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of Dano/EXP with most of the BeOS 5 apps able to work (about 8% of the
BeBits' ~2900 BeOS apps won't run on Dano/Zeta because they are too
old and the API has changed a bit). YellowTAB has changed the Deskbar
folders from 'Applications' and 'Preferences' to Demo, Bookmarks,
Software and Preferences. Software now has a number of submenus with
application launchers, like games, office etc. I like the order found
on Software's hierarchy, but now that YTAB decided to put subfolders
there, maybe the "Demo" folder should go under Software too, in order
to avoid clutter in the root window. As for the "Bookmarks" submenu,
it would only have been useful if these were the same bookmark-set as
the ones NetPositive (BeOS' browser) creates instead of a completely
different set of bookmarks files. I see no point having these 5-6
bookmarks there linking to YTAB's sites and friends, while it doesn't
use your own Net+ bookmarks at all. It defeats the purpose of having a
bookmarks menu, at least in the way KDE and Windows use this feature.

On the good side of things, you will find that YTAB has worked on
their themes and they got it... more right than in their past
attempts. They include a number of window manager themes, but most are
just variations of the same theme, so overall there are about 8-9
different window manager themes to choose from. I got fond of the
"Smoke Decor" to be honest. It has its problems but it seems to be the
most carefully designed of all.

Another great thing that I love about the Dano/EXP codebase -- now
found at Zeta -- is the "smooth window dragging", which is explained
here better (only visible on CRT monitors, LCDs won't feel the
difference). MacOSX is the only other OS that has this feature (and in
fact it does it better than the BeOS, as the BeOS' way is a bit of a
hack since the Be engineers didn't have the full specs of the graphics
cards they were supporting in 2D mode back when they were implementing
this feature. Under BeOS there is some tearing when moving windows, on
OSX it is "clean"). Other new features include flicker-free updates of
windows, more color sensitive UI, non-rectangular window support and
more.  
Applications and Usage

YellowTAB includes a number of applications with the OS. This version
I tried, beta 5a, featured CD tools (e.g. Helios), a few demos,
development applications (e.g. CodeLiege IDE), the Bochs emulator,
three games, some internet applications (BeAIM, BeShare, Mozilla,
NetPenguin, Beam, Phoenix), some third party multimedia apps in
addition to the BeOS ones (e.g. SoundPlay, SampleStudio, DVDRip,
VideoLAN), BePDF and more. There is still space on the CD to be filled
up with apps, as the ISO was only ~500 MBs.

YellowTAB has developed a few applications from scratch, like the
FFMpeg front-end which allows you to encode videos, the Fax-It
application which allows you to send faxes and another one called
BeEAR, which I have no idea what it does as the app would only load
itself in German language, even though my localization was set to
English (my guess is that it is an address book though). There is also
a To-Do application, called ToDoIt, also coded by YellowTAB and, as
the other YellowTAB applications, will only be available for Zeta.

Zeta uses a modified OpenTracker and Deskbar version which supports
Internationalization and a few other goodies like cut/copy/paste
directly when selecting some files/folders (a feature missing from the
original Tracker). This Tracker also supports SVG, but I found no way
to enable its settings globally (you can only control it on per-window
basis, as far as I know, I could not for example set all windows to
128x128 or 16x16). Deskbar now supports "Team Expander" which will
expand the running applications' windows to be able to select them
directly instead of having to navigate on a submenu to reach them.
Nice add-on, I really like it, but there are bugs still. The "Move
To", "Copy To" and "Create Link To" context menus have been enriched
with more options. So far, I had many instances where NetPositive and
other apps won't respond to my mouse's double click to minimize, while
the minimize button (found only on some themes) does work.

