Four screenshots that supposed to come from an unreleased internal version of BeOS have emerged on the net. The BeOS info panel in one of the screenshots says that the kernel was built on November 15th 2001, and it has the codename 5.1d0. The BeOS community is arguing that the shots are either fake or original. It is already known (through the BeOS source code leak that happened a few months ago) that Be had a version of an updated Interface Kit and App_Server that would support themes, full double buffering etc, but no more details became known, as Be’s legal department took immediate action back then. Our Take: Speaking as a web designer, if these screenshots are actually fake, the artist has done a pretty good job. Update: At least the WindowBlinds skiners are working hard. Just today, one day after OSNews helped spread the news about the existance of the screenshots in question, JT Folden has created a ‘BeOS 6’ skin for the WindowBlinds theme engine that runs under Microsoft Windows. UPDATE 2: A former Be engineer, who wishes to remain anonymous, confirmed to OSNews that the specific screenshots are likely real. The version of BeOS shown in the pictures is the BeOS desktop-version that was in use internally at Be for development of BeIA (otherwise known as the “BeIA Development Platform”).
Were These Screenshots Taken from BeOS 6?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I don’t think they’re fake, but they certainly didn’t come from a future release of BeOS unless all the execs and all of the dev team went crazy. Be wanted to survive … therefore they wouldn’t have spent a minute developing a new UI when there were so few programmers left. Their time was spent creating BONE, working on OpenGL and the new media server … not fiddling around with the UI. Most everyone I’ve talked to thinks Be had the best looking interface … they wouldn’t go make it less functional (no moving tabs) and attractive.
Though what do I know?
I can deal with palm not wanting to produce and release new versions of BeOS, but the least they could do is release the critical parts of the system on some sort of OSI approved licence. If they care so little about the Be users, then I certainly won’t be buying any new paln or handspring products. I may just go with a new agenda Linux-powered PDA.
I think we’re just going to have to wait for an announcment from Palm. They haven’t said “no” yet so that’s at least a positive. I think they’re working to strip out what they need to make PalmOS 5.0 and who knows … maybe then they’ll release something to us.
I hope, I hope, I hope ….
Speaking of all this, I think I’m going to make a desperate attempt at getting Be to run on this AMD XP system (there’s a hack, but so far I haven’t been able to get it working … probably because I need the new ATA100 IDE driver as well).
Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake (& extremely gimmickly ugly & non-functional gui)
I tried this developer release a while back. It sucked because I couldn’t get a lot of existing BeOS software to work on it. Personally, I don’t like the new look, and I could switch it back to the old style window design. The widgets are a fixed new design though, and I really don’t like those either.
This OS was kinda worthless because I couldn’t get any web browser to work on it (because of BONE). They didn’t even fix Netpositive to work with BONE, and the BONE patches for Bezilla are ancient.
So anyway, there’s nothing really that great here, just a somewhat new UI design, BONE that breaks a lot of apps, and the build I had didn’t seem to have the new OpenGL stuff, I dunno.
If I remember right wasn’t Diana Hackborn (or something like that) working on a new App_Server that was to support better customization? Oh well like we will ever see this materialize, MacOS X here I come.
Sean Long
{tear dropping down cheek}
I think I agree with Kyle above. They (Palm) just CAN’T let something so great just fizzle into obscurity. And if they do, and don’t care about the community or the unpolished diamond they picked up for so cheap, then f*** them too. I won’t buy any future Palm or Palm Licensed products…
Everyday I think I might wake up from this nightmare and that new Be above boots up when I turn my PC formaly loaded with Be. Now it is an all XP computer.
I have seen several itterations of R6 screen designs. These pictures look like earlier, more preliminary images compared to some more refined ones that I have seen. I still have the images on my machine.
In any case some of our x-Be engineers may be able to confirm or deny the screenshots. JBQ, Eugene, any comments?
