e nested. Mac users will feel much more at home here than will people who are used to Windows Explorer.
Of course, there are some other differences, most of which are cosmetic. BeOS sports a sort of sketchy, dashed-off look, perhaps to attract the video and multimedia artists who are the system's primary target market. Apple's Mac OS 8 looks more polished and pressed by comparison. The biggest cosmetic difference is antialiased text for TrueType fonts (in PC format!). Built into the OS, this feature is a welcome advance. Most of the text just looks better and is easier to read.
Some of the differences between BeOS, the Mac, and Windows, however, are functional. A window that grows along the right-hand side, which is known as the Deskbar, lists the running applications in much the same way as the bar on the base o
f the screen in Windows 95. A start-button-like menu tree with applications and preferences also sprouts from the title bar of this window.
The biggest addition, called a
workspace
, is a simple mechanism for switching between nine desktops. You page between them by holding down the command key and pushing a function key. You can also drag windows between workspaces with a special graphical tool. This is a great advance for people who use their machines for multiple tasks and want to keep them organized. Most users will probably allocate one workspace to housekeeping tasks such as mail and put different applications in the others.
For the most part, though, the differences lie underneath the surface. BeOS offers preemptive multithreading. Be claims the file system and the graphics system are written as many lightweight threads that don't dominate the system, and my tests tend to confirm this. Measuring the degree of "threading" of an OS is always difficult. Slicing jobs into too many thin th
reads can result in deadlocking through resource conflicts if the threads end up jamming each other. I tested this by running many different programs at once and measuring the performance of the system.
In this regard, BeOS is rock-solid. Adding processes slows down the system, but there were no hiccups or glaring freezes during tests with multiple graphics and network programs running. Such performance is impressive and one of the main reasons that someone may choose to do their development on the system. This feature alone should appeal to people who try to juggle several large multimedia projects on a single machine.
Getting their hands dirty with the BeOS command-line interface may scare some people who are wedded to GUIs. You can open up a "terminal" window and run Bash, a version of the Bourne shell, to monkey with threads and poke around the file system. Unix lovers will crave this window in the guts of the system, while it may put off others. Windows NT hides this level of detail by arrang
ing for the output of these lower-level programs to go into scrolling lists. There isn't much functional difference, but Microsoft gets lots of marketing mileage by citing it as a difference between Unix and NT. Users who love Unix will be happy, and NT addicts will think it is all a bit primitive but still quite functional.
The 64-bit-wide file system means the OS can handle disk arrays as large as 18 TB, which should give the OS several years to grow. Multithreading reduces the impact of large copying jobs on productivity, as will
journaling
, a technique for lessening the dangers of corruption when two applications access the same file.
Some nice touches should make the system
more friendly
to folks developing interactive content for the Internet. The file system can share files via IP, and the file types are Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME). There is also an integrated Web server for publishing files. Be added many of these extra details after the Intern
et frenzy began, which means that BeOS has one of the cleaner approaches to the Web. The greatest hole, however, is the lack of a Java implementation. There is a browser, but it doesn't do Java, at least not yet.
The greatest asset may be a version of the popular Metrowerks compiler that ships with the OS. You can read the source code for the demonstration programs and write new ones using the built-in system. Metrowerks makes the best compiler for the Mac. The company has plenty of experience compiling for both the PowerPC and Intel platforms.
BeOS vs. Unix
BeOS uses neither Mach nor BSD Unix, building up its own flavor with a new object-oriented library at the core. The libraries are close to Posix compliance, and Be claims that complete compliance is on the horizon.
Despite its Unix-like core, BeOS will disappoint those expecting to find all the bells and whistles of Linux or Solaris. Remote file sharing is available only as a third-party version of NFS, and the graphical interfa
ce doesn't support remote windows such as the X Window System protocol, though BeX provides a similar function.
Disappointing too is the lack of multi-user features: BeOS allows only one user at a time and lacks file-level security controls. Likewise disappointing is BeOS's lack of a scripting language.
Who Will Buy This?
I tested BeOS on an Apple Performa 6400. The process required reformatting one partition of the drive and then arranging to boot up with a special Mac application. The transition went smoothly, though the Mac OS now complains that the partition is damaged. Aside from that, the machine now supports both OSes.
Just because BeOS is impressive technically won't necessarily make people want to use it. It offers all the multitasking sophistication of NT and much of the user-interface gloss of the Mac OS, but it is neither of those.
If you want to use either NT or Mac OS applications, you're out of luck. Be has announced that several important applications are avail
able for the OS (a productivity suite and some multimedia applications), but the selection is still a far cry from the games and tools available on the mainstream OSes.
The best target may be programmers who need a workstation to roll their own programs that manipulate large volumes of data. The multithreaded nature of the OS simplifies running tasks in the background without degrading overall performance. I could see a small computer-animation shop choosing to build many of its tools on a Be platform, because it is so nicely functional. Tool builders and Unix heads may cling to BeOS, because it offers one of the best combinations of Unix and a modern GUI today. Anyone wedded to shrink-wrapped software, however, will have to wait.
Product Information
BeOS Preview Release...........$49.95
(most PowerPC platforms with a 603 or 604 processor)
Be, Inc.
Menlo Park, CA
Phone: 650-462-4100
Fax: 650-462-4129
Internet:
http://www.be.com
Enter 1011 on Inquiry Card.
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