YellowTAB comes by default with a number of useful Tracker add-ons,
including a brand new one named "Fax these files", which loads a new
FAX-It application created by YTAB+friends especially for Zeta.
Overall, some good new additions and options and some
bloatware/duplication ones, like the addition of DockBert, a
MacOSX-like Dock application which, when it comes down to it, it does
exactly what Deskbar does. It serves no purpose having two different
taskbars on the same OS, and BeOS was never the OS of many choices
(like OSX and Windows too), it was the OS with the best defaults. Zeta
seems to fail in this regard, adding a lot of new but similar things
instead of perfecting the solution at hand that is proven to work.

YellowTAB comes with... three GCC compilers. GCC 2.94, 2.95 and 3.2.
YellowTAB claims that including the old BeOS compiler is necessary for
easier adoption of the platform by the existing BeOS developers
(applications compiled with GCC 3.2 won't run on anything but Zeta you
see, so the older compilers are needed). In my opinion, this is a bad
situation. YellowTAB should bring the OS forward. When Be moved to R5,
their forward compatibility issues wouldn't allow creation of
executables that could run on R4.5 either, but all older applications
would run on R5. They made a choice to not allow legacy into the OS
and without having an impact to the users, as all older binaries were
still working. In my opinion, YellowTAB should take the same course
and move the OS to GCC 3.3 and optimize it for all sorts of new cool
stuff and forget the past. Allowing binary compatibility with R5
binaries is enough, developers will migrate with time.

Zeta comes with BONE, which was the new networking stack for Dano. It
was modeled after BSD's networking stack (it is not a port though, it
is brand new code), and it offers much-superior performance to the old
user-space based net_server which used to crash very often. Be left
the BONE development in pretty much 90% of its completion and
debugging but I don't have any information about whether YellowTAB has
completed the job or left it as-is.

Dano/EXP was also coming with some 3D support (Voodoo 3/4/5, ATi
Radeon up to Radeon 8500, some Matrox G400/G450 3D support, Intel
i810/i815/i820 and an SiS model I can't remember now). Jason Sams, one
of the brightest Be engineers that ever joined the Be team, created
the GL stack and drivers with little help from others, and our
benchmarks back in the day at BeNews showed that this was a very fast
stack by year 2000 standards. However, no one really can get into
Jason's mind as there was no real documentation on how he put the
whole thing together. Other Be engineers who looked at Jason's
accomplishment were left scratching their heads on how it worked
(Jason had also created a brand new programming scripting language
which looked like assembly to help him with the development). Jason
works for nVidia these days (he left PalmSource recently). YellowTAB
is left with no documentation about this particular GL stack, so there
was no 3D support in the Zeta I tried. In fact, running a few
*software* GL applications would result in crashes after a while (even
the simple GL Teapot app). Please note that this PC has been running
BeOS 4/5/betas for many years now, so it is definitely not my graphics
card at fault here. YellowTAB is telling me that we will have to "wait
and see" about 3D support; they do have something at work but it won't
be ready for quite a while.

Speaking of drivers, YellowTAB has brought to the table a number of
new drivers, like better 2D support for ATi and nVidia, some more
networking card support and Audigy, AC97 support. Zeta also features
the new printing API and tools Be designed that look extremely nice,
professional and simple! Check screenshot.

YellowTAB also works on the LocaleKit which will allow Zeta to support
localization for most languages, something that BeOS lacked severely.
They have contributed work on BeAIM, Jabber, wireless LAN drivers,
video capture card support, support for latest CPUs (I think
HyperThreading support is already there, Be added it a few years ago,
when Xeons HT were not even available, with the help of Intel).
YellowTAB also did some work on AbiWord, on a new word processing
application (no details yet) and they now support all three kinds of
USB (UHCI, OHCI, IHCI - BeOS 5 only supported Intel's USB well, but
VIA's not very well or not at all depending on the chipset). There is
also a new add-on to be added to Zeta, which will bring ODBC support
to the OS! YTAB was telling me that this module will be available for
testing soon.

Zeta uses the updated Media Kit, which doesn't have broken support for
codecs as the earlier versions of BeOS had... And hopefully, there is
better support for the SB128 sound cards which was the main complaint
in 2001. Also, a port of MPlayer is at works too. I just hope they
will rewrite the GUI to be Zeta-like and simple.

