Bernd from YellowTab sent us a number of screenshots of their upcoming Zeta operating system which is based on BeOS R5 and Dano versions. First screenshot, second. And here are a shot of ToDoIt application for Zeta (still under heavy development), which is a personal organizer and more.Additionally, Zeta is to support via a shell script the building of your applications for different versions of BeOS (R4, R5, Bone, Dano etc etc) and even for OpenBeOS. Other new features to be found on Zeta is the FaxIt Tracker Add-on, the new Deskbar (the drop-down taskbar entries on Deskbar feature was added to OpenTracker’s CVS last month), a highly modified Dockbert, new drivers and lots more. We should be having more news on YellowTab’s Zeta in the near future.
Check YellowTab’s New Zeta Screenshots
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
two great news from beos frontiers! I’m very glad, all I can say is that I can’t wait to order a copy of zeta. proting of mplayer is very important, in order to have alternatives (to vlc). the new deskbar looks killer, too! I wonder how the new dockbert looks like, though. ^_^
With trembling fingers I type…
Return with me now to the distant, primordial past when Windows 98 roamed the Earth. I had to get out, get away, as far as I could from the BSOD – all the way to BeOS! Yes, I discovered Be just in time to see it stagger, fall, and die.
I held it in my arms, crying to the heavens, ‘Why, God? Why?’
So my lonely trek began again, only to deliver me into the Land of Linux, the once and future desktop OS. It was arcane, it was frustrating, but it wasn’t Windows, so there I remained…
I remember the joy of downloading Be R4 onto a 1.44 floppy and seeing it install on my system without a hiccup. It ran great, it ran fast, and it didn’t get in my way. Linux is now where Be already was years ago until Be hit the wall from one too many wrong moves. I know I’ll be excoriated for this, but I will give my ELX, my Xandros, my Libranet all a well deserved rest and go for a spin in my Zeta!
Why did the change the BeOS-Style window-borders???
…you shouldn’t go see a counselor?
Drug counseling office or so, maybe?
.. are unusable. Way too small, not everyone has perfect vision. Other than that, it isn’t really pretty 🙂
yeah, i second that. whoever is designing the windowborders and widgets needs to get fired. yuck.
The widgets and general borders were designed by Be for the BeOS 6 version (“dano”) that was never released. YellowTab has MODIFIED some of the colors on the borders and scrollbars to be all yellow. I believe that this was a wrong move as the desktop now loses contrast. They should keep the yellow border around the window (the place where used to be gray), but leave the mauve (magenta) colors in tact as Be had them.
I was screaming with hope to see some eyecandy but gosh those screenshots are really super ugly (in my opinion)
And those windowtabs? ugh! UGLY.
Yellowtab has to do better than that!
.. or just a leaked version + some other stuff? I mean, are they actually modifying BeOS code or just adding on hacks?
they CAN be returned to usual BeOS r5 borders. no big deal, if you don’t like them…
Nobody knows for sure. But I know that while YTab had an agreement with Be for some things, they do not have the source code of BeOS or if they do, they do not have the right to change it directly. They are replacing bit by bit the BeOS system with OpenBeOS stuff or by hacking stuff around. They have added an impressive amount of stuff there, new drivers etc.
But yes, indeed, if a company does not have the source to modify the very guts of the system, that system is bound to not get real evolution until these guts are replaced with “free” and compatible alternatives. OSes is all about evolution, so “rehashing” is not enough for a product with future. YTab will need to get the source code or replace these bits with their own versions where they will have full freedom to do as they will and update properly the platform.
They said they had acces to the beos code, since they had agreement with palm inc. They, of course, don’t own it, but have the right to use it afaik. And they, indeed, have the intention of replacing the OS part-by-part with obos as it gets completed for future versions.
Nice widget theme
That’s pretty, don’t like the borders much but the buttons/scrollbars are nice. I sense a new GTK2 theme engine coming on…….
Really I’m sure BeOS is nice, I did try to install it once but the CRC checks kept failing
but is there something really so special about it that Linux couldn’t be adapted? The translators (or whatever they were called) sound cool, but really that could be layered onto Linux. VSYNC sounds nice, but again it could be added to XFree, it’s just nobody really seems to care enough…..
According to a post on BeOSJournal, YellowTab licensed some code from Palm for actual updating. I can’t verify the authenticity of the statement, however. It would explain how they got accellerated 3D in the system, though.
This would be nice indeed.
Well, I suppose it is true that Linux can do everything, and more than BeOS. But a city bus can carry more people than a BMW M3. Sure you can add a spoiler to the city bus, you can fit it with leather seats. It’ll never have the effect on the driver that the BMW will have. Ok.. I know that’s a little contrived. I want BeOS, not Linux trying hard to be BeOS. I use both.
