Everyone’s favourite perpetual beta operating system, SkyOS, has introduced a concept of an interesting new feature, whose inspiration came from a feature on the Playstation 3. The feature is kind of like an always-accessible (even during the boot process) version of Front Row, which you can access using a mouse gesture or a shortcut. It then allows you to access and play all your media files. “So whenever you want to quickly listen to music you don’t have to open a dedicated music player. Simply enter crossbar, select your song and return to the desktop. Crossbar has been designed to make this as fast and as straight forward as possible.” Click read more for a video.
The video shows Crossbar running on an old P4 2.0 Ghz, no hardware acceleration (VESA only), with the interface ready in 10msec after pressing the shortcut. It currently supports images, music, videos, and web streams.
With such a feature, you have instant access to all your media, in a way that doesn’t clutter up the desktop, and you don’t have to load dedicate music/video players. The fact that this feature is available even in a pre-boot environment opens a whole can of abilities; for instance, I can easily see this being used to set up a locked-down kiosk-like multimedia interface.
see this is the good part about keeping your software under “beta” lets you change stuff all over the place without people getting to mad, “oh well its just beta software.”
once you take that beta off and start making radical suden changes people get mad.
i like it, keep up the good work guys
Hurd is my favorite perpetual beta OS.
Hurd is a kernel, not an OS!
Hurd is stable!!!! HURD IS STABLE!!!
At least the codebase is stable… 😉
The Hurd userland is quite stable… it has been in production for several years using a “temporary” kernel called Linux
no updates does not mean stable.
only debian can do that.
and more on topic, i like it. i have a ps3 and i like the simple interface (compared to xbox or something). i hope people start finally developing better interfaces. the desktop metaphor works not that well.
Edited 2008-09-10 18:43 UTC
I applied for the beta a while ago, and I haven’t heard a word from them since. Does anyone here use it? What’s it like? What are the benefits of using SkyOS over others like Linux or BSD?
i use it. I love it. its different, fairly quick, lots of inovative features on it (go to the web site for a feature list), I actualy like it because its not a linux of BSD (not that i have anything against them but i like having other options). It’s a constantly evolving OS with so-so hardware suport but a very active dev team. I bought teh beta on its first release, its fun to play with, looking forward to a “final” hahaha final
I think you’ll probably be picking Crysis out of the $10 classics bin to run under Syllable before you’ll have the “final” version of SkyOS
. I’m curious to see how SkyOS turns out, but right now, I’m more interested in where Syllable and Haiku are going. They both have a lot of potential, and are still in relatively early days.
I thought I was the only one.
Really good work gentlemen.Its coming along nicely.Keep it up.
Have you tried to contact Robert about this (email, forum, irc)?
If you paid for it, you should get access within a few days (something to do with paypal).
Have you tried to contact Robert about this (email, forum, irc)? [/q]
Did.Contacted initially by email.Pc Crashed.Lost the email and tried again.No response.
Its ok.I’ll wait.Everything happens for a reason.
I have been a beta tester for ages. Benefits? Your wallet gets 30 Euro lighter.
Otherwise I have never had sound, network, 3D acceleration… Using very popular hardware.
Software availability? You’ll be much better off with Debian.
Edited 2008-09-11 20:28 UTC
I watched the video and I am quite impressed. This is a good feature.
I’ve got a beta license, not that I’ve used it yet! I’m patiently waiting for SkyOS to be released. Maybe I will be dead first, but hey, you’ve gotta have faith right?
Edited 2008-09-10 01:36 UTC
That would actually be very cool, to hit a key, or “gesture” and change your music, then switch back to all your running apps that get to remain untouched. like said, does look identical to the ps3 (even the background, come on… haha cept that its not animated) but seeing its very early on, im sure it has alot of changes to go.
May have to dust off my login and check it out when it makes it to beta release!
Awesome feature, and good alternative to Frontrow or even the Media Center.
So they made a new skin for quicksilver/katapult/$my_clon_of_choice with reduced functionality and a more shiny than confortable interface? Great news…
I understand that this is a useful feature to allow fast, systemwide access to media, but the implementation is almost an exact copy of Sony’s XrossMediaBar or XMB, which is far more than just a feature of the PlayStation 3. The XMB is the primary interface for a host of Sony products, including the PS3 and PSP, some Sony Ericsson mobile phones, some BRAVIA televisions, some AV receivers and even a few Cyber-shot digital cameras. The XMB actually won an Emmy.
This is a complete and unabashed imitation of the XcrossMediaBar in name, appearance and function. Thankfully, I see from the SkyOS website that the “look, feel, integration and feature coverage is still up for discussion.”
Exactly. This was the definite goal of this proof-of-concept, seeing if SkyOS is able to host an application like XMB in its current shape and form. Including the support for all the transmissions, multiple vidoe playing, browsing, etc..
Using an already well established interface for such experiments made the development phase rather easy and no man-power had to be “wasted” on the design phase.
Now, as we know such an application is actually working very nicely on SkyOS we can go and define the actuall look, feel and feature coverage. In this case we just do the design phase right of developement is almost done.
anybody know what song the used in the video?
Judas Priest – Take on the world
about the comments of the crossbar being a copy…
it’s a proof of concept, with indeed ideas and looks taken from the ps3 implementation but it is definitely not the final form.
“So whenever you want to quickly listen to music you don’t have to open a dedicated music player. Simply enter crossbar, select your song and return to the desktop. Crossbar has been designed to make this as fast and as straight forward as possible.”
If they had drivers for sound cards in the first place! I must have tried it on about 7 different cards and I can never recall having sound.