June 02, 2003
Die, BeOS, Die.
The, BeOS, The.
For some reason I was looking at YellowTab's screen shots of their new release of BeOS, and I noticed that they're using the sweet progress bar enabled icons that Tim Martin (now at Apple) invented. In my brief time at Be, Inc., I implemented just such a progress bar icon for files being downloaded by NetPositive, allowing people to see on the file icon how the download was progressing.
There is a lot to be said for a UI that implements ubiquitous multithreading until the last moment of rendering. Despite the sad fact that almost no programmers are capable of writing threadsafe code, there is a positive effect when several items update simultaneously that is different to our visual systems than the quickly interleaved lockstep of a UI that shoves everything through a single pipeline early in rendering.
That said, I believe that OS X and Win2k are each better than BeOS ever was in terms of breadth of libraries and maturity of design. Though I think the world of the code and the people who wrote it, I'm sad to see that there are people still working on BeOS as anything except a hobby.
Posted by Trevor F Smith at June 2, 2003 09:30 AM | TrackBack