I would agree that Yellow Tab are doing a bad job on the Tabs. But if it’s true that we can go back to R5 style without too much trouble, then it’s not a big deal.
Still; it feels nice to know that a commerical BeOS (clone?) will be on the market soon. At least that’s a step in the right direction.
This is really getting interesting. I’ve trained myself to expect nothing from any of these projects, so I wouldn’t be let down. But, I have to admit, this is getting intriguing.
just check this screenshot: http://www.yellowtab.com/graphics/screenshoots/installer1.jpg
it features old r5 style windows-borders with dano widgets&buttons. you can select in dano if you like new or old or a different window border (in dano they had 2 additional borders to choose). It’s not hacking or something, you simply choose a border from a menu. I wonder if they’ll provide a tutorial for us to create new window borders, it would be ultra-cool!
well I don’t think it’s not only the UI that is ugly… I think the whole thing looks unpro and homemade. Just look at the twists here, is it legal? is it hacked? and etc.
Why does the font rendering looks so bad? It’s so ugly!
The early screenshots showing the installer looked pretty good font-wise. What changed?
I see nothing wrong, except that these new screenshots are more compressed ones, so it’s very normal that it looks worse.
With open-source solutions available (Such as FreeType2 etc.) there shouldn’t be any excuses for poor font quality these days.
Yes, they did get a license for _some_ of the BeOS code base, and have been improving it, and they have rights for unmodified BeOS binary distro for the rest. Read: No PE in there (well, for as much as that can be said, since nearly all of PE is the same as Pro).
Deej
No offense meant, but *ALL* the Zeta screenshots posted so far are plain ugly. And I *KNOW* for a fact it does not have to be like that.
For instance (although my opinion about this is suspicious), check this screenshot form my machine running R5. It rocks, doesn’t it? 
http://www.bug-br.org.br/img/screenshots/016.jpg
-Bruno
i like the yellow scroll bar, i now notice how bland is my current grey bar because i have to deliberatly look at it to see it’s position, i can’t deduct the position by peripheral vision. I would never have think of it myself, too obvious
what is the blue stuff around the “fax” button? I still don’t really get that blue stuff purpose in the UI.
The deskbar seem interesting but i will have to use it some week before telling if it’s good or not.
About the tab, i greatly prefer the original one, i don’t hate zeta tab look but IMO the widget bellong to the tab and not to the window. I especially apreciate that the tab it self is a button and that the close and expand are far appart.
Anybody that tested that mplayer and could comment how it compare to our vlc?
Hey Bruno, how did you get or what app makes thumbnails of pics in a directory? that is kewl.
As for Zeta screenshots, if there is some what to customize it, then I don’t think it would be too bad. Can’t wait!
it indicates that the button is the currently active one. about screenshots: yeah, they are not of the best quality, but that’s because they want to show as much as possible at once, and also they have compressed the images a little bit too much. don’t worry about scrshots, beos looks always kewl!
In daily use, the fonts in beos/dano do NOT look ugly, I prefer them over linux fonts any day. Plus you can use windows ttf fonts with NO tweaks under BeOS. so fonts are NOT an issue.
You’re right – that screenshot is VERY cool.
Welp, i looked long and hard, i havn’t done much research into yellowtab and their dealings…
i would have to say this, regardless of where they get code from, it seems too close to an M$ model of doing things..
that is if their using code from OpenBEOS to get their “clone” up and running, for all intensive purposes they have R5 with updated drivers, they didn’t really start from scratch.. which bugs me.. i have more respect for all the coders who put in effort to provide a new built from scratch BeOS “clone” than Yellow Tab’s hodge podge of code that has been assembled… it’s just my personal oppinion and we all know how that rates… i just don’t want to see projects with so much contributed to the community get shafted by a company thats out to make $ over the backs of those who worked so hard.. i would rather wait and see OBEOS finish what they’v started on and use that, than use Yellow Tabs managatwa of borrowed code (if thats what it is) if someone can clarify it for sure, then it’ll satisfy me, but until then… their just a M$ wannabe…
~J
lol. Do you have any idea how much money Bernd (forgot his lastname) gave out of its pocket? He is not after quick money. OBOS and Yellowtab are NOT rival organizations, they COMPLEMENT each other.
the M$ relation you “invented” is one of the funniest things I have heard in a while.
Why do people keep posting about BeOS. BeOS is dead, these little hacks remind me of the crowds who couldn’t give up MSDOS when NT totally removed real mode. It is time to move on, and support future OSes with more potential than BeOS had. It gets sickening to read about BeOS this, and BeOS that, what about OS/2, QNX, and the others that are still around and make wonderful desktop OSes? There are fanatics in every OS, but until the OpenBeOS people release a usable OS, stop mentioning every little baby chunk of code released. What good are these little pieces on their own anyway? Would I want to run windows if I had to download every little piece of it chunk by chunk until I could make a complete and usable OS? Yes, it would be interesting if OpenBeOS succeeds, but there have been hyped projects like this in the past that never materialized or succeeded, many of which disappointed me and many others. So stop putting so much emphasis on something that may never materialize.
