It doesn't take long living in this world to learn that bad things happen to good people. It takes even less time in the computer industry to learn that when someone puts out an innovative, great, well-developed product it has about a 15% chance of survival. This brings us to BeOS, one of the pinnacle examples of something really good that died far before it should have. However, it is not quite dead yet. BeOS has continued to captivate a large and devoted community. The Haiku project is working on an Open Source version of the OS and now out of Germany comes Yellowtab's Zeta, a continuation of an unreleased development version of BeOS code-named "Dano." Is Zeta worth the price? Will Yellowtab raise BeOS from the ashes and inflame public interest in the OS? Read on.
Installation
Your first experience with Zeta is a nice splash-screen in the BeOS style and then one of the easiest install routines I have ever used. In fact, this is one of the best all around installers I have seen, with one exception. The partitioning section, while easy, is completely unsuitable for any sort of advanced or even moderately complicated partitioning. The only thing it allows you to do is pick a partition or an area of free space on which to install the system. That is fine, but its complete lack of the ability to delete or modify existing partitions is rather surprising and more than a little frustrating. This blemish is really a shame, because otherwise I would be able to call this the perfect installer. It asks almost no questions, has sane defaults and sports an utter lack of complexity.
The installer has one feature in particular that I feel deserves a second look. When you select that you want to customize the applications to install, the dialog you are presented with includes not only a tree of application names and a description, but a tab where you can see a screen-shot of the application. This is an excellent idea. Anyone who has scrolled through a package list knows that program names are almost never descriptive and the descriptions themselves are sometimes completely unhelpful. This is truly a case where a picture paints a thousand words.
Hardware Support
Arguably one of the most important things that Yellowtab has done with Zeta is include a whole mess of drivers. The installer, desktop and the applications don’t matter if the user cannot use the OS. Zeta can now boot with 1GB of RAM, has CPU optimized kernels, has many printer drivers in the form of CUPS, more NIC drivers and updated support for many graphics adapters. It was able to easily detect all of my hardware, something all earlier versions of BeOS failed miserably doing. Actually, it has always been my experience that the most difficult part of installing BeOS was finding a machine with supported hardware. Well done Yellowtab, for taking steps towards resolving this. It is much appreciated.
Desktop Experience
BeOS was always focused on desktop experience. It strived for simplicity, speed and consistent UI design. This all makes it even more shocking when you boot Zeta for the first time and see Yellowtab's preferences application. There are many things I like about Zeta, this is not one of them. I don't understand the logic behind this program's design. It is a central configuration center, which is fine, and is based on the idea of tabs...also fine. However, the tabs are located on the left-hand side in a strange scrolling box and are spaced very widely apart. The upshot of this is that you can only view about 3-5 of the tabs at one time and have to scroll to see the rest of them. The scrolling itself is very stylized and, while it looks cool, this makes it even more difficult to see what tabs are available. Fortunately, the various tabs are also accessible as separate application launchers in the menu. If you use Zeta for any amount of time, it becomes obvious that these direct links are the only real way to get to the preference panels without developing an aneurysm.
After you exit the unfortunate preferences application, the first thing you may notice about this desktop when compared to BeOS 5 or Dano is the icons. Yellowtab has added SVG icon support to Zeta and converted most of their icons. These look great and really do more than anything else to make Zeta appear updated and current. There is a slight delay on the rendering of these icons, but its not that noticeable. You will not truly appreciate the SVG icons until you download and install a third party application. The comparison between the old-style icons and the new is rather amazing.
The other major change any BeOS user will notice is the widget set. Pretty much every type of UI element has an updated look. I was not completely sure, based on the screen-shots, if I was going to like these updates. However, I have found I do like the new widget style. It is very different and mildly strange, but somehow it fits. Zeta also includes the capability to change many aspects of the “look n’ feel”, including window manager styles (called decor), colors and fonts. It even has theme support and ships with a strangely disturbing Citrus theme, a predictable High Contrast theme and an actually quite pleasant Olive theme.
L to R: Theme Panel Of The Preferences Application; Zeta Menu
The layout of the desktop itself has not changed much at all, which is a good thing. Yellowtab has taken the correct route here in updating the look of BeOS without significantly changing it. The Be layout works well as it is and has always been one of the most effective desktop designs out there in my opinion. The only small change I dislike is that they have added one of those translucent selection areas that is used when you click and drag on the desktop to select multiple icons. This would be a fine idea, but there is some serious lag on the graphical effect and it detracts from the fast feel that BeOS has cultivated.
BeOS Features
Most of the things that are good about Zeta are inherited from BeOS. This begs the question “what was so good about BeOS?” Pull up a chair, stool or rug and I will tell you. Technically, BeOS was very advanced:
It was multi-threaded by design.
It included multiprocessor support back when that was hardly standard.
It was designed to be object-oriented, to the point that much of the API was in C++.
It included a file system that supported database-like queries, journaling and was 64-bit.
It supported preemptive multitasking.
It was designed around a client/server model. That is, applications ran as "clients" and accessed "servers" to use operating system resources. For example, an application would access the app_server to create its initial instance and the network_server to access the Internet. [1]
Zeta Find Dialog
These technical features enabled the Be designers to create a very fast, stable and easy to use OS. Actually, there are still aspects of BeOS that many current operating systems still have not replicated:
It boots very quickly, in under 5 seconds on my machines.
The UI itself is very snappy. Programs start quickly and there is almost never any delays on menus or dragging/dropping.
It is very stable and if something did crash, it almost never brings down the OS. For example, when I was using it back when BeOS 5 came out, the sound_server was slightly unstable on my machine. When I would open one sound file in particular, the program would crash and the sound would not work from then on. What would I do on most operating systems? Restart probably. On BeOS? I would just restart the sound_server and it would work again.
The desktop design, while nowhere near as revolutionary as it once was, is still one of the best. Things just tend to make sense. For instance, where are your contacts? In the folder marked "People."
The system has a file system-centric approach that nobody else has really copied. Emails are literally files, as are contacts, and are thus search-able like anything else. I loved this idea when it was first introduced and I still like it today. It not only makes finding things very easy, but just makes sense.
It actually remembers where a window was when you opened it before, what size it was, etc. Apparently this is really difficult, because I can count the numbers of UI's that do this successfully on half of one hand. I could stick my hand in a garbage disposal and have a good chance of still being able to count them.
You can right-click on a folder and get a cascading menu of its contents. Why does no OS anywhere do this? There used to be a utility for Mac OS 7 that would do something like it, but nothing else has anything even close to it. This feature is incredibly useful.
