Steve And The BeOS - Jan. 5th, 1997
Today I'll talk about the Be Developers Conference amongst other things.Table of Contents
- Be Developers Conference
- Crash followups
On January 11th I attended the BeOS Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA.
Be gave a stage for developers to show off their cool applications, for tools vendors like Metrowerks to show of new Java tools (or at least talk about them) and to brief us on what was coming up in DR9.
DR9 will ship "on or before" March 31st. What amused me was how marketing was calling it a customer release and engineering was calling it a developer release. In either case, DR9 will be shipping with Power Computing machines.
The two main components that interested me were the new file system and tracker.
The new file system will treat database entires as files, meaning that a database rebuild will not lose data. Yeah!
Also, the system is journaled, so should you crash or restart, the system can pick up where it left off. This means no 10 minute delays while the OS scans yiur drives like in MacOS 7.5.
I beleive I heard that the file system was staying case sensitive, which IMHO sucks. If I am wrong, please correct me.
The file system will now have permissions, which means that multiuser capability may be possible in a future version of BeOS.
The tracker used to be called Browser, and was renamed in order to remove confusion with web browsers.
Be is listening! The new tracker will allow icons on the desktop, use MIME types for its files, allow the user to set the default MIME type for an extension, override a particualar files MIME type, support soft links (aliases), resizable and reorderable columns, outline view and live icon dragging, just to name what I wrote down.
I guess I was most impressed that everything on the list was stuff that people asked for.
My problem with booting and not having the keyboard work appears to be a problem with the Apple 1710AV monitor. Using my NEC 17" worked every time.
I have not be able to replicate any of the other crashes. I have had new ones, but was doing nothing in specific when the crash occurred.
© Copyright 1997-2002 Steve Riggins. Graphics by Andrew Duncan.