Accually, I think it would be the smart way of doing things. If YellowTab tried to start from scratch they would have been dead before they could even get a working kernel up and running.
Then, if they even did get a working OS complete, they would have to worry about OpenBeOS, and BlueEyedOS creating a better implementation than theirs.
Anyways, I believe after version one of Zeta, we will see a much more cleaner Zeta v2.
>>
In daily use, the fonts in beos/dano do NOT look ugly, I prefer them over linux fonts any day. Plus you can use windows ttf fonts with NO tweaks under BeOS. so fonts are NOT an issue.
>>
You have a lot of more control over fonts in Gnome2 and KDE3 than in BeOS5. Not that the fonts issue is completely fixed in Linux, but for instance you can set what font type and size range gets antialiased in those Linux GUIs, you cannot do that in BeOS5. Although I like very much the BeOS, that lack of fonts control is a problem for me because I spend too many hours in front of a computer and can’t stand small fonts antialiased (not neat) nor big ones without smoothing (hairball ugly).
1) Please. Dont insult us by comparing MSDOS to BeOS. They are nothing like eachother, both technically and how they were killed.
2)Both QNX and OS/2 have never showed in any way to be ‘better’ than BeOS, so why should I look to those OSes?
3) This is an obvious reason why people post every time a new part of the OpenBeOS or BlueEyedOS is completed, because people want to hear about it. Its like complaining about how the news reports on sports scores.
it’s always fun to post an oppinion no matter how wrong it seems, people seem to bend it to their way of thinking no matter what, either it’s good or bad.. if you want to draw a line in the sand… it was only an oppinion…
it’s true, if Yellow Tab had started from scratch they’d be where OBEOS is maybe ahead maybe behind… and as far as OS/2 that debate has been raging back since before 1996 when i was still in college.. after installing it back in 2000 on a laptop and found it only supported a minority of hardware, i promptly tossed it in the corner..amiga was another interesting debate, up until recently QNX was a niche OS and to a point still is… only now are they picking up steam and delving into a more Desktop like OS style along with delving’s into handheld PDA’s ala Ipaq.
fanatics serve a minor need to keep things alive.. even things that should or should not have been kept alive..
in time the BeOS clones will either materialize or fall to dust..
~J
Yes, those windows are themeable – just look at these shots and some early shots at the YellowTAB’s site – you CAN change the window decors.
As for the Palm license, I’ve heard lots of rumours. The most popular one being that Palm did license some code for exchange of some profit but they wont announce it until YellowTAB actually makes something good.
And it seems that Eugenia is not angry at Bernd this time! There’s still hope
GOOO YELLOWTAB!!
Well, YellowTab never pretended they were starting from scratch.
As far as being sick of BeOS stories…well, this is a site about operating systems. When there’s news about any of them, even the most obscure, it shows up here. Despite the fact that I’ve been very skeptical about these projects, the BeOS is not dead. If there were no one using it, it would be dead. But, that isn’t the case.
If Zeta is pretty much BeOS 5 with more driver support and some other things, that’s okay with me, I’ll give it a try.
Repeat after me: YELLOW IS COOL!!!! (even in xp)
http://clientes.netvisao.pt/qu011612/desk.png
That new look they’ve given the tracker is ugly and looks sick.
I hope you can use the standard OT instead and get rid of that stupid Dano look. Hopefully, it’s skinnable.
For the love of God and all that is holy to you, stop being a god damn anti-MS zealot, Necromancer! I hate such narrow-minded people! Every OS has a place and a purpose. OpenBeOS and Zeta DO complement eachother.
Bernd Thorsten Korz wants to opensource many parts of Zeta if possible. Also any APIs, extensions, drivers etc will very likely be shared openly with OpenBeOS and other BeOS revival projects.
Bernd even follows the development of OpenBeOS very closely and from what I can see, he is very well respected amongst the OpenBeOS guys.
OpenBeOS and Zeta have the same goal but they have chosen different paths. Think BSD and Mac OS X if you want an example of how one thing can complement another.
even only the updates and new programs ported&developed deserve for a buy. Ever heard of Win ME? There is like 1000 times more things updated in Zeta from R5 than in ME from 98!
You shouldn’t count dano leak as a release because it wasn’t legal by any means. Now you have the chance to buy the latest UPDATED beos release with lots of new drivers, a kickass SVG tracker that lets you preview images even from right click menus (no other os does this afaik), updated dockbert&deskbar and again lots new new APPLICATIONS and also harware 3D support. this is not a new r5 personal rip with a few apps from bebits. these people spent lots of money and lots of effort to bring zeta in what it is today.
