OSgeeks.net Comes Online

There's a new alternative OS friendly website out, and it's called OSgeeks.net. Feel free to check it out, use the forums, and otherwise make yourself comfy. Also don't forget to vote on the poll. The BeOSJournal won't kid you... we WANT you to vote for BeOS. ;-).... You might also want to drop them an email and let them know how you feel about the site. Great work so far, we think it looks splendid!

What They Said : Neil Morris.

Where did you learn to sound that good on BeOS Radio?
I don't know that I am that good :) I was a professional broadcaster back in the eighties and, before that, a volunteer on a hospital radio station. I've been out of the business for a long time but once it's in your soul it sort of sticks.

What sound card do you use these days in BeOS, and why?
The SB Live is always my first choice... it always works in BeOS and it's very easy to set up for recording as well, which is important to me as an amateur broadcaster and musician.

Any comments on how to promote openBeOS once it hits store shelves?
I should leave that one to the marketing specialists really... I think availability is the key though. If it's promoted well and people can get it quickly and easily they may well try it, like it and stick with it. If they read good things about it but can't get hold of it easily they won't even bother looking at it.

What They Said : Peter Moore.

What animal best represents BeOS?
An Octopus....many hands (threads?? :P ) make light work.

What is your current favorite feature of BeOS?
I have too many fave features, small footprint and maybe different resolutions in different workspaces is cool.

How long until you next release something for the BeOS Community?
In the next few weeks I hope to release a new version of SnortMonitor :)

Interview with Simon Gauvin of beunited.org, Part II

The BeOSJournal spent a solid 2 hours with Simon Gauvin, and finished up the second part of what has turned out to be, an amazing interview. Unfortunately, due to real life issues, neither Daat nor Nutcase could make it in time, so we decided to go ahead and finish up part II. We would welcome further questions from the community at large, as we're sure there will be ground we didn't have time to cover.

Read More...

What They Said : Tom Artosorse.

What was your first reaction to the discovery of BeOS?
My first reaction to BeOS was kinda like 'blimey guv, this makes windows look even more appalling that I already thought it was'. I was pretty much hooked on BeOS from the word go, that first experience being the infamous pc mag cover disc that was the bootable demo.

Who is the person you most respect in the BeOS Community?
I'm not sure I respect any one person in the BeOS community more than any other but there are a few guys that do put in that extra bit of effort to keep the community interested. Dane Scott is still running BeOS Radio which is a good thing, and of course Neil Morris adds the all important UK touch with his posh voice news-reading. Then there's the guys behind the websites such as BeBits and of course TBJ - keeping as many BeOS sites up and running as possible is very important so respect to you guys. Over and above this though, the ones that really deserve the full respect of the community are the coders. Without there selfless dedication BeOS would have died with Be Inc. It's thanks to the coders that we are getting exciting apps like SampleStudio.

If you could fly anywhere in the world, what country would it be, and why?
If I could fly anywhere in the world I would to go to Iceland - just saw a program on the TV about it once and thought it looked like a proper bonkers type of place. Would suit me down to the ground!

Blizzard Entertainment Passes Up BeOS Development

To compliment many of the new features "Zeta" will be bringing the BeOS community an attempt to get 3rd party developers to consider the BeOS as a future development platform has begun. The first piece of feed back was received on 10/02/02 from Blizzard Entertainment.

Blizzard was just one of many 3rd party developers contacted to raise awareness of the Be OS - Zeta - & OBOS platforms for development in hopes of bringing choice & awareness of our efforts & existence to a commercial reality. Sadly Blizzard has stated that at the moment they are content with their current development platform & do not wish to support other operating systems at this time.

The contact with Blizzard was one of 2 major development gaming firms that were contacted in the hopes of generating a future for BeOS gaming. The other gaming firm has yet to respond, but hopes are high as winning over companies to use R&D time, money, & manpower on a new application programming interface (API) will take time.

Sit tight folks, for some day we may play Quake 5 on BeOS *cough* or whatever it is called in the future.

Here follows the discourse of our communication with Blizzard Entertainment:

Dear Jess,

Thank you for your e-mail to Blizzard. Your e-mail was forwarded to me by our sales department. Thank you for your thorough explanation on the benefits of the Be OS. However, we are very satisfied with our currentsolutions and do not plan to explore additional development tools.

Thank you for your interest in working with Blizzard.

Sincerely,
Elaine Di Iorio
Director of Business Development
Blizzard Entertainment"

-- Original Letter to Blizzard --

Hello,

My name is Jess Tipton marketing relations for YellowTab. I am contacting you in hopes of starting a development relationship. We represent the furthering development of the former Be OS.

The BeOS & future versions are a media OS designed for rapid development of media & software for professional level developers & common users alike. On behalf of the community & developers continuing this incredible computer operating system we would like to invite you to consider our platform for future development from Blizzard Entertainment.

