[openbeos] BeOS style icons on primetime tv

I like computers, and like most geeks I like sci-fi. So I was watching
Quantum Leap 2, nay, Journeyman on NBC and noticed some familiar
icons. I thought to myself "those look like BeOS icons." So I made a
screenshot to see if I could clear up the picture. A little white
balancing later I had a better image.

http://img3.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/1571ae8e29.png

  So they could be BeOS, but they could also be any number of BeOS
look alikes or even the Haiku icons.

Then an idea struck me to go look at the old Haiku icon voting page to
compare the icons in the screenshot to the voting icons.

http://bug-no.petterhj.net/iconcontest/iconsets.php

I focused on the person icon near the lower left corner. It was
clearly a traditional orange person, so that narrowed it down.
Stippi's person icon was too fat, so that left zuMI and McClintock.
The person icon's head was light grey, so I settled on McClintock. The
problem was there are a bunch more icons, some of them looking a
little out of place. The weird screen on the upper left, and the
yellow blob on the lower right. So I go to McClintock's page and
download the png version of his icons.

http://mc.clintock.com/first_floor/study_1/desk/computer_projects/icons/BeOS_Icons/

Jackpot. Almost all of the same icons where there. The screen was an
Apple screen, and the yellow blob was a post-it note, but the mail box
had a black flag in the screenshot and the paint brush was painting
black, instead of red. The two people in the upper left corner were
missing for some reason. One thing bothered me, there were a lot of
digital artifacts in the screenshot around the icons. Zoom in to see.
They almost look like marching ants. This meant one hing, digital
manipulation, almost certainly compositing of the icons and background
together. Why couldn't they just use the icons directly? So I did one
last search for "BeOS icons" in Finder-SpydeR, um, I mean Google.

BINGO

Result number three, deviant art.



  Looks at the large version of the preview screenshot and the
screenshot from Journeyman. Notice anything ? The icons on deviant art
are in the exact same positions relative to each other, as they are in
the Journeyman screenshot, in clusters anyway. The
BeOS_Documents_Folder_2 icon and BeOS_Folder-queries are aligned
vertically in both screenshots, as are BeOS_paint and BeOS_Stickies.

So instead of using a screenshot of the icons with a blank wallpaper,
someone went in and cut out the icons and took the time and effort to
get rid of the white and grey squares.

Stippi may have won the Haiku icon contest, but McClintock, via Kol,
made it to Hollywood.

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