I hate to be rude but that is really ugly.
When can we buy? At least a estimate would be nice.
if you read the forum guidelines, you’d have known better than to post that..
either way, i am far from a M$ zelot, i use Windows (TM)
every day, as a member of an IT team… i don’t aprove of their buisness model, or some of their subversive tactics.. but their software almost without equal.. every OS has it’s place.. no one OS does everything exceptionaly and i never implied that, and i’m sorry if you took it that way.. you can’t really compair a BSD model to and Apple model as Apple shares a corperate model similar to Redmond… it however has chosen to acknowledge the OSS movement and embrace it to a point in order to allign itself in a more possitive light.. which is a task not easily achived..
and if i remember right i asked for corrections to my first post in case i was mistaken in my views, i didn’t ask for flames..
~J
The “new look” looks like basically the OriginSimple theme from Dan0 with some color changes. I liked Origin Simple in Dan0, but found it annoying that I couldn’t shift-move the tabs and the font seemed a little small.
The mod to the Deskbar looks nice, it’ll be interesting to see how that turns out. I’m mostly looking forward to seeing the SVG-Tracker, though.
As for the person criticizing BeOS for not giving control over the antialiasing threshold, I’m pretty sure you can do what you’re suggesting in Dan0, so I suspect Zeta will have that feature as well.
yellowTab needs to pay attention to the fonts and widgets. The fonts in Leonardo look awesome (according to the screen shots) and the widgets too. Zeta fonts (according to the screen shots, well they really suck) What’s going on?
Compary this Leanardo screen shot
http://www.intuiware.com/Products/Squeezer/images/Shot13.gif
with this Zeta screen shot
http://img.osnews.com/img/2547/zeta2.jpg
Another Leonardo
http://www.intuiware.com/Products/Squeezer/images/Shot14.gif
Some more Leanrdo:
http://www.intuiware.com/Products/Squeezer/Screenshots.html
What is Leonardo?
That’s not Leonardo. That’s Squeezer running in BeOS R5.
What did Apple do then to make itself look good in the OSS community? The ripped Konqueror’s rendering engine and stuffed it into their browser. They needed a fast rendering engine to throw away IE. It was a business decision, it had nothing to do with the OSS community.
It’s not about embracing the OSS movement or worshipping the GNU. It’s about operating systems and how good they are compared to others. In my eyes, Linux is far from what BeOS was a long time ago. And BeOS is closed source. Closed source business model might not be the best thing ever but totally free opensource model is worse. Look at the number of Gecko-based browser spinoffs – one worse than the other, all still pretty slow. I wont even attempt to list the number of GUI toolkits available on Linux with each app using it’s own. And no, “having a wider choice” is not a good argument. It’s like having Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows 3.11, QNX, OS/2, BeOS and Amiga all running on your desktop at once with no consistency. Lately, I’ve been doing my work with WindowMaker, Phoenix, SciTE and the good old commandline just to avoid all the bloat, excessive eye candy and UI inconsistency that using a full-blown Linux desktop environment would have.
Opensource has it’s place but obviously not on the Joe User’s desktop yet. Xandros maybe, but that’s it.
Right now, I want Zeta. Now!
those leonardo scrshots are usual r5 shots. as I said earlier this zeta two images are MORE compressed jpeg images than the other scrshots. search for zeta images under beshare, there a few, especially for a file showing the font overlay under zeta. It is really not any worse than r5. it is just these scrshots are fucked up not the real os itself.
I believe the bad quality of the fonts you are all talking about is due to the high compression of the image.
I hate the windowborders. They are even uglier than the yellow and purple 5.1/Dano borders (which were aokay) and probley just as useless.
The zeta screenshots make me want to use an old skyos gui (see http://skyos.org/images/06.jpg). It’s a lot less ugly.
But zeta still has a long way to go, and a lot of tweaking, i’m sure by the time it’s released it won’t be as ugly. I hope.
I don’t like the Dano fonts (which apparently made it to Zeta as well). A friend made a short rant-page at http://littlebluerodent.tripod.com/fonts.htm . I have to agree, after a few hours usage of Dano, the fonts really start to annoy you.
I’m hoping you can use R5’s font renderer in Zeta, if possible . . .
That’s not Leonardo. That’s Squeezer running in BeOS R5.
Thanks for letting me know this. I thought that was Squeezer running under Leanardo.
I believe the bad quality of the fonts you are all talking about is due to the high compression of the image.
I hope so because so far I haven’t been impressed, It’s like looking at Xfree86. But why compress the image for? First impression matters! I haven’t been impressed.
