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First of all, I had to make sure I had all the necessary hardware to run it. They don't support a lot of it on the PC, but luckily I had just the right system to run it (for example, they only support SoundBlaster AWE64 right now, and I've got it. Also, the Matrox Mystique is one of the few supported video cards, and I've got that as well!).
I received it about 2 weeks after ordering it, and then proceeded to install it on my NT machine. It comes with PartitionMagic, a program to help make new partitions by making existing partitions smaller. I didn't really need PM since I was installing to a separate drive (Western Digital 1GB IDE). A very simple installation allowed me to choose my source drive containing the install files, and the destination drive (which had to be formatted with the BFS file system). The only other options were "Clean Install" (to overwrite existing settings), and "Install Optional Items."
Only fifteen minutes later it was installed! It said to press the button to reboot into BeOS, so I did. Only trouble was, it didn't boot up! After screwing around with it for a day or so, I found that the problem seemed to be with the Western Digital... BeOS must not like it. I freed up some room on my primary drive, a Maxtor 5GB, and BeOS installed perfectly.
The trick with installation is to leave some space on your hard drive as unpartitioned. Then use the BeOS installer program to format it to BFS, and initialize it.
The first thing that impressed me
Bootup speed. It took about 10-15 seconds from the time my machine started to when the icons and windows were drawn on the desktop! (P200, 80MB ram). Normally NT server takes about 30-45 seconds to completely load (granted, it must also load some network services that I wasn't loading on BeOS).
The Good, the Bad: The GUI
It was nice. :) Very clean, high tech looking. The Deskbar is their equivalent to the Taskbar in Windows. I like the Deskbar better, because it only shows one listing per program. So if I had 5 web browser windows open, there was only one "Browser" listing on the Deskbar. To reach the other windows, just click the listing and a submenu pops up. Their equivalent to Windows Explorer is the Tracker. It keeps track of all windows of that type, just as other programs do.
Instead of minimize/maximize buttons, BeOS has one button that either fits the window to the contents, or returns it to it's "normal" size. Instead of minimizing windows, you "hide" them by double clicking on the tab (the tab is like a Title Bar in Windows, except it's only as wide as the title of the window). I didn't really like having to double click to minimize, I thought it would be nice to have a second button to do that. There is also a close button on the left side of the tab. The active window's tab is always yellow (I didn't notice a way to change that).
The scrollbars were configurable! I like this a lot. You could specify the minimum size for the scrollbar handle (you know how in Windows, when you're working with a really long set of data, and the handle always shrinks down to a few millimeters? Well, this fixes it!). You could specify the "ridges" on the handle (purely for show). You could also specify whether you wanted Windows style scrollbars (i.e. they have a up arrow at the top, a down arrow at the bottom), or the default BeOS style (both arrows at the top and bottom). I preferred BeOS style, since I didn't have to move around much if I wanted to go back and forth in a window.
The other GUI widgets seemed pretty standard to me.
Oh, btw, you could move the Deskbar to certain locations on screen, even making it stretch out at the top or bottom of the window to mimic the Windows95/NT style of taskbar (including the digital clock at the right hand side). This is a nice way to let people from Windows transition to BeOS without having to freak them out!
Other things I noticed about the GUI (good or bad):
Replicants are so cool I decided to give them their own subtopic. :) I don't have much to say about them, because you really have to mess with them to 'get it.' Replicants are program parts that can be copied from a working program, and "pasted" to a document or program that supports replicants! Here's an example. The desktop itself can hold replicant objects. The web browser that comes with BeOS is setup so that the page viewer is a replicant. I dragged it to the desktop, closed the browser program, and was able to continue to browse the web through my desktop! :) Then I just right clicked on it, hit Delete, and that replicant vanished.
BFS and MIME types
BeOS uses internet standard MIME typing throughout the system. There is a program on the Deskbar that lets you force a file to be MIME typed, and apparantly it does this by looking at the file's binary code (MAGIC header, I guess?), which is associated to a mime type somewhere within BeOS. You can add/delete/change MIME types within BeOS.
This fits in perfectly with their file system, BFS, which supports file "attributes." Files can have any number of attributes (sound familiar, Brad? Possible XML use maybe?? :) and those attributes can be displayed in the Tracker windows by the user (just like you can display file types, modification dates, and such in Windows). If you use .zip files to transport files from BeOS, they retain their attributes. Attributes are useful also for sorting the content in the filesystem, and searching it through BeOS's Find program.
Odds and Ends
I think we have a contender here folks! BeOS has some definitely new and unique features. 95% of the things lacking in it right now will likely be addressed before the public release of the OS. As it is now, it's cool but definitely still for geeks only. I think anyone working on the JOS gui should pick up a copy and learn from it.
More?
I'll probably add more here as I notice it. Anyone else is free to add their experiences with BeOS to this page...
-- (4/14/98)
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