SkyOS announced that they are taking pre-orders for people interested in joining their new beta program for SkyOS 5. This program will allow you to receive a copy of SkyOS 5.0 beta before it is released to the public. The cost to join the beta program is $30, and by joining you will receive these benefits.
SkyOS 5 Beta Testing Cycle is Open
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Hopefully SkyOS will get a lot of people helping them out. I would have loved to be on beta team but I currently don’t have the $30 to spend right now. Anyways keep up the good work, and I know this will be a great OS once its released.
Sandman
(SkyOS Rocks!!!!)
(insert perplexed emoticon) — the OS is free, why pay 30 USD to be a beta tester? Even for MacOS X beta I paid only 25USD lol 🙂 I did not come through anything on the website as to why he is not just providing it as a free download with the”beta” disclaimer
I hope to become a beta-tester and be able to support this nice OS. Considering that you’ll get 2CDs inclunding shipping (beta and final – seperate), this isn’t much at all and ad I already said I’d be really glad to help them with the tiny bit of revenue they get…
They can probably need it very well to cover hosting-costs, e.g.
here are the additional things you get:
– a copy of the most recent version of SkyOS 5.0 beta when available
– a position on the team as a beta tester
– access to the beta team forums where you can post any bugs or feature requests
– extra technical support, with questions answered directly in the beta forum by Robert and other members of the SkyOS dev team
– a copy of SkyOS 5.0 final when it is released (this will be the version available to the public)
– Including shipping cost for both versions
because he’s a single developper and not a mega corporation full of money ? or did you missed that ?
what he does costs way more than $30, by providing it in a beta paid way, you can reward him, and honeslty if you’re into this stuff, he really desserves it.
its not A free os, it’s his free os
well… he decided to make it free 🙂 no one put a gun to his head. He could GPL it but then he loses creative control. Developers should reward him for making apps for it. Once apps are available he can ask for some money (e.g.: 15 for a CD – like he does now, or lets say 8-10USD for access to a download area)
I am not counter to the idea of paying him for his effort, I am just perplexed as to why he is asking 30US for a beta
We encourage everyone that we can to purchase SkyOS, rather than simply download it, because it just gives us more money to pump into the OS. This includes things like buying new hardware to test on, buying CD-Burners when they die on us (as Robert’s recently did), pay for the 40-60 Gigs of traffic we push every month, etc. The OS is currently free of course, and we encourage EVERYONE to take advantage of that and try it out, and tell all your friends. But if you can spare a bit of money, it really helps us keep going and making SkyOS better and better.
As far as $30 for the beta goes, we had quite a bit of people that wanted to try the beta out. We weren’t sure if we wanted to have a beta period for 5.0, but decided to go ahead and do it. The $30 not only gets you the beta about 3-5 months before 5.0 comes out, but it also gives you access to the dev forums where you can talk with other testers, ask us (the devs) questions, and just give general feedback. You’ll also get a copy of SkyOS 5.0 when it is released for no extra charge (this would be around $20-30 anyway, if you decided to buy it rather than download it).
Remember, this is PRE-ORDER only. We are taking your names and contact info. We will be ready to start shipping CDs out shortly, and we will let everyone that signed up know how to pay. We did this so that we could make sure we didn’t get swamped with requests and not be able to get the CDs ready in time. It turns out, that was a pretty good decision (many orders so far). =)
Thanks a lot for your interest everyone. We’re really excited, and can’t wait to see what you guys have to say. =)
Those screenshots of 5.0 are really cool!
Skyos has really come a long way and 5.0 looks like it could be a dark horse with regards to contending for desktop market space. I’d love to see a company growing under Skyos and pushing it to be a premier operating system.
I too would sign up if I had the extra cash. Good luck Skyos!
I’m curious if there is some good software available, like an office suite, or a port of OOo. Without the software it doesn’t seem like there’s much of a reason to use it (except it’s really cool).
As far as “graphics” go… boy did that interface get butchered.
I remember looking at the prototype, going “Damn this is going to look great!” HUUUGE disappointment.
50% of it is font rendering, kerning issues, ugly fonts. Also ugly icons. Unbalanced spacing, use of white space, composition. Inconsistent use of colour, gradients, fonts. Ineffective and unnecessary use of drop shadows. Wrong colours for drop shadows.
Don’t forget I have a lot of great things to say about SkyOS too. As an operating system and part-time accomplishment SkyOS is astounding!! Keep up the good work!