So the Leonardo screen shots I posted (or most likely BeOS R5 screen shots) haven’t been compressed and the Zeta ones have been compressed. I don’t think it has to do with any compression. I think that is how it looks! But we’ll see.
The shots are sucky because of the lossy compression, and frankly, the first screenshot didn’t chose a good subject, either.
Use a non-lossy compression algorythm for the format and more attention on the screenshot composition, and it will look dramatically improved.
They’re movable right? And if they are not, please tell me the tabs on the classic BeOS theme are movable. It may seem like a small thing, but I think think the movable tabs really make a big difference in the usability of BeOS. If Zeta doesn’t have movable tabs I’m going to.. cry :-(.
The fonts look exactly the same as Dano’s. If anyone’s willing to post another image to prove me wrong, go right ahead.
If there’s one HUGE nitpick I’d have on these screenshots (not counting the things like misaligned widgets in Installer, since they’ve been misaligned for a while now, and besides… I was told they’re going to be fixing it up soon, so . . .), it would probably be the “(C) yellowTAB” on the titlebar.
THE TITLEBAR IS NOT AN AREA FOR COPYRIGHTS. I _KNOW_ yellowTAB made ToDoIt. I also don’t want my titlebar to be 20 times larger than what it should be because of things like this. Keep copyrights to About windows, where they belong.
Maybe ToDoIt should have the ColumnListViews taken out and just thrown into Tracker, ala BeMail? Looks like a BeMail design would be way better in this case.
Also, what is it with the universial assumption that all people are blind? Icons do not need to be at least 128×128 to be seen. You can stick more than you can imagine into a 32×32 image. Something like XP’s use of icons would be great.
keep the copyrights OFF the tabs! put there the USEFUL info, it’s such a limite and precious piece of real estate.
fye: I’m not sure if you’ve experienced the latest fonts in Linux (ie: Xft2, FreeType2, fontconfig), which fully supports TTF in Linux with no “tweaks” (not sure what that means anyways). As far as I’m aware BeOS doesn’t offer you control over smoothing and hinting, not to mention sub-pixel rendering on LCDs. RedHat seems to be a big contributor of getting Linux font support to the point of trumping most other OSes. (It certainly does compare to Windows, and is in many ways better)
To me, those screenshots show font rendering that hasn’t been touched in 5 years, while great progress has been made since then.
While I have to agree that the new interface isn’t particularly
well-designed, please remember that BeOS *never* had very good
window decorations or window management. I loved the OS to pieces,
but the ugly yellow tabs, the fact that the tabs didn’t span the
whole window (making it awkward to tile windows), the tabs changing
size with the window title, plus lack of edge resistance made the
interface a pain to use.
If YellowTab is listening, I’d offer the following – ditch the “tab”
approach(yes, I know this causes problems with your name), make the
thing stretch all the way across, and use this new space to make the
buttons big enough to actually be used. The tab paradigm has no
advantages.
I’m not quite ready to throw a BeOS type OS back on my machine, but
I’m watching all this closely. Won’t get my hopes up and get my
heart broken again though…sigh…
Tabs are _great_! If you don’t like them, switch over to the MacOS skin in R5 or something. I’m sure yellowTAB will pack some more decors in, though. But… one of the main things I miss about BeOS when I’m in Windows is the tabs. O_o How one could hate them I will never know.
And the font rendering _HAS_ been touched. I didn’t notice anything different in Dano’s font rendering at first, but after a while it became _UNBEARABLE_, which is why I run R5 now.
Apparently you never heard that you can hold down the shift key and slide the tabs across the top of the window.
This makes tiling the windows extremely efficient.
Make sure you know what you are talking about before you say it.
Also, once you get used to right clicking a titlebar to send it to the back it is hard to do without it.
There are many small things that make the BeOS interface cool.
Tabs are cool! Too bad other OS’es don’t know how to use them properly.
just kill me. Yeah, I know, they’re in there. But can we please limit the size of them this time around? When the tab held 60+ characters or something, the benefits of having them were lost.
Somebody slap me, I’m actually going to buy Zeta and possibly even start using it. I think the ‘from the ground up’ versions (oBOS, B-E-OS, etc) will be better than Zeta, eventually.
The professionalism in YellowTab’s overall “image” is rather lacking, to me. It seems that they don’t recognize the “finer details.”
I agree with most of you here about the quality of YellowTab’s info and screenshots. The Zeta information we hear comes from people other than YellowTab and it is often conflicting. The info on YellowTab’s site is questionable and indefinite. Releasing screenshots with high JPEG compression is unhelpful. Then there is the subject matter and cropping of the shots (both less than ideal, especially when you can see lots of little details in the OS that look unfinished and badly handled). And lastly, the inferior font rendering. This last one is a serious issue. Font rendering on BeOS R5 is just good enough. Anything less is going to bother people. Including me.