Let’s hope that the PalmSource Expo ( http://www.palmsource.com ) gives us more insight on the future of our beloved BeOS.
ciao
yc
Those are real! I’ve seen R5.1d0 and I’ve seen the Baqua-them you can even change the Menu/Window/Deskbar-Colors.
ManWithOutName
Uh and by the way. The BeOS/Amiga/Macintosh/Windows98 is no longer working (althogh the entry still exists), also “moving Tab” in BeOS-look is no longer working
ManWithOutName
… the screenshots are really from an unreleased BeOS version. The look you see is only one of the possible themes tough (including the standard BeOS theme but without moving tabs).
-Bruno
and it is a lot newer than i “a while back” as you say.
ummm…..”apparently” the NetPositive works fine and replaces RSA security with OpenSSL….and apparently it works fine…..as i said “apparently”.
As for Net+ not working on BONE ? well i dunno what version of BONE you had but “apparently” it works very well. HTTPS on Opera does not work under BONE but that’s about the only issue.
NoUseForAName aaah yes you are correct on the decor thing…i never used it anyway preferring the standard look.
BeOS will come back….either licensed from Palm or through OpenBeOS. Just be patient as good things come to those who wait. And BeOS IS a good thing.
keep well.
I just love how the “BeOS Community” is two pages of forum users, less than 20 in count. It’s dead folks just let it rest in peace. Palm will never release it as a desktop operating system, it will never be open sourced and has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever seeing daylight again in any form you may be familiar with. Just let it go. Develop elsewhere, OSX, Linux, Microsoft something with at least a solid predictable future (read at least 5 years). You people are like the last guy standing on the back end of the titanic convinced it still wont sink after it’s been broken in half.
There are *way* more than 20 fanatic users in the BeOS community – but not all of them post to newsgroups and/or webpages – and the ones that do don’t all post to the same ones. This isn’t like your Titantic analogy, it’s more like a patient on the operating table getting the electric shocks to the chest. Plenty of them have been damned close to dead – but, somehow, came back.
There’s a lot more support for BeOS than you think. As to whether anything actually comes of it, that’s another story.
There are BeOS users and developers out here in the wasteland, I’m one of them so make the count at least 21!!!!!
22, and counting.
Anyone notice that screen0, the disk was just created a couple days ago ? Seems that this version is still being used by somebody… Very interesting though to see what was in the works. I just hope for some future for BeOS, whether from Palm or independant open source initiatives.
Well I like the GUI look and if they could smooth over the icons alittle, then it could be a serious contender with Windows XP and Mac OS X! I still think SoundPlay is the coolest Music Player around, over WinAmp and iTunes!
“I just love how the “BeOS Community” is two pages of forum users, less than 20 in count.”
Try going onto BeShare (a file-sharing and chat program for BeOS), there is way more than 20 people on there.
And as for the Titanic, it has not sunken yet. It is just not being maintained anymore because the entire crew has been fired. It is not going anywhere (eg forward) for a while, but it has not sunken just quite yet! Sure, it will probably start rusting and sink eventually. That is, if we don’t do anything.
We, the passengers, would like to maintain it ourselves, but we would need the original blueprints for that, which have been sold to Palm. That is why the more technical among the passengers have started replacing parts of the ship one-by-one. Others are trying to get the blueprints from Palm. There is already a new, working radio (read: Mail Daemon), but that is only the start. There is work being done on a new deck, a new hull, a new engine.
Eventually, we will have a new ship and we’ll be able to sail on..
(Let’s just hope Jack still drowns though 😉
No way are those fake, and I’m reasonably sure that the former Be employees at Palm still play around with BeOS. I’m not holding my breath although it would be nice to see something good come of this M$ antitrust trial.
