Regretfully, I am no longer actively developing BeOS software. If anyone is interested in obtaining rights to the source code for any of my BeOS programs, contact me. The BeOS pages on this site are archival in nature.

(Posted to comp.sys.be, 1/5/96, based on the 1.1d5 BeOS release.)

Here's some info and thoughts after a few evenings with my BeBox and BeBook. Hopefully, not repeating the facts of the previous posters. For reference, I'm a software guy (though my schooling's EE), a long time Mac programmer (most recently, Hewlett-Packard scanner software) and I did a few years of HP-UX as well, among other things.

I bought the preconfigured package, not being patient enough to have the box sitting around until I got all the parts together. It arrived in a couple of boxes, one with the BeBox, the other with keyboard, mouse, BeBook, etc. The ethernet and graphics cards were already installed. There were manuals and/or data sheets for the mouse, CD-ROM, hard drive, and ethernet card, but nothing for the graphics card or floppy.

The bare metal of the front panel made it obvious there are some things left to be tidied up appearance-wise. The cover letter indicates the bezel is being worked on and will be sent once it's finished.

The box is all pretty heavy gauge sheet-metal, so it feels pretty solid when you try to lug it around. Two thumbscrews on the back of the box go into the two holes you can see halfway up the outside edges of the picture on the Be web site. When removed, they allow the U-shape cover to slide forward, revealing the insides. A nice sticker on the back indicates the box has not received FCC approval and is not for resale.

The CD-ROM and floppy stick out the front like in the pictures, and the hard disk is mounted on the inside and under the top of the box toward the front. The internal SCSI ribbon cable connects the logic board to the CD-ROM and hard disk, and has two left over positions for the drives for which there appears to be space in the front cage and under the top of the box behind the first drive.

I know I've seen all the pictures and diagrams on the Be web site, but it's still pretty impressive to look at the back of the box for real and see all those connectors! And it's fun to describe them to friends.

The power supply inside is a 200W unit. The fan on it is a bit louder than the APS SR2000 drive I've got sitting next to my Mac, which is a bit on the loud side, but not too bad.

At the risk of getting some people mad in case I am more fortunate than others, it appears that I got more than I paid for:

The developer program acceptance letter said it would come with a 340M IDE drive, and after getting around to bringing up a shell and doing a "df" and looking at the data sheet for the drive, it appears I actually got a Fujitsu 1G SCSI drive! I'm _not_ complaining.

Also, the spec booklet that comes with the Toshiba CD-ROM drive says that it's capable of 1X, 2X, and _6.7X_ performance. It's the Toshiba XM-3701, which is apparently new because I just saw a review of it in InfoWorld (12/25/95-1/1/96 issue) where it was stated the list price for the device is $415. Be probably got a better deal on OEMing, but I'm sure it cost quite a bit more than a vanilla 2X drive they promised and could've included. I did some quick measurements, dragging the "msgs" folder off the d5 CD to my hard disk, and got about 550 Kbytes/sec. So, I believe I really do have the faster drive, beating the maximum theoretical 300 for a 2X drive. I'm _not_ complaining.

On the downside, the Ethernet card is an Addtron with thinnet only, not the 10Base-T/10Base-2 indicated in the acceptance letter. But I've got a PowerMac 7100, which doesn't have built-in twisted-pair, so I was going to have to go out and find an AAUI anyways to hook the two together. Glancing through my MacWarehouse catalog here it looks like they're around $40 or so. Floppies for backup and transferring files in the mean time.

The mouse is a Logitech MouseMan, which is cool, and has three buttons.

I have a minor quibble with the keyboard, it's a PC-style unit. It's got that "L" shaped Enter key, which has the vertical-bar/backslash key up to the right of the +/= key. And, it's got the little guide bumps under my index fingers, instead of under my middle fingers like on the Mac keyboard. All of which means it slows my typing down. Oh well, I got the bundle... but I'm gonna have to get a different keyboard. Given a large portion of the early developers are going to be Mac folks, I wonder why they went this route?

But, in all, I feel like I've got even more than I expected for the hardware bundle, and my brief foray through Computer Shopper seems to indicate it was, if not great, a pretty good deal.

