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Yellow Tab Hits RC3 45

Posted by timothy from the wistful dept.
*no comment* writes "The Carriers of the BeOS torch YellowTab, has hit RC3 in their latest update to what might have been BeOS 6. This runs at about $99 ($10 upgrade when final version is release), and has a long list of features, such as the included Gobe office suite. Don't forget to check out the recently updated screenshots."
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Yellow Tab Hits RC3 More

Yellow Tab Hits RC3

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  • Be was great back in the day, I just don't know whether it will survive, regardless of which incarnation it's presently in. I saw the audio app running, which is one of the things Be was good for, but how much more will it take before we see much commercial Be software?

    As it is, you're lucky to find a Mac title or two in some establishments, and occasionally can find a shelf or area devoted to it.

    Be, however, seems to be missing from just about any shelf anywhere.

    What would it take to make this change?

  • 99 Euros (Score:3, Funny)

    by Prien715 ( 251944 ) <agnosticpope@nOSPaM.gmail.com> on Monday June 14, 2004 @10:31PM (#9426295) Journal
    That's 99 Euros. If I could only get a euro for a dollar.

  • Cool (Score:4, Interesting)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @10:40PM (#9426340) Homepage
    Pretty nifty.

    For all the folks who were chanting for OS X on the PC, this might be the closest thing.

    But seriously. I remember about 2 years ago, installing and running the last release of BeOS (the one which happily coexisted with win98).

    There's something VERY cool about a modern operating system which boots to the desktop in 5 seconds. This was on an Athlon 750 w/ 128mb RAM.

    Of course, there were a few hitches along the way. Namely, the networking support. I was on dial-up at the time, and there was a bug in the CHAP authentication thingy in BeOS. It eventually led me to ditch the OS, but it will always remain in my heart as the coolest OS i'd ever used. The GUI was clean and simple, it had all of the 'good bits' of the Mac UI in it. It beat the heck out of Mac OS and Win9x at the time. Linux wasn't even an option at the time due to the ridiculous complexity (although I did nuke the Be partition* to install Debian which was even more short-lived then Be)

    *And the windows partition. And the backup partition. And all of my files. Curse you buggy Debian Fdisk frontend!

    Any idea why we haven't seen more software ported to Be? Is it not port-friendly or something?

    • Re:Cool (Score:1)

      by torpor ( 458 )
      Any idea why we haven't seen more software ported to Be? Is it not port-friendly or something?

      I think its that classic "nobody uses it" situation. Those who do use BeOS are the ones doing all the porting already ... and yes, it is 'port-friendly' ... in a similar way to OSX, actually.

      • yes, it is 'port-friendly' ... in a similar way to OSX, actually.

        I am not so sure. OS X was an Unix from start, and with each version, libraries for simplifying the port of Unix applications are added, so most Unix ports can compile directly or with minimal changes. Plus OS X has to two APIs that were used to build programs at some time, Carbon (classical Macintosh applications) and Cocoa (Next step applications).

        From what I gathered, BeOS has Posix support and that's it.

    • The networking in BeOS 5 was completely broken on so many levels... and the Be people knew it. Thats why you can find the "unofficial" Bone upgrade for it floating around the net, and why Bone is the networking in Zeta.

  • Here we go again! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @10:40PM (#9426341) Journal
    This runs at about $99 ($10 upgrade when final version is release), and has a long list of features, such as the included Gobe office suite.

    Yup, that's the BeOS spirit, all right. Some extremely commendable technical accomplishment, and just too damn expensive to give a serious tryout without making a serious upfront investment.

  • Be was a great idea (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Be was a great idea when it came out and I believe the core of it is still an excellent idea. I used it back in the day as a demo and to do some light video and audio editing. Nothing could beat it for how smoothly the OS dealt with multiple audio and video tracks. Nothing I've seen (well, played with anyway) can beat it today on a x86 platform. One of my demos when I was still teaching was to bring up 16 individual video tracks and have them all playing on the same screen, at the same time (minus audio b

  • Windows replacement? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NewWazoo ( 2508 ) <bkmatt@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Monday June 14, 2004 @10:59PM (#9426446) Homepage
    One of the nice things about Linux as a replacement for Windows (in my case) is the rich suite of applications available. I can do all the development I require (MCU and FPGA, among other things) in such an environment, and the software for which there's no functional replacement generally runs under WINE (with a working windows partition for dlls and such). I'm even generally more productive under Linux to boot - if it weren't for the abysmal user interfaces available, I'd use it exclusively (note: KDE is Getting There, and quickly).

    What about BeOS/et. al? Can I run all that GNU software? Is there a windows emulator so I can be 100% happy and still get to use Winamp5 and Trillian Pro (without which I CANNOT LIVE :] ).

    Please, someone, say yes; until OS X is available for x86, BeOS seems like the most useable thing going...

    B

    • Re:Windows replacement? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by burns210 ( 572621 ) <maburns@gmail.com> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @01:19AM (#9427113) Homepage Journal
      Yes, you can leave windows and still run every Windows program you want, have it look like Windows, and even upload your password and user account preferences to ease migration... o, wait..

      This is BeOS, not Windows. You don't run Winamp5 for Windows on a machine that doesn't have Windows installed. Why do you need "winamp5" specifically, when player X is just as capable? Because it is different, you don't want to change? Then why leave Windows for a new OS.

      When you leave Windows and migrate to a new OS, things change. You find replacement applications, software and utilities to fill the holes you have. You don't get to keep everything Windows, and pick and choose what you don't want. Life doesn't work like that, and Zeta, Linux and Mac should not cater to that market. People like that don't want to switch, because they don't want to leave Windows.
      • I just slap Litestep [litestep.net] on my Windows machine and it fixes everything I hate about the Windows interface.