Hey, YellowTab! I want you to succeed!
If you want another beta tester, someone to help you with good-looking screenshots and all those little quirks and “unprofessional details”… please contact me. I’m quite good with all of that stuff. I want to continue to use BeOS in the future. It does me no good if Zeta fails in the eyes of its market and is abandoned because of lack of attention to the “little unimportant details.”
A professional image is important, right from the start. Even if things are still in beta, you attract or turn away customers from the first posting of “info” about the product. Amiga is also doing a shoddy job in this regard. Both Amiga and YellowTab are organizations that I very much want to succeed.
No offence intended.
Not to bring anybody down, but Zeta although it looks great still has neither an openoffice port nor java AFAIK, bezilla hasn’t got working plugins, etc. So what are you all going to do once you load up Zeta, stare at the Tracker all day ?
The font system is VERY advanced. I cannot get into too much detail, but as I type this in Zeta, I cannot for the life of me see how these words are made of squares… it is craziness!!
Of course, my eyes and someone else’s eyes may not agree (I fought Bernd to use this system, he know likes it more than the old).
I’ll say one thing, we keep coming up with too many ideas!! Not sure if this is a good or bad thing. Good for features and organization (and even eye candy – Bernd doesn’t seem to realize he is running like the very first alpha attempt at a decor.. yuck)..
BUT, is it a good thing for our release ‘schedule’? I’d say not, as we had attempted for Dec 2002 for semi-public RC1. Now, only a few things need to be done before this can occur. I’d say we are only a month behind, but we are moving finally fairly well.
Anyway, I’m behind schedule on my code….
–The loon
Zeta has a few tricks up its sleeve.
The screenshots are taking by a VERY busy man and usually in a great haste. Wait for *REAL* screenshots when We settle the interface down to its new default appearance.
Then pass judgement on appearance.
As far as the Deskbar’s expanding mode.. I can’t live without it!
–The loon
http://looncraz.tripod.com/
Visit that site, you will see a single example of the font engine in Zeta. I will not show the options.
This shot also uses the latest Decor I created. I am working out more aspects of the decors so I can recreate more accurately the many requested decors and decor designs.
If you have ideas you would like me to consider, please DRAW THEM and email: [email protected]
–The loon (hoping Bernd doesn’t shoot him ;-))
That is AWESOME, I am definately getting zeta now.
Screen shot seems to have “Command and Conquer” running. Is it:
(a) just the Windows C&C playing through some emulator,
(b) a BeOS “port” of C&C that still requires the Windows disks, or
(c) evidence of a real-life contract between YellowTab and a mainstream software maker.
I bet it’s *not* (c)!
Does anyone else think that $39 might be a little high for the Home Edition, which is on a single CD? I’d like to see a low-price, no support option. If there’s a lot of new BeOS-exclusive software included with Zeta, like games, science software, and office apps, I’m definitely interested no matter.
The screenshots they advertise are crap but I have seen others and they are awesome, I believe that is the “out of the box” look…the other themes are much much better looking from what i have heard.
I want– no, I DEMAND a Zeta decor of http://elliotro.dyndns.org/retrocade .
(To say the truth, I was sort of thinking of BeOS while designing the site, and I think the look would work great as a decor)
And the fonts DO look better, but like I said, I really can’t tell unless I use the OS for hours on end.
BTW, do you know when widgets are going to align properly? I see that the Installer still has unaligned widgets. : The last thing I want to do is have to take screenshots and zoom in on them 800% to make sure my widgets align properly.
Don’t judge my grammar on that page. ;P I basically redesigned a friend’s homepage for him and left all of his errors intact. Sadly, the site is probably never going to be finished, but a BeOS decor would own.
the curved edge tabs don’t look so clean compared to the “classic” look. i liked the fake beos r6 screenshots by those nabox.
Ugly decor!!!!
Ugly decor!!!!
Ugly decor!!!!
R5 looks great, obos shots look ausome, Zeta ick!
(I agree compressed JPG doesn’t make good shots :^)
http://clapcrest.free.fr/revol/beos/shot_Zeta_001.png
http://clapcrest.free.fr/revol/beos/shot_Zeta_002.png
http://clapcrest.free.fr/revol/beos/shot_Zeta_003.png
Now to answer others:
(notes: By Bobthearch)
This is a port of FreeCNC.
(Critical note By Tyr)
> bezilla hasn’t got working plugins, etc.
False. Mozilla under BeOS can use the Opera plugins, and at least the Flash plugin (well it used to work, didn’t test the last moz).
The window control buttons are too small, the fonts too small, the widgets too old-looking and the icons falls short of my expectation of the promised SVG icons. But then again, don’t judge a book by its cover.
thanks for the screenshots mmu_man
Once again the window border you can change.
The fonts you can change the size, just like in R5.
