Star MacOSX Week: Tales of a BeOS Refugee
Linked by Scot Hacker on Mon 17th Dec 2001 17:34 UTC
Features, Office The story of how a BeOS refugee (and not just everyone, but the author of the 'BeOS Bible' book) lost faith in the future of computing, resigned himself to Windows but found himself bored silly, tore out half his hair at the helm of a Linux box, then rediscovered the joy of computing in MacOSX. Scot Hacker will describe his personal adventures with today's operating systems after he was set out to find an alternative to his beloved (but with no apparent future) BeOS. Update: Make sure you read the second part of the article, a rebutal, found here.
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in response to Michel Clasquin
by rain on Mon 17th Dec 2001 23:32 UTC

"1. "Hey" was the creation of a guy in Hungary, Attila something-or-other. It was never part of BeOS itself AFAIK. Before hey came out,
the only way to "script" in BeOS was to use C++ and dig deep into the API. So to compare hey scripting to that in OSX is not really fair."

Hey itself is just an extension to scripting in BeOS. The scripting support comes with the OS.

"2. and there was another
mail client that eschewed the standard email store in favour of a shared cache with its own Windows port - sorry, the name escapes me. "

i.Scribe is the name, and the idea behind it was to make a cross platform(Windows<->BeOS) e-mail client. So it's perfectly understandable that it uses it's own format ;)

"3. BeOS also had some really bright ideas, like desktop Replicants, that somehow never caught on with developers. "

MacOS also had something similar(I don't remember what they called it). But it went away because so few people were actually using it.

"4. In the same way, it is doubtful that the average user really ever used the power BFS had"

Any BeOS user who has ever used BeMail has also experienced the power of BFS. I think the main reason why regular people hasn't bothered trying to use meta data in BFS even more is simply because they aren't used to having it, it's an unfamiliar concept, they are used to having some special software to store and manage all their information. And I think the same goes for replicants.