        Add a few bits of software here and there to replace Explorer and Outlook Express and it's like having a whole new OS that can run all my current software.

    • Re:Windows replacement? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MrHanky ( 141717 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @08:47AM (#9428471) Homepage Journal
      I'm even generally more productive under Linux to boot - if it weren't for the abysmal user interfaces available, I'd use it exclusively (note: KDE is Getting There, and quickly).
      Interesting. How can you be more productive if the user interface is so terrible?

      Not that I actually believe you. What does the user interface in Windows do, that KDE can't? Not much. Nothing that I can remember. But please remind me.

      (Writing this from OSX, which is good, but lacked some important things that I could do easily in KDE, before Panther came with Exposé.)
      • Because I do more than work on my computers, and when I do work, it's typically within a single monolithic applicaion (e.g. MATLAB) or on the command line.

        I want an OS that I can use to get work done AND watch movies and listen to MP3s and browse teh intarweb. Unfortunately, I find Linux to be exemplary for the former purpose, and horrid for the latter. Contrarily, Windows XP is just the opposite. This, admittedly, has little to do with the actual OS in question - it's more about the applications available
        • In question though, you have to think about how fast Linux is growing. I mean, people are gradually starting to realize the truth, that there is more beyond Winblows. I even browsed the screenies and drooled, I needed to keep my keyboard out of the vicinity of my keyboard so that I don't mess it up. 10 buckets of drool later, I realized that this BeOS flavor has potential, and I salute the Yellow Tab developers for creating a product who's interface is drool-inducing (at least for me, it was ;))
      • IMHO, it's not KDE alone or GNOME alone that are the problem. It's when you have to start mixing them. Some apps use Control-Q to exit, some are Control-X, etc etc. Font rendering is different. Apps generally "feel" different. Firefox looks different from both KDE and GNOME apps, etc etc. Eclipse/GTK is slower than hell, which makes my development experience in Linux abysmal.

        The user interface in Windows is consistent! That's the difference!
        • The user interface in Windows is not consistent. The preferences panel is in different places in the menu, Notepad has a different look and feel from Wordpad, which has a different look from Word, and so on. Those are just text editing apps from the same company... And no media app looks like another (apart from all the Winamp clones).

          The 'problem' is of course worse in Linux, since you also have the inconsistencies between 'legacy' apps like Emacs and vi. You may complain that ctrl-C doesn't work as expec
  • Sad, but I can't think of anything 'replacing BeOS' or 'taking up where BeOS left off' without insisting that it run on BeBox hardware.
    • while it's not ppc based this company does make it's own systems. Why on earth would you develop for a platform whose CPU topped out 5 years ago(+?) at 133Mhz? I agree they were bad-ass, but that's just bad business. It would be bad idea to develop it for the bebox. Even Be themselves had a timeline laid out for abandoning it.
      • Rubbish. The BeBox's are still operational. They still work. Why shouldn't they at least have a target for the BeBox - since they -are- so old, the driver work to support them should've/would've been done years ago.

        It really ought to be a simple TARGET=BeBox scenario by now.

        This uncaring attitude for hardware that is 'old' or 'antiquated' is really a detriment to constructive computing. My BeBox still has lots of life left in it.

        You think the Linux kernel shouldn't target 386's? I can still build a
        • the 386 was also the most dominant platform of it's day and one that linux was originally written on. As for the Beboxes we're talking what, a few thousand that were sold? and none since '97, and no more new coming....ever. Yellowtab does not have the Be source, most of what they are working on was written, or rewritten by them. A simple TARGET is not an option. It's a rumor that yellowtab actually has the be source. If you read the history page over at yellowtab you will see that palm bought be and cl

  • How's Palm doing? (Score:3, Funny)

    by CoolGuySteve ( 264277 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @03:28AM (#9427530)
    I never gave much thought to Palm before they bought BeOS and let it languish. Now I hope they disintegrate soon.

    I would donate without a second thought to purchase the BeOS for the sake of GPL'ing it. At least then we might see a kernel that's newer than 2001 and a much needed injection of some new features like OpenGL. Once Palm closes its doors, the property will hopefully be cheap enough to do so.

    For now, I'd rather use Linux 2.6, Fluxbox, and some accelerated X drivers and think of what might have been.

    • Re:How's Palm doing? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      from what i've read, Palm has integrated the BeOS scheduler into cobalt. it seems that cobalt is the first major revision to PalmOS, perhaps since the beginning. They're using the code, its just taking them quite a while to get it integrated.
  • It is rather depressing, though, that they've taken BeOS and beat the interface repeatedly with the ugly stick. The yellow doesn't have to be that bright, seriously. I know the NewOS look was there before, and they kept the neat checkboxes and comboboxes... but took the window decorations to a new level of fugly.

    Not to mention, the whole thing looks like a mismanaged linux distro now.

    Oh well. Long live Be.

  • Yeah, I bought it. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Bill, Shooter of Bul ( 629286 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @03:46PM (#9433728) Journal
    Its just a little spit and polish away from beign a real windows competitor. Or so it appears. Of course then you have to fight the lack of software available. blah blah adoption ect. but that stuff can wait. right now rc2 still crashes a lot more than any rc should. I ordered rc3 a couple of days ago, but it hasn't arived yet. Oh, and they are going to have to get a newer version of gcc on the thing. You can get some GPL software to work on it, but you have to know what you are doing ( ie editing the source code). So why not run linxu kde? zeta is still tons faster. and more polished gui.
  • Tahya al-Moqawama al-Iraqiya!
    Fuck the American imperialists!

    The Americans will pay for what they've done in Iraq! Soon the American cities will burn! They will forget 11 September when they see! Tahya al-Moqawama al-Iraqiya! Tahya al-Moqawama al-Iraqiya!!

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