The widgets, well, ugh…
So as for the icons we use R5-looking icons but of course you can use the same icons as you use in MacOSX or Linux (those even are from someone who designed them for MacOS).
My point is that the goodness of SVG is lost if all it is used for is for easier resizing. Besides, like Eugenia always said, defaults matter.
Ok really all the zeta shots looks ugly and unpro.
It looks worst then those home made BeOS MAX edition etc.
The logo on the deskbar just looks plaindumb, why didn’t you keep the orginal BeOS logo? It is standrad on the opentracker. The window boarders looks just terrible. Actually the whole GUI looks terrible, it might attract some ‘geeks’ if you’re lucky. I think yellowtab stated somewhere that they wanted to attract another audience than ‘geeks’ well this is NOT the way. This is geekstuff all the way. Why don’t you just hire some pro. people? This is awfull. It makes shit out of BeOS. This is not how BeOS R6 would look if Be designed it, I can say for sure. It’s sad how you are completly making a joke out of the fine BeOS. I must admit that all screenshots posted here looks ugly in my eyes.
did ya fix the P4 problems?
I’d just wanted to state that I belive in the product, but not in the design and UI, wich is VERY importent!
I can’t wait for Zeta to be available! It looks really cool! Rock on YellowTab!
Actually.. this was the look Be was planning to R6, it was used internally in the last build.
Bernd dont be mad at me, but the shots doesnt look good at all. After all I think you should show what you need to show, and let some pros do the work for you. Do you really think they would show Bill Gates desktop of XP?
I suggest that you show some clean shots, check the colors (Background, icons, decor ). Its more important that you ever can imagine.
Then I know that you really like the look, but its better to show “cleaniness” then choas.
/Konrad
Now *THIS* is what I want to see
http://clapcrest.free.fr/revol/beos/shot_Zeta_001.png
http://clapcrest.free.fr/revol/beos/shot_Zeta_002.png
http://clapcrest.free.fr/revol/beos/shot_Zeta_003.png
These Zeta screen shots are awesome. Thx mmu_man for the links.
Here are some ui designs done by a former be employee …
http://talking-dog.com/tim/be/be_os.html
I think there is big problem with new “decors” in Dano and Zeta.
If I look closely, I have impresion that text on windows tabs are not anti-aliased.
Aso, there is another big problem with new decors. What I hate on Windows is that buttons for Close, Maximize and Minimaze are put one beside other. If those buttons are small, I have dificulty hitting the right one if buttons are too small. Good thing you can make them bigger. In new BeOS decors, not only you they’re ugly, they are microscopic! Maybe it’s ok for 640×480, but on anything bigger then 800×600 it is PITA. WHen I was in army, I was the best sharp shooter in my Company with AK-47, but in Dano I can hit that damn “X” 🙂 Default BeOS-look and yellow tabs are excelent. Not only Close and Maximize buttons are big enough, they’re on oposite sides of tabs, so you can’t miss them.
Also, one big problem with user interface in BeOS is font sensibility. If you enlarge system font, dialogs widgets don’t resize as well. So, most of dialogs are corupted, you can’t see all options, labels are cut short, etc. That’s problem with all BeOS versions. Also, maximum size for system fonts is 12, which is small, so in R5 I have to use FontSelector utility app, but in Dano there is no chance to choose bigger font. Big problem if you’re using resolution more then 1024×768.
I don’t have time to provide screen shots to back up those claims (I’m buisy making NetPositive theme for Phoenix:-)), but anyone using both Dano and R5 knows I’m right.
I’ve been burnt once, I am not going to be burnt again.
Until Zeta supports ALL THE FEATURES of Matrox G550, SoundBlaster Live! and my printer (HP Deskjet 610c) without the need to buy third party “drivers” like binkjet, I won’t use it. Simple as that.
I was burnt in R4 and R5, hoping that Be would pull finger and support basic devices. Heck, I can understand why a small company can’t develop drivers for everything, however, you should be atleast be ablt to support the most popular computer components like Soundcards, video cards and some basic USB gadgets like Zip drives and mice.
As for software, don’t come knocking until you have a 100% native version of OpenOffice and Mozilla. Until then, Zeta can join all the would’s and could’s of the operating system world.
Those screenshots are almost gorgeous. But someone needs to give you an artistic clue. In fact, if you had that clue, the original screenshots would have looked much better, too.
Example: on the second screenshot, there is a window with some black-and-white background that reminds of washed newspaper, but with some diagonal lines on it. Well, that looks plain wrong. Even when people criticize the fonts, they might be actually under the influence of an artisticly badly looking desktop. That’s not Zeta’s fault at all, but of the person who arranged the screenshot.
get a chick to help you out, or anybody else with a fresh mind.