Gaming plays a vital role in our marketing road map & would value a partnership with Blizzard to bring quality entertainment software to a new platform giving consumers more choices & you as a developer a chance to not only broaden your sales but possibly lower your development time & yield a faster "To Market Time", while reaching new technological heights & pushing your development process one step further to increase the level of innovation found in Blizzard software titles. As you know Gaming is a vital market in the home PC market.

From Businessmen to children games are a large market as you well know & depend on for your livelihood. Our marketing road map requires a solid development relationship with 3rd party developers to further both ours & your reputation. This will give you the opportunity to find a new market in a thriving competitive home & professional operating system for both x86 & PPC architectures as well realizing the advanced API's capabilities & extremely low latency as the opportunity to push your games one step further "eeking" out more performance & incredible effects from hardware that could simply not perform the same under a competing platform.

We offer you community & the realization people want a choice & this movement is becoming more clear with open source movements. We give you a well structured development platform with a solid, graceful, easy to use API allowing your development team more creative freedom to bring your projects to life & less time spend on debugging & error correction. I look forward to hearing back from you & sincerely hope you will consider us as a choice for your future projects. For technical & API documentation please go to http://bang.dhs.org/be/bebook.html

Thank you for your time,

Sincerely,
Jess Tipton
- Marketing Relations -

http://www.yellowtab.com

What can the community do you may ask? Email me with developers that you feel should be contacted. There are many good 3rd party companies that can help further our efforts & with enough contact it will at least raise awareness for our future & current projects. Also any chance you get speaking to sales people in stores or any other situation where you can voice your needs & opinions as a consumer make it known you want choice. Write developers yourself & let them know you want to see their software for alternative OS platforms. Most current software titles game or other wise have feed back forms... use them.

- Jess Tipton

Thank You Complexero

Mike, you ROCK. Thank you so much for putting TBJ back online after our brief bandwidth overrun. I think it's safe to say that without your kindness, generousity, and goodwill, for the past year, TBJ would not have been able to do what it's done, and that is commit itself to reporting the news of the BeOS Community.

So, I thank you, my staff thanks you, and I'm positive that everyone reading this thanks you. It's from the heart.

If you want to show Mike how much TBJ means to you, please a kind email or two, or three ;) and tell him. He deserves a lot of kudos for being such a great host. So far, TBJ has had to spend nothing for the past year to be online. I think that is wonderful.

What They Said : Brent Miszalski.

Who is the current "JLG" of today's BeOS Community?
I don't think we have one member of the community analogous to the infamous JLG. His hardened nipples are a sheer freak of nature, something that cannot be inherited by BeOS usage alone. But, perchance it can?? Who knows, perchance the evolution of the OpenBeOS project could yield Michael Phipps as our "Fearless Leader", only time will tell.

What do you think of Palm Inc?
Hoarders of the Holy Grail.

How often do you listen to BeOS Radio?
Not as often as I should :-)
With a 56k modem, usually all my bandwidth is used up. Also, I just have lots of mp3s so I just don't think of starting up BeOSRadio.
Maybe I will start it up more in the future.

Mini-Interview with Tyler Dauwalder from openBeOS

The BeOSJournal recently fired off an email to the hard working Tyler Dauwalder from openBeOS, who is working on the Registrar along with Ingo Weinhold, and he replied in short order.
We'd also like to thank Ingo Weinhold for his wonderful work, whom as Tyler told us via email, a lot of work would not have been possible if not for Ingo. Great job!
Now, on to our mini-interview...

TBJ : We're glad to hear about the recent progress with the Registrar reaching its second milestone; can you tell us what a registrar is, and what yours can do at this point, in real world terms?

Tyler : The BeOS registrar is a program that runs quietly in the background, serving a variety of tasks. A few of the major tasks are:

• The registrar manages a list of running applications. For example, when one application wants to talk to another application, it asks the registrar the "address" of the destination program so it knows where to send messages to.
• The registrar facilitates the system's clipboards for passing data via copy/cut/paste operations.
• The registrar manages the system's file type database (i.e. the MIME database), which contains information such as which applications support a given file type, which icon is associated with a given file type, etc. Also, the registrar periodically runs a "sniffer", which crawls through your hard drive attempting to identify the types of untyped files.
• The registrar orchestrates the sytem shutdown sequence, asking running applications to quit, notifying the kernel that it's time to shut down, etc.

TBJ : When do you expect to reach milestone 3, and just how difficult is the road ahead?

Tyler : Well, we started discussing the registrar four months ago, and started coding three months ago. The remaining tasks should be less involved than those already completed, so I would hope we'd be able to finish up milestone 3 a bit more quickly. :-)

TBJ : How compartmentalized is the work on the registrar? Will there ever be a point where you can not continue until something X has to be completed first? What is that X?

