[haiku] Re: Feedback from a BeOS demonstration

Hi,

> I recently had the pleasure of demonstrating BeOS to the 3ivx 
> development team.

You know we have Haiku images available too ;)

> I thought I would write down my thoughts from that demonstration.
> 
> The audience was composed of pretty much Windows developers with 1 or
> 2 Mac OS developers.
> 
> OS Features that impressed them:
> Copying and Moving files with a right click.  Indeed I think they
> rather liked the way the right click worked for most things.

Yeah I always try to do x-ray nav in windows or linux :D

> Replicants made them sit up and take notice.  The idea of being able 
> to
> extract pieces of an application and embed them into the desktop was
> something that they really liked.

Well, Windows or OSX has some similar stuff, just not done the same 
way.

Replicants were really underused in BeOS sadly.
I'd like to extend the concept to match document mimetypes and actions 
(verbs maybe... B_OPEN, B_EDIT, B_PRINT...) to allow an app to just 
find a replicant to display a text/x-pdf or an application/x-vnd.Be-URL
-vnc ;)

> Multiple Desktops.  Just like having 32 monitors only virtual :-)

They can even have different rez, but with LCD screens it's not that 
much useful though.

> Super Fast find, nothing like an indexed query. :-)
> 
> Live Queries, setting up queries and watching them autoupdate as you
> copied files around or created new ones provoked a lot of discussion
> about how it was done.

Oddly, NTFS has index support, seems like MS forgot how to use it ;)

> Changing Windows to display attributes so you could render a list of
> files with the additional details

I should make a package for googlefs for BeOS before switching it to 
our new VFS API I suppose ;)

> Apps that impressed them
> ProcessController, they liked the way you could see everything 
> working
> while you examined the processes.

There is even a clone of this for win32:
http://www.osnews.com/story/19945/BeOS_ProcessController_for_Windows

> The version of BeOS I was given to demo on had BONE installed, I was
> not very familiar with it and it crashed a few times.  The developers
> used scp and ssh a lot to move files about so a good network stack is
> a requirement.

BONE is quite stable but not perfect...

François.

Other related posts: