[haiku] Re: Feedback from a BeOS demonstration

2009/7/30 François Revol <revol@xxxxxxx>:
> Hi,
>
>> I recently had the pleasure of demonstrating BeOS to the 3ivx
>> development team.
>
> You know we have Haiku images available too ;)

Well, the demo was specifically for BeOS.  I did bring a Haiku usb key
along for after but we could not get it to boot on their machines :-(

>> 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.

I explained it as Vista Gadgets done 10 years ago. :-)

> Replicants were really underused in BeOS sadly.

Yes.  Perhaps we can do more with them in Haiku.

> 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 ;)

Yes, we talked about NTFSs attributes as well, sadly the only people
using the extra capabilities of NTFS are virus writers.

>> 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

Yes, I run that but I decided not to mention it :-)

>> 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...

It did not seem to like me.  They have problems with scp.  it works
and then it stops working.  I showed them how to turn on the ftp
server in BeOS and they are using that now.

-- 
Cheers
David

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