Anyway, speaking as a total BeOS freak I can tell you that most of us would rather be on a sleek and fast vessel, not no f’ing titanic. Live life on the edge! It’s no fun if death isn’t looking over your shoulder. 🙂
dutch
get out of the computer world and move into the realms of creative writing.
i’m joking, just the extended allegories tend to grate with me, like cheese. it’s all cheesy.
but you’re right, i want a new beos aswell. with NEW haikus! and maybe some tankas. hell, i want Joyceian prose whenever i crash it.
best wishes (no offence, honest!)
Fake or not?
Why don’t you just ask your husband?
It would be nice if BeOS rose from the dead – they could code-name it something cool like Pheonix or… Messiah…! 😉 Hopefully if it’s a throwaway GPL from Palm, we could patch the holes and cobble together a running version again. Otherwise, OpenBeOS needs help. And if it’s open-sourced and Free, it’s theoretically impossible to kill. If BeOS came back as just another Palm project, it could die with the next spending cut. And I’m getting tired of switching OSes every year…
I’ve always wanted a Mac, that’s how I found the “Mac-like” BeOS… The one thing that irks me about Apple is that I can’t get at ALL the source code. I know I’m a freak, but I don’t REALLY trust any of these big companies NOT to screw me over. Seeing the source is important to me, just so I can clean out any backdoors/logging stuff. If BeOS came back under an OpenSource license, I’d have enough faith in its survivability to stick with it. Otherwise, I’d value the long-term survivability of Macs over the fleeting joy of BeOS.
Oh yeah, am I #23?
The Oracle
fake.
As someone mentioned in the begroovy-forum; there’s something fishy going on with screen3.png. Specificly the bottom-right corner of “Terminal 2”.
And beside that; The second I saw them I thought I had seen them before. I think in a fake R6 screenshot competition on befaqs.
If you look at the Disks window, it has the same type of resize drag fixture as the shell windows, so at least it’s consistent. Probably based on the window type.
Take a look at screen0.png, the emptying trash dialog. You can see some crap around the trash icon that looks like it was cut-and-paste from a lower quality picture.
Just looking at these pics make me depressed. I want my BeOS back!
These screenshots are 100% original. I have seen this version with my own eyes, Be sent it to some partners, like SONY and Qubit, months ago already.
I have posted some other screenshots.
Feel free to check them out here:
http://home.nyc.rr.com/ycrevecoeur/postr5.html
ciao
yc
These might be fake, because they look A LOT like the fakes designed at http://cotito.free.fr/. Also, it was once rumored that the screenshots designed by those guys were actual screenshots of a developer release of BeOS R6. Believe whatever you want… but I think it’s gone.
yc, most of the shots in your page are original, except the shots which their filename is 00xx.jpg, which are known to have being faked by a french guy.
The others, epsecially the one that shows the graphics application called Imagination, it is said to be original and it is striking similar to the ones we chat about today (the new app_server supports themes so it can feature different looks).
But there is no real way to prove any of this. People who know, can’t say, due to NDAs.
These screenshots look great, but …
Why is “Terminal 2” in screen3.png the only window that displays single arrows on each end of a scroll bar, when every other scroll bar got double arrows?
This setting is system wide, at least until R5 – so this might indicate a fake or even a new feature 🙂
Hey does anybody have any screenshots of the BeOS startup screen? I noticed that Be has taken down the ‘BeOS in Action’ screenshots from their website. I need them for a project and unfortunately I am not currently running BeOS here in Europe at the present moment and all my Be stuff is in the US 🙁
<< Why is “Terminal 2” in screen3.png the only window that displays single arrows on each end of a scroll bar, when every other scroll bar got double arrows? >>
Note that even in R5, if you resize the terminal window (or any window) to Be very small (vertically) the double arrows become single arrows.
This proves that it is indeed authentic as most fakers would have overlooked this rather intricate behavior of the BeOS.
ciao
yc
Not necessarily proof of a fake.
Change the ScrollBars in R5, and only windows opened *after* you changed it will have a different scrollbar.
Old windows will not be changed.
