New YellowTAB Screenshots Posted

Hello, Snake.

You really should try BeOS…it’s fast. Insanely fast. I have no patience for other OSes now. You can download BeOS R5 Personal Edition for free from this location:

http://www.bebits.com/app/2680

You don’t even need to create a new partition: the entire OS (in this version) installs in a single file within your Windows or Linux installation. This makes trying it out really easy.

Or you could download the Max Edition from this location:

http://www.bebits.com/app/3148

and install onto a separate partition.

Czeslaw

Hello, Jay.

Your post emphasizes an important point: good looks and usability *are* really important, especially for people who are approaching a new operating system for the first time.

It’s a matter of a good first impression…which is why default UI settings are also important, in my view.

Czeslaw

alls i gotta say… if the obos ui looks like those shots… whoa nellie! 8-D

Its no problem at all to create a theme like that, a complete copy would be harder. ( deskbar etc ).

I realised that are not many limitations in the Skinning ( SemiTransperency is the only I am aware of ).

/Konrad

Hello, Fye.

Since you mentioned the Gonx UI concept for BeOS, I thought that others might appreciate having a link where they could see some sketches. So here it is:

http://cotito.free.fr/projects/gonx+index.html

The commentary is in French, but the screenshots are still all there for viewing by anyone.

Czeslaw

“Zeeter”! I love that!

That’s exactly how Neil Morris (a Londoner) pronounces the name in his news commentaries on BeOSRadio!

So maybe now we know that Bernd learned his English from somebody on that side of the pond!

Czeslaw

Hello, Eugenia.

Oh, I see! You’re saying that one could call a Zeta user a Zetas…that’s a scary thought! I’m reminded of the Costa-Gavras film “Z” and the infamous colonels of 1968…

But actually nivenh is saying that “Zeeter” is how Bernd Korz pronounces the name of his yellowTab OS!

Czeslaw 🙂

> It seems like YT has been spending all their time tweaking the GUI, writing a new installer, making a iTunes rip off, and TimeLiner, instead of writing new drivers.

There are more than 25-30 new drivers in Zeta than there are in R5. Things like FireWire and Bluetooth won’t be supported, but better usb, gfx cards, audigy etc, will be supported.

> i’d rather see drivers for graphics cards, video capture cards, usb midi interfaces, usb audio capture devices, etc, etc…

Right. And then what? What are you going to use your PC for? It seems that you just want to make sure that your hardware works, so you can install Zeta, and then just sit back on your chair and stare at it, having nothing to do with it. You seem that you want Zeta to do all that just so you can install it from the geek point of view: as a toy.

But Zeta is not in the toy business. They have to have a balance between supported hardware and available applications. And that’s what they do!

Could things be better? Surely, there is always something better to be done. But given the fact that they are only 4-5 people working on it, not always with knowledge of how to write low-level code and drivers, YTAB does a good all-around job.

At the top of the screenshots page it now says “yellowTAB New Generation BeOS Solutions – creating a future for the BeOS!”

IMO that is much better than the last one, because it shows a clear direction for what they are trying to do, and what they can do for their existing/potential customers.

I think they should work on their fonts, possibly asks permission from the B.E.OS team to use their latest techniques, or maybe they can try and create their own method to do the same thing.

http://www.blueeyedos.com/resources/screenshots/font_kerning.png

It would be a definate improvement.

I have to say I agree with the people who say these screenshots are disappointing. I have spent months hyping the future of BeOS to people, and this is a slap in the face in the wrong direction. I don’t care how easy it is to change or customize, the default is what the public perception will be based on.

I looked at those OBOS screenshots months ago, and I was wondering if it is a reality or just a dream. What is the timeframe (and a REAL timeframe) for a working copy of OBOS to be released? Any operating system that works like Be, looks like those OBOS screenshots, and can run basic apps will become my new primary OS!

Amen to what JLS said, perhaps not as harsh but still, why did they even begin messing with skins in BeOS in the first place? One of the KEY things that I loved about BeOS was the BeOS UI and it’s clean to-the-point sleekness, but now they’re introducing skinning for no reason whatsoever then to make screenshots look attractive.

I think the original BeOS look deserves better, there were hard work and ALOT of though behind each little pixel in there and now that’s all thrown away in favour of skins.

It’s like peeing in the wind cause I know I’m fairly alone in my struggle against all this skin mania for no purpose whatsoever, so let me form this rant into a question instead, will there be a Classic mode? (NOT a skin that looks like classic, real classic mode like Windows) If so, I’d be content and stop bothering you all…

>iTunes;

It is a needed app.

> a new installer,

I agree that this was useless, you know that I said that already.

> and a few new window decors

These take no time to do. They are easy to implement, so I guess they do it in their… free time.

>mabye they should take one of their best features (media) and find a niche. BeOS was called the media OS remember?

Sorry, but BeOS was the Media OS only on paper. The Media Kit — despite popular belief– sucks beyond belief. BeOS can’t become a Media OS, it has no support for codecs or video hardware, and a team of 5 people is impossible to deliver something of this magnitude. Even Apple struggles with that, and they have hundreds of developers, money and licensees.

Do you think that OBOS and Zeta will be appealing to the same target audience, or different groups? Which ones?

Also, will OBOS eventually have distributions like Linux has (suse, redhat, lycoris, xandros, etc.), or just pretty much one standard open-source OS?

Hello, Three.

I anticipate that there will be different distributions of OpenBeOS ultimately, since several separate parties have already declared their intentions in this regard. (The first to come to mind is BeUnited.org, but there have been others as well.)

The question of target audience is a good one. My impression is that these two OSes will appeal to one single target audience at least initially, namely, BeOS veteran users and lapsed users. Even within this “seed” group, though, there could be a division based on differences regarding the open source issue. Free software proponents would naturally gravitate toward OpenBeOS.