Tyler : The basic registrar functionality needed to be implemented one piece after another, but that sort of linear progression is not so necessary anymore. The handful of remaining tasks in particular are unrelated enough that they could, for the most part, be worked on independently and concurrently, assuming we had the resources to do so.
As to any potential roadblocks, when it comes time to finally handle the system shutdown services, we're going to need our own app_server and BWindow implementations in order to display the system shutdown window we're all familiar with. And to get everything technically completed, it's all going to need to be running on our own kernel.
But other than that, I believe all of the remaining functionality should be implementable whenever we get around to making it happen. :-)

TBJ : Thanks Tyler... It really helps a lot to allow everyone have a small glimpse into the world of the openBeOS coders...

Tyler : My pleasure. :-) Thanks for continuing to be an active part of the BeOS community. :-)

-Tyler

You can find out more information about Tyler and Ingo's work at the openBeOS website, in the Storage Team area. Thanks again to everyone who is making openBeOS a reality. Without your hard work and dedication, it would be a far more depressing world to compute in. ;-)

OpenBeOS Updates: Newsletter and Registrar Milestone 2!!

A couple of updates come to us from OpenBeOS land. First, we have a new newsletter, which brings it up to Issue 27. In this issue (a very long one), they've included 3 (count'em) rants by FL#2 (as someone said) Michael Phipps and one by Daniel Reinhold. Go check it out right here.

Second update, is a big one. A new milestone (Milestone 2) has been reached by the Registrar. It's Milestone 2 out of 4, and it comes to us due to a great job done by Ingo and Ted. Here's the scope:

After much dilligent work by Ingo and myself, registrar milestone 2 has been reached! :-)
In addition to everything we had before (complete running application support and inter-app messaging, plus a BRoster skeleton) we now have non-running application querying in BRoster, plus complete MIME support (i.e. BNodeInfo, BAppFileInfo, the C mime functions, BMimeType, and mime database support in the registrar).
Ingo has already begun work on milestone 3, for which is planned complete BRoster support (launching, watching, recent support, broadcasting) as well as complete BMessageRunner and BClipboard implementations.

Great job guys, keep it up.

UPDATE:
It seems there are only _two_ rants by Michael, the first one isn't.. damn it! :)

What They Said : Marcin Konicki (Shard), BeOS Developer.

Why is BeShare important to you?
It's the place where I found a LOT of helpful people when I tried BeOS for a first time. Now it's a place when I can meet friends from all over the world, test my apps, try to get help and to help others. It's a kind of Living Knowledge Well about BeOS :)

What sort of applications are you working on?
Currently I'm working on a small deskbar replicant, new (better! hehe ;) JPEGTranslator, and sometimes I make some patches to OpenTracker. I also have plans for the next release of the Zip'O'Matic replacement, and a lot more different apps.

What is the feature you most want to see in BeOS?
Conquer the world! hehe ;]] no, not really. It would make BeOS/OBOS number one enemy for most of the world (just like OtherOS). I would like to see it as an OS mainly for creative people, trying to make a human world a better place :)

New Feature @ TBJ: What They Said

We're starting a brand new feature at The BeOSJournal, and it's name is What They Said. It's a series that will ask 3 questions to various members of the BeOS Community, and post their answers here. We're striving to make it a daily series, or at the very least, a new WTS every couple of days. Stay tuned for more updates!

Here is our first WTS:

What They Said : David Shipman, Media Kit Developer.

What is the most exciting thing to happen to you in the past 7 days?
Hearing from an old friend, who I hadn't spoken to in years - oddly, they found my email address through the OBOS site since they're starting BeOS development too - funny how these things work out.

Care to comment on BeGeistert?
Community is a big part of the "BeOS experience", so events like this are especially important - and as OBOS progresses, I think the next few BeGeisterts will really help developers pull together, meeting face-to-face, as well as being a lot of fun.

What is your favorite thing about BeOS?
It's the first (only ?) OS I've found that really feels natural, almost like an extension of the user themselves - and thats an amazing thing for creativity.

Thanks David! If you want to contribute to a WTS, plese feel free to drop us a line at and we will whip up 3 questions post-haste! ;)

First Historic Meeting of Open Standards Group

beunited.org has recently reported on the first historic meeting of the Open Standards Group. More from Simon Gauvin himself:

"It was a truly a great experience for me to see all the leads of the OSBOS projects discussing and working together", said Simon Gauvin, president of beunited.org, "and it makes me proud and confident that the road ahead will be a tremendous success for everyone involved."...

This is exciting to us at TBJ, since it such open communcation is possible if given a chance. Keep up the great work, everyone!

Blender & BeGeistert Conference Reminders

Just wanted to let people know that I'll be heading to both the Blender3D conference in Amsterdam, and the BeGeistert conference in Germany, so if anyone has questions about either, and can't make it, please let me know. I will be conducting at lesat 1 interview at each conference, and getting some valuable commentary from many, many computer users.