But I don’t belive these shots are original. I just don’t. Until I see such a version running with my own eyes.
—
Ronny.
I don’t want to make most BeOS followers here nervous, but prepare yourself for the sad reality. I am an Amiga fan. I remember endless discussions of what could happen. Once Gateway acquired Amiga, there were big plans, backed by GW management. But big boys don’t play nice games. They can send all the work to the trashcan in sec. So, don’t expect too much from Palm. Maybe Palm folks even don’t understand media value of the OS, as their own OS is pretty crappy.
-pekr-
Gateway has never been in the OS business. Palm always has been in the OS business.
Big difference!
BeOS is virtually guaranteed to live on in ARM based Palm handhelds and is likely to become the dominant OS for handheld platforms. While Palm has not yet
announced a Desktop OS, I have hopes for at least a BeOS based desktop development platform for the handhelds.
Has anyone here ever done BeIA development? Were the development tools based on Winblows or BeOS or Both?
ciao
yc
>Take a look at screen0.png, the emptying trash dialog. You can see some crap around the
>trash icon that looks like it was cut-and-paste from a
>lower quality picture.
That junk is there on my system (R5.03/Opentracker), so that really isn’t a proof of it being fake. Take a screenshot of your BeOS system while emtying the trash and zoom in on it, or open the Tracker binary with Quickres and look at the resource called R_TrashStatusBitmap. You’ll se the same junk in the icon.
It’s funny when one of the most exciting things for a community is to argue wether some screenshots of a system they’ll maybe never use anyways are faked or real.
I guess, they’re like a precious jewels.
ciao
yc
Those screenshots reminded me of somthing. Now I know what it was:
Check http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=304 and click on the new screenshot link.
From what I have heard, Palm is denied any further BeOS developement quite strongly. Even if they happened to release a new BeOS, I’m not sure how much I would trust them with maintaining the BeOS. Afterall, Palm is not in much better shape than Be was not long ago.
I think the open source BeOS clones would be where to look in the future, BlueOS or OpenBeOS. Afterall, as someone else stated here, it’s much harder to kill open software.
“Speaking as a web designer, if these screenshots are actually fake, the artist has done a pretty good job.”
Its not hard to fake a screen shot of an OS. Any paint program will do. Many people fake pics of hardware. Now thats a bit more impressive.
Eugenia, this is real. It will never see the light of day. I dunno if JBQ has been staying in touch with the right people to be able to verify it for you. If you *do* know one way or another, you should think very carefully about your journalistic integrity. Claiming that it’s real when you know it’s fake, or claiming that it’s fake when you know it’s real will make you look bad. It might be safer just to say “hey, folks, somebody posted some very interesting screenshots…. *no comment*.”
I doubt BeUnited will be allowed to have access to it. BeUnited’s goal is to be legitimate and legal. *Some* people are still working on BeOS on their own, under the table. IMHO that’s fine as long as you DON’T LEAK IT *ahem* and as long as nobody does it for commercial profit.
Think about it. Anyone who spent several years at Be Inc pouring all your effort into BeOS would feel some attachment. My guess is that once Palm took over, some engineers left, others transferred to Palm, but not everybody got rid of their backups of the dano/exp source.
BEOS IS DEAD. Why can’t the world stop speculating over a few screenshots and go back to ignoring BeOS again? *sigh*
that it would be cool if the developers working (?) on Opentracker would start playing I little with the GUI. Perhaps add support for MacOS X icons or something else interesting.
Yeah actually there is an initiative at BeUnited for this kind enhancement in the future for the next version of BeOS, I agree that the icons (though well designed) need some smoothing over along with the window displays and anything on the screen. It wouldn’t take much for BeOS to look better than Mac OS and Windows with a tweak of the pixels on screen and a few other additions! I really like these screenshots though, I hope they are authentic?!
