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BeOS is the brainchild of Jean-Louis Gassee - a former Apple marketing director who broke away 10 years ago to found Be Incorporated. The company's original aim was to be a hardware manufacturer and the BeBox featured twin Motorola PowerPC processors and advanced multimedia support.
A 1994 demo showed the machine running a QuickTime video, optimising the playback of a Beethoven sonata to the room's acoustics, rotating a three-dimensional drawing and answering the phone - all at the same time, without slowing down and in just 8Mb of RAM. Sadly, the BeBox didn't take off but the operating system lingers on. It has shifted to the Intel platform and while retaining support for multiple processors, will still run happily on one.
BeOs 5 comes in two versions - Personal and Professional. The Personal Edition is free and installs to your hard disk just like a Windows application. Running BeOS from the icon then restarts your computer, in a similar way to restarting in MS-DOS mode.
On our PC, the entire installation - including choosing the location of the BeOS files and icons - took less than four minutes from pressing the install button to the arrival of the BeOS desktop. Subsequent restarts into BeOS from Windows took around 30 seconds - less time than it took to restart Windows itself.
The next pleasant surprise was that nearly everything worked first time - the graphics card, soundcard, DVD and CD drives were all present and correct. We did have problems connecting to the local network and weren't able to use a USB scanner attached to the PC. On a brighter note, we were able to download pictures from a three-year old digital camera without any extra software.
BeOS prides itself on its multimedia support and this is no idle boast - within minutes of installing, we were playing audio CDs, .wav files and MP3s and even watching, albeit somewhat jerkily, a DVD film.
Fully featured
The Personal edition also includes a Midi player, sound recorder and a multi-track sound mixer. Other applications and utilities include an image viewer, TV and video camera viewers, email client, web browser and address book. There's the Software Valet for downloading and installing applications, Expander for managing Zips and other compressed files, a screen magnifier and even CD recording software.
Although the Personal Edition of BeOS occupies a 500Mb file rather than its own partition, it still behaves as a separate drive when it's running. You can still access your Windows 'drives' by 'mounting' with a right-click on the Desktop. Drives and partitions lose their letters though, and you end up with multiple 'no name' drive icons, which you then have to rename.
With a few other exceptions, the interface presents no problems to Windows users. There's a Deskbar that incorporates similar functionality to the Windows Taskbar, Start menu and System tray, and Tracker works like the Windows folder system (you can view in standard, small icon or list view). Unlike Windows, you can spread yourself over multiple desktops and switch between up to 32 virtual screens, each with its own resolution and colour settings.
Unlike the Windows Taskbar, which creates a separate button for each window running, BeOS groups them. If you have several folders open, for example, they'll all be in a menu nested within one Tracker button, resulting in a much tidier Deskbar. More disconcerting is the lack of an hourglass pointer - although BeOS is by no means slow, the unchanging finger pointer meant we were often left wondering if anything was happening. Another thing we missed was Help on the menu bar of windows - to get assistance, you need to dig out the documentation from the Web-style user guide.
One brilliant touch is the presence of a favourites menu in the File Open and Save dialogs, which you can populate with often-used folders to save time digging through the file system. In general, the interface is less complex and cluttered than Windows and more comprehensible than the raw command line interface that lies beneath such graphical user interfaces as Linux. There are also some nicely human touches, with system messages such as 'Tidying up a bit ...' and browser error messages phrased as haikus.
The Professional version is installed rather differently - it does need its own partition on the hard disk and, to this end, a purpose-made version of Partition Magic is included. This wasn't quite so simple and would only let us create a partition from the existing C: drive.
We had to be very careful to ensure that this new partition was the one chosen for installation, as it wasn't the default choice and making the wrong decision here would have wiped our existing files. This time installation was a little slower - around 10 minutes - but still far swifter then either Windows 98 or Corel Linux. With this version, you don't have to start Windows first but instead get a boot menu offering a choice of operating system. BeOS still loaded in about half the time of Windows.
A real Pro
The Pro version comes with more drivers, a set of development tools, RealPlayer and some media files, including mystifying movie clips of some ladies and gentlemen throwing computers off the top of a building. More usefully, there are some sample files for the 3DmiX sound mixer, which given the lack of a help file, went some way to showing how it works. There are also some 'experimental' applications, including a video recorder, diagnostic tools and a setup for printer and file sharing. Despite the latter, we were still unable to connect to a Windows network.
Trial versions of four other applications were also included - Postmaster (an advanced email client), Moho (an animation producer), GimICQ2 (a chat program), and Gobe Productive. This last is an integrated package encompassing word processing, spreadsheets, drawing tools, image processing and slide shows, and has the crucial ability to read Word and Excel files. Unfortunately, the Save feature is disabled in the trial version - a limitation which precludes any serious attempt at evaluation.
This brings us to the weak point of BeOS - the lack of applications. Most of those available are for sound, images or development and, outside the multimedia world, there are few familiar names supplying software. There's a lot of freeware, shareware and trial software at www.bebits.com, but little in the way of standard business software. Apart from the Gobe suite, we could only find two word processors, both still in pre-release versions.
The BeOS Personal edition is free from http://free.be.com. Prices for the Professional edition will be announced.
Contact BeOS (France) +33 (0) 1559177
http://www.be.com
See also:
All Operating Systems
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