I am (and always will be) a rabid BeOS user, but when I am not using it, I like to experiment with different OSes-SkyOS is no exception. I downloaded 4.0…and after the initial disappointment of using it as a LIVE ISO, I mounted it. It’s pretty cool! For a “one man band”, it’s certainly more useful than some AltOSes I’ve tried. I’ve heard rumors that 5.0 will be even better. This has me eager to get it when I can. Now, as far as the $30 is concerned, I also can’t swing it at this time of year (and with $220 out of every pay for child support)…but when it’s available, I’ll do my most to get it.
John
I understand if now is not the best time of year for buying SkyOS. Boy do I ever understand. =)
SkyOS will always be available for download in some fashion, quite possibly like how BeOS did things. I personally think it is ridiculous that you can’t try out your OS before you decide to buy in. Almost every other piece of software has a trial period or something to let you see if you like it. I don’t see why the OS should be any exception.
In regards to apps: We are currently in the process of porting some of the more popular apps. Gaim is being worked on hard right now. OOo is VERY high on the priority list (it is going to be a big project though). We also have a SDK for 5.0 available, and encourage anyone interested to write or port applications.
People in these comments are saying some nice things about this OS.
And that’s all well and good.
But, as a non-techie user… I have an important question.
What apps are there for SkyOS?
A decent browser that supports modern standards?
A decent office suite?
Driver support for current devices?
Why is this better than using BeOS 5.0 or BeOS PE?
At least for that OS, there are SOME apps. Even if they’re not all up to date.
Not that I want to discourage the development of a new OS… But ReactOS is MUCH more exciting to me.
Get that puppy up and running (even equivalent to NT 4.0 or Windows 95/98), and I have TONS of apps in my collection to run on it.
That’s a useful OS…
For me, SkyOS and Syllable are interesting… And the programmers involved are very talented, but the OS is just not very useful without apps.
But, keep going. You never know!
i agree that the screenies aren’t as good as the mockup that was made for skyos 5
but it looks so simple to make it good. it just need some polish. spaces in menus etc needs to be reworked, just to look good, nothing else!
some icons just needs to be replaced with pretty ones, again, nothing hard!
hmm windows shadows just needs to be totally redone, ok, harder one, cause right now it’s just a black rectangle and it looks sucky, it should use alpha like osx does.
well mainly, just some hard polish on the whole ui, new icons (some are k) etc, and that would be wonderfull to look at
way to go devs !
My goodness! Some of the complaints about how it looks are so… trivial. Whats wrong with the drop shadow? Its point is to make windows more defined and easier to seperate from the background. It does that very well, and frankly, looks better then the bearly perceptable OSX shadow-blobs. Fonts and spacing all look fine to me too. I just don’t see what the problem is.
“Skyos has really come a long way and 5.0 looks like it could be a dark horse with regards to contending for desktop market space.”
As much as I would *like* for this to be the case, I think we can classify it as “wishful thinking”. SkyOS is amazing, considering that it really is the pet project of a single developer, but it is *far* from being a desktop OS for the masses. For power users, or nerds like me, maybe =)
There are a few usability issues (why so many levels in the menu system, just to access a media player?!) I noticed in the screenshots, and the current UI is hiddeous. Although, I am assuming that the current WindUI is just a placeholder.
I just d/led SkyOS v4 and think its pretty amazing considering theres only one devolper. It does a very good job at h/w setup except for my sound(VIA AC97) and my internet(not sure about exact name but I use the RhineII module in linux). All things aside, Im very temted to buy v5.
Keep up the great work!
Eeek, those shadows are hideous. Please, remove them. Make the edges move curved and anti-alias those curves so that it doesn’t look pixelated, as for the over all theme, what are you trying to go for? 3d or a flat basic theme? http://art.gnome.org/themes/metacity/369.php is a good example of something that is flat and basic.
I’m not trying to put you down, however, my suggestion is to make the interface basic, yes, the temptation there to make it more complicated is strong but try to resist is realising that it mearly makes more work later on when you realise that there is too much thus requiring to rework it again.
Devon, if you can’t see what’s wrong with that interface graphics-wise… well… let’s just say I wouldn’t want to work on a graphics project with you.
I just wanna say the sky os people are doing a hell of a job. Its ammazing how far its come in a really short time. I wish them the best of luck.
This is a good explanation and I fully support it
as for the interace critics, I like the interface of 5.0 – I wish though that some of the other demo interfaces had made it – I liked some of them alot