I’m not sure what kind of “market differentiation” we might see between these two OSes with respect to future users, meaning users who are entirely new to the BeOS universe. I do believe that there are plenty of such people in the world, though, who are interested in alternatives to the familiar commercial OSes but find Linux and the BSDs difficult or otherwise unappealing in some way…

Czeslaw

The screenshots look fine to me. I’m not too big into unnecessary eye-candy “skinning” either, but it’s a simple method of making people feel like it’s “their” OS.

I’m waiting on two things before deciding to purchase:

1) A complete list of included software titles and versions

-I don’t want to pay too much for apps that are freely available at BeBits. I’ve read that there are some original entertainment titles to be included. They also advertise that the Home Edition will include a complete office suite – I hope they don’t consider AbiWord an office suite(!).

2) A complete list of supported hardware

-If it were free, I’d tolerate Vesa mode, mono sound, and could do without modem support. No way I’d accept that from a commercial product.

Best Wishes to the YT team!

-Bob

I see the GUI to ffmpeg in one of those shots, is that made by YT or can I get that GUI now (couldn’t find it on bebits).

Looks very amateurish imho.. Nothing professional in adding itunes clone or divx encoder on top of an unfinished os.

They should debug the os first and then make a better mozilla port and a good mail client.

Eugenia, itunes is not needed at all. 90% linux users use xmms which is a perfect clone of the winamp 2 ui, and a lot of win users still use winamp2 (or foobar2000:)

I think the obos team is the only true beos believer.

They did not forget the original beos spirit.

> Eugenia, itunes is not needed at all. 90% linux users use xmms which is a perfect clone of the winamp 2 ui, and a lot of win users still use winamp2 (or foobar2000:)

Yes, but BeOS/Zeta does not have XMMS. Neither Foobar2000. BeOS is not a Linux if you haven’t noticed. As for SoundPlay, there might be licensed issues and YTAB might not be allowed to include it, so they HAVE to create something to bundle with the OS.

Eugenia

Yep, I was thinking of cl-amp. Plugins, playlists and winamp skins.. they do not HAVE to create another player.

I think I will stick with SoundPlay myself. That is if Zeta comes out with support for DSP24 based multi channel Sound cards like my C-Port by Hoontech. If not then it’s Windows for me.

i already told my wife what i want for christmas!!!!!!!

-2501

Making themes does take some time, but not that much. And one reason I do that is because you dont want a driver from me =).

Mat, comon CL-amp is a perfect clone of Winamp2 aswell, so its not a good arguement.

Mat: What good client would you like to have? Have you checked at bebits, tried the latest MDR ( its not looking like much but its really useable ). Mozilla? Hmm, actually I cant see why ppl complain so much about the Bezilla port, I am now using the latest compiled version with Sergeis speed patches, its really great.

/Konrad

The problem with Zeta is that it’s basically R5 with some eye candy, and not a new OS, or even R6. The reason is that there seems, at least none announced, to be no fixes to the major problems in R5 such as:

These are real issues that make the current BeOS out of date with OSs like Windows, MacOSX and Linux. The only thing BeOS still going for it is the performance of the app_server. I suspect that YT does not have either the source code (too expensive) or the engineers (too expensive) to fix these problems. This is why only OpenBeOS or one of the Linux based clones will ultimately be the real solution, and Zeta will only be a temporary go-between until these other solutions are complete.

Alot of those issues could easily be resolved by Zeta ripping out the guts of BeOS then build up from the FreeBSD 5.2 kernel, the toolkits and GUI. That would be a much better solution than trying to fix an OS that is so broken the cost fixing rather than replacing is rediculously high.

Alot of those issues could easily be resolved by Zeta ripping out the guts of BeOS then build up from the FreeBSD 5.2 kernel, the toolkits and GUI. That would be a much better solution than trying to fix an OS that is so broken the cost fixing rather than replacing is rediculously high.

There is already a good kernel to raplace the BeOS kernel with one day – http://newos.sf.net/ and there’s also an effort going on to make this happend – http://open-beos.sourceforge.net/tms/team.php?id=1

Oh, and if Zeta doesn’t fix this limitation, I have absolutely no inclination to purchase it.

Adam

But the damn tabs have to slide! Linux has sliding tabs, but not Zeta? Absurd. I’ll still buy it, though.

Utterly Tasteless

http://www.bedoper.com/bedoper

The classic BeOS R5 decor is there, and bit-perfect (or really close).

Our attempts to create a slidy-tab decor have been halted until after R1’s release. We need to focus and get this thing out, make some green, and hopefully hire some more talent.

–The loon

will yellow tab have same level of hardware suport that linux has ???? im not saying linux has the best known hardware support but it has a goiod selection now, will yellow tab come out with the same level if not greater support ?

Snake

linux + freex86 does not boot up nearly as quickly as beos r5. that’s one reason i won’t try those. so far it’s obos and zeta for me.

i’m not horribly impatient. i can wait, so long as it works.

“will yellow tab have same level of hardware suport that linux has ???? ”

I doubt it. Nearly all modern mainstream hardware has Linux support. The main reason is hardware manufacturers. Most hardware makers release their own Linux drivers, or release enough data that others can produce the drivers.

But Nvidia, for one, is secretive about their hardware specs, thus accepting the responsibility for writing drivers themselves. The trouble is, they do a piss-poor job of supporting alternative operating systems other than major Linux distros.

-Bob

wouldnt it be possible for the YT or OBOS teams to some how use the linux drivers so they have much more and better hardware support ??

thus allowing more choice of hardware and maybe more users ?

Snake