A new “tour” is available at the SkyOS homepage, showing off what will be available in SkyOS 5.0. Included are many screenshots. This is a good summary of everything that has been done with SkyOS over the past year. In other news Developer Studio, GCC 3.4.0, Binutils 2.15, Make, Python, Autoconf, and many other development tools are new available for SkyOS, as well as Blender3D. The SkyOS community has been busy as well, developing such applications as Personal Organizer (e-mail client/organizer), SkIRC, AFTP, and a few others.
SkyOS Tour Available
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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SkyOS is amazing but I don’t like the launch button on the top: since its location floats according to how many programs you have open, it means the user gotta look and “aim” everytime one wants to launch a program.
In most OSes the button is in one of the screen corners, which is great because it means you can just (in case of KDE standard location) push the mouse all the way down and all the way to the left, not really worrying how far you go.
To see the taskbar getting bigger and smaller might be distracting too, I suppose.
SkyPad is an integrated, tab-based text editor with support for synatx highlighting.
But apparently not spell-checking :>
It does look good though. I’ll be interested to try an eval version when such a thing becomes available.
@ rod:
And on the flipside of your argurement, I don’t find the launchbar size/shape change annoying at all. I liked the ability to see at a glance which programs were/weren’t open.
& general comments:
I’ve watched this “hobby” OS grow by leaps and bounds over the past 3-4 years. I’m amazed at what has been done this past year alone.
I find the look of the theme and the color scheme very clean and pleasing to the eye.
Were it not for the lack of desktop space, I’d actually dig my PC out of the closet and download skyOS for the adventure of it.
To be successful their going to need a lot of support, money or both. I don’t see much coming from Open Source & certainly not hardware vendors, so where will the drivers come from?
The one chance they have imv is Scitech Snap for graphics but their either unwilling or unable to invest in it.
I agree, an OS should make best use of the sides and especially of the corners of the user interface. These a easiest to find, you only have to drag your mouse left and down, and you have your start menu or whatever, drag up and right to close maximized windows. That’s just good practice in user interface design, and the current top menu is not. Just because OSX, Gnome and Windows have certain menu’s, doesn’t mean that to be different, you need to have a different type of menu.
when this comes out I think I’ll buy it (it’s commercial right?)… Syllable doesnt work for me and skyos seems great. I don’t know if wine has been ported but that, and a few filesharing apps like shareaza (since they’re doing ports, not just linux and shareaza is opensource) I’d just die.
in terms of file sharing someone has begun work on CDC.NET for win32 using .NET 1.1 once the dotGNU pnet framework on skyOS gets winforms bound to SkyGI that will be ported (assuming win32 api calls are used for networking and such)
alot of drivers have their spec’s opened or are detailed in whitepapers, also alot of BSD drivers can give insight into how a piece of hardware interacts with a system and then work from there.
The talk about free/buyable, is there all right…
Anyway, there is an entry on the download page of skyos, saying, that skyos5 will be there.
So i think that it would be free, when it is ready (dont like the word done, cause no software will ever be done, Mmmmm!!!)
Unfortuantly driver support is sparce and they have next to zero documentation on writing your own. I bought into the beta expecting to help develop/port drivers but i realized after I had paid that that wasn’t possible at the moment. What was worse is when I asked for some documentation i was smugly told they don’t have enough people to write that kind of documentation and would get to it after 5.0 release. When I said that was a pretty dumb plan… who would by something they cant get working… i was given the cold shoulder. Sky’s video driver freak out on me at least 50% of the time on my ATI mobility and i’ve gotten practically no help in attempting to figure it out. They said run it in debug mode but that only works with a serial port (i’m on a laptop which doesnt have one) so that is out of the question. No logs are kept. At least no one told me where they would be. I’m was really disappointed with it all… hopefully with upcoming releases support will improve.
@ brostenen
erm skyOS 5.0 is commerical not free, there will be a LiveCD evaluation disc available after release.
@ antonio
where did you post there queries as well i’ve been a fixture at skyOS for well over 2yrs now and i dont remember any queries relating to anything you said, the driver documentation is like you said none existant but there is a DDK with example driver source code. also if the ATi Driver doesnt work with your mobility chip use the Vesa2 driver. or dig out the SkyGI Dump log from inside i think its: “/boot/system/”
Is it me or do I find the window borders are big?
I hope that it’s only a skin that can be changed.
Other than that, it’s a great OS! Good Work All!
SkyOS supports full themeing. Anything can be changed to anything else.
I don’t think it’s really fair to call SkyOS a “hobby” OS anymore. Once you start selling something it really loses its “hobby” quality.
Uhm, it depends on what you mean with that term. It’s either developed as a hobby for the developers, or it’s a hobby for the users. I think the latter is pretty much true for SkyOS at the moment. A product can have professional quality and still be a hobby product.
Also, most OSS projects are being developed as a hobby for the developers, but they are being used by a lot of professionals.
However, in my world the word “hobby” doesn’t exists. It’s either usable or useless, fun or boring.
Yeah, I agree, the borders are way to large. They really make the GUI look unprofessional. It would be nice if they could hire someone like Ross Harvey (http://www.web9design.com) to make the graphics. He has a good sense for making clean, professional and usable skins, and he also has a lot of experience which allows him to be more creative.
Also, what’s up with those shadows around the windows? first off they doesn’t look like shadows, more like a black glow. secondly, the corners look really wierd. If you are going to have something, please make it regular drop shadows and make them look good.
I think your fonts look wonderful. Is it arial plus freetype?
Also is the GTK theme an entirely new theme or was it based of something else? I would like to download something similar for GNOME
@ Youlle
the vesa driver is unusable. It’s terribly slow. The ati driver is better but not by much. it works when i first activate it but after a reboot the screen goes nuts. Where is this DDK you talk of. I cant find it on the developers section of skyos.org.
I don’t think video drivers will be too much of a problem for SkyOS. Being the kind of project it is, there’ll be nobody using it on anything much except recent nVidia and ATI cards. Nearly all the work in supporting a broad spectrum of hardware is in implementing support for the 80% of devices which are only used by 20% of people, which isn’t a concern in this case.
Sound chipsets on the other hand, they’ll be a major pain
Zrln: I agree, hobby =! $income
the DDK is only available to beta testers and SkyOS developers if u dont hav beta access that means you are using an “illegal” copy of skyOS or one of the few people who got Beta5 for answering the SkyOS Questionaire.
Do all SkyOS applications use the same widget set? Or do they use different ones? For example The GIMP and Blender use different widgets (I think) on other platforms.
GIMP uses GTK+ theme for its widgets and lindever has been working on a WindUI GTK+ theme for skyOS. blender i guess they’re native widgets for that application but dont see why you couldn’t replace them.
the GTK+ theme is original as it was designed from WindUI widgets.