So, I excitedly hook things up without reading the manual, flip the switch, and am rewarded with a nice star-field zoom into a rendered Be logo. The browser came up quickly...

"Cool, it's running! Look, opaque window drags, and all the windows behind it redraw as they're revealed!"

Open a bunch of stuff on the dock. Try the two icons at the top of the dock and see that they're the equivalent of the Mac's app menu and the top part of the Apple Menu with the About selection, and some other stuff. Accidentally click on the right edge of the dock, and it zooms off the left edge of the screen, leaving only the right edge showing. Click on the edge and it comes back. Switch to small icon mode. Fill the dock by dragging some icons from the browser. Switch back to large icon mode and see the up/down arrows appear at the bottom of the dock so I can scroll around.

"What happens when I double-click the title bar? Ah, drops down into an icon parked at the bottom of the screen. Where's that bar-graph/led thingy showing the two processor activity? Okay, 'apps'. Sounds like a good unix-ey name, but who cares, where are the movie files? Ah, in my mailbox."

Double-click on two movies and a Mozart sound clip at the same time.

"Whoops, thingy says I'm out of memory, and I'm getting some jerky movement as something appears to be swapping out to disk, so maybe that was too much to ask with the default OS configuration, they probably packed it to launch everything in the background on startup. I'll figure that out later."

But then I don't touch anything and it settles down after a few seconds, and the movies play and the Mozart comes out of the little speaker on the front panel just fine.

I had some trepidation about buying a box unseen, only on the reports of people over the net, and basically a pre-release box, but my early experiences haved lived up to my expectations about what the basic OS would be capable of, with just some toy apps to demo things. I'm not as harsh as John Norstad is about the "polish" of the system, to me it's not "pretty bad," it's just different, and there are lot of things left to be done.

But like John, I'm beginning to go nutso over the pleasure it is to be programming on this machine. If you truly _enjoy_ programming, think it's fun, like to create all these neat abstractions in your head and see it do things on the screen, then I think this API is definitely the way to go.

I've read through most of the BeBook, ignoring the media and midi kits for now. I'm impressed by the documentation, and it's been pretty easy to get a simple app running, just trying out the buttons, menus, etc. I've had quite a bit of C++ experience, so that probably helps. I didn't quite have the orgasm John did about the scrolled views, but it is a lot easier than calling TrackControl, et.al., or trying to figure out the myriad coordinate systems of TCL or PowerPlant, etc.

The messaging system looks more interesting to me, and pervades the whole system. It's simple, and I only had to read through it once to get the feeling that I understood it. If you've been through the Ch.4 on the Be web site, you get a good feel for how it's used throughout the system. I spent quite a bit of time implementing generalized AE handling on the Mac in a framework I authored, and though it does lots of neat things I think it's over-engineered for the purposes that it is being put to use these days, and it's fairly complex to do even simple things.

Fun, fun, fun.

A little warning, if you're doing printf's to debug or watch what's going on, make sure you launch from the shell. I double-clicked and ended up hanging my window thread, apparently waiting for someone to receive the output (serial port? I think I read from some previous discussion?). There's probably some hook in the app kit to detect when I've been launched from a shell vs. double-clicked in the browser, but I haven't bumped into it yet.

Is anyone working on a simple view builder for putting together dialogs, etc.? Nothing complicated, I don't want a code generator or a killer framework, just something like Resorcerer's DITL editor and some code to read it from resources. Anyways. Maybe I'll work on one as an exercise.

I don't see in the BeBook any way to source level debugging yet, either from the Mac, or with the native tools. So I'll probably stick with the Edit mini-app and the shell and makefiles. So far that's worked out fine. The docs on the tools accessible from the shell are pretty minimal, so you have to play around with it, hoping they take -? or -help options to give you a summary, but they do pretty much what you expect if you've done some unix work.

If the rest of the API works out as well and straightforward as the app and interface stuff has so far, I'm gonna be a happy camper. So I'm merrily staying up late while the family's asleep, tapping code into Edit, getting ideas for programs (Be: waiting for a SCSI driver API and 16/24-bit support to get going on my "official" project!) and generally being a happy clam. Haven't even had to mail devsupport@be.com yet.

Enough rambling, I hope this has been interesting for some people.

Jim Moy