“Beyond just having an operating system, it’s important to have applications that make the operating system interesting and useful. A long standing problem for yellowTAB’s ZETA has been the absence of business software for bookkeeping, accounting, inventory, and other office tasks. One of our developers has had his nose to the grindstone for quite some time now, working almost exclusively on a project to fill this gap.”
Well, that’s not really an OS related topic..
IMHO, Faktum should have been made by a third company. It’s a waste of time from yT, they should focus on ‘core’ things and various developers tools.
By the way, a RFID tag application seem in development from the guys who make TimeZliner.
http://wilcek.net/es/3beos.php
Yellow Tab for now needs to focus on a core set of apps in addition to the OS for now.
What happens when Haiku is ready? yT will need more than an OS.
Because the usual suspects will start talking about the virtues of Haiku and how why pay for Zeta.
Exactly.
But Yellowtab needs to realise they need other things to become viable for buisnesses. As exemplified by the recent article on how Linux misses a replacement for Microsoft Exchange + backend, BeProductive/Abiword need to be updated to improve their interoperability with OpenOffice and MS Office, and one or two killer apps to make it attractive.
A long standing problem for yellowTAB’s ZETA has been the absence of business software for bookkeeping, accounting, inventory, and other office tasks.
There are excellent webbased and java software for that kind of stuff. Even some opensource ones. Should work fine for Zeta until it gets big enough to attract more third party developers.
I’m sorry but I just don’t see the reasoning behind wasting resources on meeting the business markets needs. If an alternative OS is going to take over that market it will be Linux because it is already there in many ways.
Why not focus on the areas where Linux is really weak at the moment, and something that Zeta excels at? (hint: media production)
While any app has it uses, I am not sure an accounting app is the best idea. Even when speaking about more popular platforms like OSX people tend to be wary of being locked into something non-open or “non-standard”. They could accept it from Microsoft, but not from smaller players. What if Apple dies? What if Zeta (more likely these days) does? I don’t wish so but anyone wanting to build a small store would think about this twice.
As someone already said a php+ajax based solution (even with a local server) would be a better alternative. You can run it from Zeta with Firefox and enjoy a secure OS (eg. not a target for virus or spyware). Most important is the fact that in case your OS dies or becomes unsupported you can still use something else without having to rewrite a new applicaiton, not to mention import data in it’s format.
Had I been in charge of Zeta I’d have gone the iLife way like apple did. Simple everyday apps that make you feel you don’t want to be on another OS ever because everything is just there. And of course everything is smoothly integrated in the OS.
Isn’t this like putting air conditioning on a skoda?
The comment about iLife is spot on.
I would not compare Zeta to a Skoda but to a Fiat Spider refurbished.