First Look: BeOS for PowerMac
By Henry Bortman and Jeff Pittelkau, MacUser
MacUser, January 1997.
To put it bluntly, the speed of the BeOS is nothing short of phenomenal. When we first encountered it, the BeOS was running on a proprietary BeBox. All BeBoxes ship with dual processors, so we assumed that the responsiveness of the system was due in large part to the second processor and faster hardware.
Even if that had been the case, we would still have been impressed. On the Mac, multiprocessor systems are useful only for accelerating specific compute-intensive functions in a handful of applications. The BeOS, in contrast, implements fully symmetric multiprocessing, so all the work done on a dual-processor system is distributed between the two CPUs and hence every task on the system gets a boost.
Impressive as the BeBox was, it was when we saw the BeOS running on a PowerCenter 150 (see photo, above) that our jaws dropped. Keep in mind that by current standards, the 150-MHz PowerPC 604 chip in this system is somewhere in the middle of the processor-speed spectrum. Even though the PowerCenter wasn't tricked out with the speediest processor available and although it contained only a single CPU, the BeOS ran circles around the Mac OS running on the same machine. When you think about it, though, it actually behaved as you'd expect a computer to behave: When we clicked the mouse on a button or a menu, it responded. Instantly. No matter what else was going on.
We've all grown so used to the limitations of the Mac OS that we hardly give it a second thought when we have to wait up to a minute for an application to launch. Or when we can't do anything but sit and watch a progress bar while we wait for a file to finish copying. Or when we click on the menu bar and several seconds elapse before the menu appears. Or when the Mac crashes. And crashes again. And again.
Did we mention the BeOS' stability? Although the system software we tested was alpha, it almost never crashed. And when it did, it was rare that anything other than the offending application was affected. The rest of the system, and other applications, stayed up and running.
Another intriguing feature of the BeOS is its built-in database. A hybrid of relational and object-oriented technology, the database is a system resource both the OS and applications can take advantage of. For example, the BeOS' file system makes extensive use of the database. Information about files' names, types, creators, creation and modification dates, and so on is stored in the database. This makes the Be Browser's Find command return results in the blink of an eye. It also enables queries to be live: If a filename changes or new files are created, query results update automatically.
The BeOS also uses its database to keep track of contact information. Called People, this capability enables the BeOS to store names, addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses. Be uses People to provide an easy way to address e-mail messages: All you have to do is drag a People icon to the message's address field. Third-party applications can also access and extend this information.
Interface homage
Of course, along with every new operating system comes the opportunity to reinvent the graphical user interface. Be hasn't made any great leaps forward in this arena. Rather, the Be interface is a pastiche of UI features borrowed from other operating systems. It includes the de rigueur file and folder icons. It has menus. It has windows. The windows have scroll bars, close boxes, zoom boxes, and title tabs. Double-clicking on a window's title tab minimizes the window so that only the tab is visible (à la Copland's promised Drawers feature).
But although most of the requisite elements are present, Be appears to have made some curious omissions and a few bizarre choices. For example, even though there is a desktop, you can't put icons on it. Instead, Be has placed a NeXT-OS-like dock on the left side of the desktop, to which you can drag aliases of files and folders for easy access. But the dock's capacity is limited. Meanwhile, most of the screen's real estate remains unavailable for drag-and-drop operations.
Then there's Be's approach to menus. There is no universal menu bar at the top of the screen like the Mac's. No problem there. But it seems as though Be couldn't quite make up its mind about what it wanted to do about menus. At the top left of the dock sits a main menu. It changes as you switch among applications.
In addition, many applications have menus in each window. These are supposed to contain commands specific to the contents of the window. We're skeptical about how well this partitioning scheme is going to work in a complex application. In the limited set of example programs Be currently ships with its OS, there appears to be no consistent set of rules that govern which commands can be found where.
Still to Come
The BeOS has other shortcomings as well. At this point, it has no color management, for example. It doesn't currently support double-byte languages, such as Japanese and Chinese, or localization of the OS for French, German, Spanish, and so on -- which makes building an international market a bit of a challenge. It also has no scripting language, nor does it have anything nearly as robust as the QuickTime Media Layer for managing media.
All these are problems that Be says can be solved with capabilities already present in the OS. Making marketing claims and delivering the goods, however, are two different things. The question remains how -- and when -- Be will actually come through with solutions to these problems.
And then there are the issues Mac users will find particularly vexing. The BeOS version we tested couldn't recognize Mac-formatted floppy or hard disks. In fact, you can't use the Mac floppy-disk drive at all, even with BeOS-formatted floppies. Be doesn't yet have a driver for it. The only printer the DR8 release of the BeOS currently supports (an HP LaserJet IIp or compatible) requires a parallel connection. Macs don't have parallel ports. So no printing either. And Be's contextual-menu feature requires a two-button mouse, which the Mac doesn't support. So Mac-o-philes can forget about contextual menus, at least for now.
To be fair, dealing with these problems is high on Be's priority list and you can expect the company to solve them before any widespread distribution of the Mac version of the OS occurs.
Then, of course, there's the question of applications. There are hardly any. That, too, will change. But at press time, only a few vendors were willing to go on record as developing for the BeOS. Among these were WebStar, working on a BeOS-savvy version of its Web server, and a company developing an installer. Adobe also supposedly is working on a version of Photoshop for the BeOS, but at press time, it had not committed to shipping it.
Even with all these problems, every one of us at MacUser who worked with the BeOS was left with a similar impression. If we could get our daily work done on the BeOS, we'd all have BeOS-enabled Macs in no time.
We may be a long way from that day. But one thing is very clear: With the arrival of the BeOS on the Mac, developers are looking at the BeOS more seriously -- and so are Mac users.
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