While we are on the topic of icons… does anyone know who, or what company designed the BeOS icons? ANd don’t say John Bull, because it wasn’t!!
I think the BeOS icons are the *best* ones around, compared to any OS – including OS X.
Gary wrote on 2002-01-11 15:28:41
>If you look at the Disks window ( screen0.jpg), it has the same type of resize >drag fixture as the shell windows, so at least it’s consistent.
>Probably based on the window type.
No, it is not consistent. (screen3.png, bottom-right corner of “Terminal 2”) I meant the weird part next to the blue/darker greyish triangle , leftside, there are 13 pixels missing from the scrollbar. Which are (or rather aren’t) exactly at the spot where there is a horizontal scrollbar in “Disks” in screen0.png.
I don’t think someone would program the “hole” (incline?), do you?
I think it’s that way by design. The vertical scroll bar appears about 1 pixel wider than the “Grow” icon used to resize the window. Note how the “Grow” icon also extends pass the boundaries of the windon on the right and the bottom by one pixel. A carefull analysis of the “Disks” window reveals that the horizontal scroll bar will snuggle perfectly into the “Grow” icon when it is present.
I guess a programmer could match the width of the scroll bar with the “Grow” icon but I am not sure that it would be correct thing to do in this case because the right and bottom edges of the “Grow” icon extend pass the boundaries of the window by one pixel on the right and at the bottom. Placing the “Grow” incon one pixel to the left and one pixel higher would lose that “extended” effect which present in all the window’s lower right and upper left corners. Too bad we can’t see any other window’s right corner with only a vertical scroll bar. I think they would be consistent. It’s just a new cool way of doing things.
Also, the little curve caused near the “Terminal 2” “Grow” icon, goes well with other similar curves in the title bar of the windows near the Maximize/Zoom/Close buttons for example.
ciao
yc
Looking at these screen caps/fakes makes me think that either way … this is a great UI … and should be taken at least as an idea for a new UI design …
These are quite real… there are a few “themes” in the Screen prefs panel, letting you choose things — such as Graphite, Baqua, so on. It includes BONE, an updated MediaKit, and BeIA development specs. The nov 15 build is old though, by atleast a month.
Everyday I think I might wake up from this nightmare and that new Be above boots up when I turn my PC formaly loaded with Be.
Whoa. You’re getting really emotional about this. BeOS dying is not a nightmare. 9/11 is a nightmare.
BeOS will live on in various Palm platforms.
See the future here: http://www.palmsource.com/devconf.html
ciao
yc
Keep September 11th out of these conversations. Yes, it was horrible but I am sick and tired of hearing about it.
Wow, that most be the most offensive thing I’ve ever heard. Personally I’d prefer BeOS to die than my son/brother/father to die.
I can’t help wondering what’s in the Nintendo folder?
I am a GameCube Owner, I wonder if BeOS was ever considered for the GameCube?
ciao
yc
http://www.wincustomize.com/skins.asp?SkinID=2278&library=1
>> A former Be engineer, who wishes to remain anonymous, confirmed to OSNews that the specific screenshots are likely real. The version of BeOS shown in the pictures is the BeOS desktop-version that was in use internally at Be for development of BeIA (otherwise known as the “BeIA Development Platform”). <<
This is great news! Nagel gave high praises to the BeIA development platform. He said that the developement tools alone were worth the 11 mil. What better development platform to use for the BeOS/BeIA derived ARM based Palm OS.
I wish I could go to PalmSource: http://www.palmsource.com/devconf.html
ciao
yc
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=511
ciao
yc
_V_ means the fact that the scroll bar and the corner don’t line up becuase they’re different widths. I’m not sure if that proves anything though, the UI in general seems rough.
Guys and fans of the BeOS out there! Maybe there is a future (not as good as BeOS6, but still). http://www.yellowtab.com
They, at least, have a dream and make it real (and they have much less to code than the OpenBeOS team)! See the first version in a couple of weeks…