Another noticeable change is of course the SVG icon set. They look crystal clear and extremely sharp, and can be resized to any size without looking ugly. An improvement over the old BeOS icons? To me, yes, but I've heard different sounds coming from the BeOS fanbase. The window decor of Zeta is also different from the old BeOS; the tabs are now a bit more shiny. I find this an improvement, but for those who don't, you can easily switch back to the standard r5 decor. The same applies for the SVG icons.
I did encounter some visual remnants every now and then, especially after unmounting drives. Sometimes, after unmounting my ZIP disk, the ZIP icon remains on the desktop as a remnant. Same applies for the E140 MP3 player. A quick restart of Tracker will fix this, but it's not the way to go. I also encountered a visual bug in Deskbar: sometimes, it would partially turn all grey.
Applications & Hardware
The applications in Zeta R1 are quite familiar. For office work, we have GoBE Productive 2.0.1. This office suite is full featured, but is of course quite outdated (2000). However, for normal users GoBE will certainly suffice. Doing a port of OpenOffice.org might be a good thing in the future, but for now, GoBE will certainly do.
As for browsing, we have Firefox 1.0.3. Firefox 1.0.3 requires no introduction, however, a few notes on it are justified: fast & stable. I do not know what the yT guys and girls have done, but they made Firefox on BeOS stable and usable. And that's a great achievement. Firefox loads in 4 seconds, and scrolling no longer tears webpages apart. Firefox is also completely integrated into Zeta: copying/pasting works fine, and graphics/fonts-wise it integrates perfectly. Well, almost perfectly. One minor thing: when you click a locally stored html file, Firefox tries to load, but terminates itself.
For emailing, Zeta recommends to use Beam, even though some people will prefer the good old BeMail. Noteworthy here is that in BeOS, emails aren't stored in databases, but on a per-file basis. Each email is a file in Tracker ('Explorer' or 'Nautilus' or 'Finder' or whatever), that way, you can use multiple mail clients without problems. This is also very handy for the query features of BeFS (which I'll get back to later). Another advantage of this approach is that you will not have any problems with corrupted databases.
Instant messaging is an area in which Zeta needs improvement. The only included client is BeAIM (for the AIM protocol, obviously), so it lacks for instance MSN support. Seeing that yT has stated that The Netherlands is their next target, they should definitely include a MSN solution (MSN has close to 100% market share in my country). Even better would be to include the im_kit in Zeta-- and I'm sure that in the future, when im_kit has matured a bit more, it will find it's way into Zeta. I won't go into details, as im_kit is so extraordinary, it requires an article of it's own. Anyway, if you want decent MSN support in Zeta, download BME. There is no official release yet but a pre-built package from CVS can be found here.
Zeta comes with a bucketload of multimedia applications. Various video players, music players, movie editors, and so on. I'm not a very multimedia oriented person, so I didn't have tons of video and music files to test all those applications with. DVD watching is easy (it uses VLC), MP3 files play correctly, and the video and image files from my cameras all worked mighty fine.
As for hardware support, Zeta is a relief over r5. My two digital cameras worked with BeDigiCam (now known as PhotoGrabber). It does require some guesswork: as it turns out, my old Kodak DX3500 is a camera of Type I, whereas my newer Canon PowerShot S50 is one of Type II. Oddity: downloaded movies get stored with the filetype attribute set to 'image/jpeg', whereas it should be 'video/mpeg'. I quickly changed this using BeOS' FileType utility, but for new users, this could pose a problem. The filetype attribute can be set to 'image/donkeypoophole', and it will still play, but not by double-clicking the file, as it will load the image viewer app and not the video player. But, it will play correctly when you first load VLC, and then use 'Open...'
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