to this site has been wonderful. Thanks!
Blake Harris and Jonah Kowall report that most of my crashes reported yesterday were non-existant in the BeBox hosted BeOS. Blake also mentioned that the new File system rewrite should fix a lot of the database problems. If the file system is as fast or faster than it is now, we're in for a treat.
Toby D Sanchez suggested turning on the write verification bit on the Jaz to solve some of the file related crashes on the Jaz. I have not done this yet.
I only had one crash today. The Audio Server, which is the OS code that handles audio, it a little finicky. With Audio In set to mic, we launched the CD PLayer app which promptly dropped into the BeOS debugger.
Now, don't go equating this to MacsBug. The 1984 movie was still playing (fitting I thought) and an animation was stull running.
I issued an ES (Exit To Shell, hey, this is a developer release) command and the app quit. But, sound was messed up.
I tried to shut down, but I got a dialog box saying that "The Audio Server is not responding. Give it more time or Blow it Away?" Well, Blow It Away! of course! Nope, nothing. Shutdown again, same thing. Later, Rinse, Repeat. CMD-OPT-POWER solved this problem.
© Copyright 1997-2002 Steve Riggins. Graphics by Andrew Duncan.