Look, folks, whining about YellowTABs VERY FIRST release (boo-ho the font colors, boo-ho I got burned by Be, etc.) is like whining about Henry Ford’s first car ‘Hey, there’s no radials on this thing!’ ‘If satellite radio’s not available, I’m walkin!’
Can ANYONE post for me the name of ANY OS that had EVERYTHING everyone wanted the WAY everyone wanted it and oh, yes, got it right in the very first release?
*Bing!*
Oh, I AM sorry, but your time is up. And the correct answer is: NOBODY! No flavor of BSD, Linux, Unix, C, DOS, Windows, etc. EVER got it right the very fisrt time. Why are you expecting perfection from Zeta when you spend so much time NOW bitching about the current 7th, 8th or 9th generation of your fave OS and how it’s all gone so horribly wrong??
I think the overall appearance of screenshots is just fine. However, I wonder what the screen resolution settings are. I have a 19″ monitor and with Win 98, I have the screen settings at 800 x 600. The buttons and menus are just the right size.
In the Zeta screenshots the “Close Window” and other buttons are tiny. Are they really that small, or could it be the screen resolution? If I set the Win 98 setting to 1280 x 1024 everything’s too small too. So it’s not necessarily a Operating System flaw, just a matter of changing the settings.
Of course I haven’t used zeta yet, but this DECOR is basically the origin-simple decor in dano with different colors. I use my beos at 1152*854 resolution, closing the windows are no problem, but you’re right they are kinda small than usual. But as I said several times earlier, this is just ONE of the decors available. You can have the exact r5 decor if you choose to do so. it’s no big deal, really. I guess we will be also able to do our own decors anyway.
Just because that look was included in dano0 doesn’t say that it was planned for R6.
I don’t think Be would release the MacOS X skin included in dano0 for example (if they didn’t plan to get sued by Apple)
I urge ‘Yellowtab’ to act a littel bit more pro. And hire _REAL_ non-beshare-geek graphic artists and people from the industry, at least if they want to build a beos market for everyone, and not only geeks as they state on their homepage.
And it’s NOT only about the freaking tabs!
Freethinker.. Your first impressation last!
I think they should contacted someone with more GFX feeling, that makes the public shots for them. Maybe even a marketing firm. Its more important than you think, I want to use MacOS x of its look, not becuase its better then another OS.
The look, its alwasy the look in the end.
BeOS can look good, especially with Yellowtabs new tracker with SVG and 32bit icons support, so why dont show us what ZETA really is, its atleast a much better product that you can imagine from thoose pictures, thats for sure.
I wonder, does Yellowtab have any GFX expert at all?
Otherwise I suggest contact art schools.. they would probably work for free, and its a good PR ( schools ).
/Konrad
Hello,
I’ve been working on BeOS design prototypes, right now someone with OpenBeOS is interested in seeing all I can come up with. I’d like any comments/critique you have (please e-mail me, I dont know if i’ll get a chance to check the boards).
This design borrows a lot of features innovated by Apple in Mac OS X (transparency, shading, etc).
http://nweb.pct.edu/homepage/student/stijor74/Mock-GUI-0.0.4.jpg
Thanks guys!
Jory
By the way, I’m just assuming the name will be “Firefly” or “Firebox” or something, that doesn’t mean anything, just put it there cause it needed to say something
My, my, my, some of the OpenSource fanatics are in for a suprise… I read comments here from people outraged that Zeta takes parts of OpenBeOS and uses them in a commercial product… outraged that OBOS’ work has been “ripped”… etc. etc.
Maybe you didn’t know this but OpenBeOS is only developing the code… they intend to rely on COMMERCIAL entities to box and package this and bundle in the every day applications we need. OpenBeOS is developing the code in the INTENT that it be used in commercial packages…and with the MIT license they dont even have to give code back… so you know where that attitude can be shoved dont you
The ultimate compliment for any OpenSource developer (IMHO, anyway) would be to have their code used by a commercial company. Look at Apple and Konqueror. I bet the lead developer of Konqueror was hopping up and down in extatics when he found out Apple wanted to use ther rendering engine in their premiere browser, Apple then went ahead and fixed hordes of problems and is donating that code back.
Seriously, I think it’s FANTASTIC to see this happening… Commercial companies and OpenSource organisations working together turning out really fantastic products… after all, that is what OSS is about isn’t, more people looking over the code, more people fixing it, more people finding bugs, better code.
The high quality screenshots are great looking, I don’t like that specific decor but it doesn’t matter.
What I would like to see is shots of a hardware accelerated GlTeapot, Zeta running the Boneyard and/or updated Media kit. Along with verification of these facts from an outside group like OSnews.com or BeosJournal.org.
I don’t mind that Yellowtab is taking their time with releasing this product. I know they want it to be top quality for the final release. However, there is no need to be so secretive.