The group is also considering the development of a rootless X11
(similar to how it works on Mac OS X and QNX) so applications like
OpenOffice.org and other applications would be much more easily ported
rather than going through the major pain doing a direct port (BeOS is
kind of a pain regarding ports because it is very different
architecture-wise than any other OS out there). When on rootless X11,
its applications would run side-by-side the native Zeta ones.
Personally, can't wait for a fully accelerated port of X11 on Zeta.
Problems, Conclusion
Bugs and problems

In this beta, I found a few problems, bugs and things that I
personally wouldn't agree with as a very old BeOS user. I don't use
BeOS much anymore, but I do have a good grasp of its excellence in
some points and its suckiness in others, so please forgive me for
being opinionated.

So, here are a few problems I found in this beta and I wholeheartedly
hope they will be fixed for the final version:
1. The fonts are bad. Very bad. I don't know what YTAB changed in the
settings of the font rendering engine, but fonts are plain ugly.
Dano/EXP also used this new font engine, but it wasn't as bad as in
this Zeta beta. Linux's latest font config is worlds better in my
opinion.
2. The preference panel "Fonts" is now broken. Changing the font size
in the "Plain Font" only changes it to the context menus, but not in
the menus of the applications, as it should have.
3. SoundPlay and its plugins and email client Beam crash like there's
no tomorrow. No DivX support I could see.
4. There is a problem with the font sensitivity of the UI, and it is
especially visible with *some* themes. I don't know if this is a bug
of Zeta or a bug of the theme. But on some applications there are
problems with widgets colliding with others widgets (they render on
top of the other).
5. There is no security/protection for the user, even now with the
introduction of BONE, like a personal firewall. Something more
advanced like internet connection sharing, would be cool to have too.
However YTAB has worked on better ISDN support and that's a plus.
6. The logo of Zeta in the Deskbar is really amateurish and when you
click on it you get an even uglier look. But hey, it's a beta, right?
7. No scanner support as of now. Bernd tells me they are working on it
though so this is promising.

YellowTAB is a small team and it doesn't have all the resources to
work full scale on every aspect of the OS. However, the realities of
the marketplace won't be kind to the company, so I feel I am forced to
also not soft-pedal my criticism.

Granted, this is a beta. However, the direction the OS is taking is
already clear: Add features and more new user-space applications and
some more and some more. I will have to ring the bell of danger for
YTAB and ask for more fixes rather than more new features. BeOS 5 was
by no means perfect. But it worked well for most people. Replacing
parts that are known to work well and have served well with new parts
that only add unnecessary bloat (e.g. the new Installer) or
duplication (e.g. Dockbert), is hardly a step forward for the BeOS
paradigm. In fact, this could be considered a step backward. We
certainly don't need another Linux, with mind-boggling choice and
variety at every turn. Zeta should continue where BeOS has stopped,
not transform the OS into bloatware and illogicality like your average
Linux distribution. Surely, I love the new drivers. Surely, I like the
new Tracker (even if it is still buggy), but instead of filling up the
preferences with unneeded panels I would have to ask for things like:

1.Samba. Where is a working samba? We need interoperability!
2. There is _stil_ no support for more than 90 Hz in the monitor
panel. In fact, the current screen panel doesn't expose all the
abilities of the driver and app_server. Be was thinking of moving to
GTF, but Palm bought them before that happens.
3. No spell checking or voice reading in the text views of any Zeta
application. No real support for accessibility.
4. No multi-user yet! Yes, this can break a number of older
applications (which was why Be didn't go live with it, but Zeta/Dano
already breaks apps, so let them breat in one go instead of having to
break more apps again in a few years), but someone has to take the big
decision and activate the Be implementation (it is just a build flag
. Zeta is a desktop OS, but multi-user also grows in the minds of
people as times goes by. It is not 1998 anymore. Even Microsoft now
offers multiuser on all its OSes.
5. Why doesn't Zeta use the _new_ preference panel that was written
for Dano/EXP. Why do we still get the old panels that are now filling
up the menus? (more than 12 items on any menu is considered bad by
usability engineers).
6. No fix for the numlock bug which makes BeOS to not remember if the
NumLock was set to ON in the previous booting. Sounds trivial and
stupid but really annoys a lot of people.
7. No fix for the 1 GB RAM limit. This is maybe the biggest BeOS/Zeta
limitation today. Read here for more explanation and make sure you
read the comments too.
8. BeOS can't load more than 32 MB of addons, which is needed for big
applications (a problem that almost stalled the Mozilla port back in
the day). No more than 192 threads per app. Say you open more than 192
child windows or threads of an application, BeOS goes ca-boom (e.g.
ShowImage).
9. Still, no Java.
10. Sucky VM in the kernel. Needs fixing. Source of many problems for
Zeta, including the 1 GB RAM limit.
11. I'd like to see support for Great Britain's TV cards (some TV
cards use a different sound standard). There was an addon for it but
never got integrated to BeOS.
12. Second biggest problem: No usable browser. NetPositive just
doesn't cut it anymore -- it is a Netscape 2 compliant browser.
Useless, at least for me, despite its speed, as it doesn't support SSL
(I don't care about javascript, but I need SSL). The Mozilla/Phoenix
ports are just _BAD_. BeOS was created to run on computers like P90
and P100. I use BeOS and Zeta on this (fast machine by the BeOS
standards) dual Celeron 2x533 (which is the machine most BeOS geeks
preffered back in the day) and BeZilla/Phoenix is just _unusable_. I
am *not* saying that it is Mozilla's fault, because in this case it is
not. I also have Windows XP and Linux on this machine and while
Mozilla doesn't fly, it is 100% usable under these OSes. But on
BeOS/Zeta, it is not. It crawls like hell. Again, I will have to ask
YellowTAB to help fix the port, as a good browser is imperative no
matter the platform (and the rest of the Mozilla apps that come with
the browser). THIS port should be fixed, regardless. It is a strategic
step for YellowTAB, even if YTAB doesn't plan on using it as default.

Conclusion

Even with Mozilla so slow when operating clogging up both my CPUs, mp3
playback did not skip (while it does on Red Hat Linux 9 on the much
faster AthlonXP 1600+). The OS still has the BeOS' great UI
responsiveness, but overall the system is a bit slower: you will need
something like 80-100 Mhz more than the previous low-end (P75-P90) and
at least 48 MB (previous low was 32 MB). Still, the OS overall,
BeZilla/Phoenix aside, is much faster and responsive on low-end
hardware than _any_ of its competition (Linux, Windows XP).

So, what I do I think of this beta? I believe that it is two steps
forward and one step backwards. YellowTAB does some hard work to
ensure driver support and application support, but at the same time
they lose focus and spend time working on things that don't need
replacement or fixing and leaving aside other things that do need
fixing. The hard problems are still there. YellowTAB must play catch
up with Linux and Windows now, as BeOS was paused and not developed
for years now. For now, I say "good job," but keep running.

YellowTAB has a great advantage inheriting all this source code from
Be, Inc. but also it has the inevitable curse that they will have to
live in the shadow of the "legendary days" of R4.5 and R5. To overcome
Be's own legacy will take a lot of work. But it is a great help that
Zeta is the true and only direct BeOS descentant, so they are
currently years ahead in development than the other teams who try to
reproduce the BeOS, like OpenBeOS, B.E.O.S, BeFree and Cosmoe. I hope
that ex and BeOS developers and users show the support YellowTAB needs
in order to survive and continue the development of the authentic and
original BeOS code.

However, I would like to see some real engineering from YellowTAB, not
just "development". Some real breakthroughs and innovations, like we
became accustomed to from Be. Hiring a usability engineer with real
BeOS experience would be a good thing in my opinion. I am not talking
about a UI artist, I am talking about a usability engineer. YellowTAB
needs one. More engineers to join the team would be good too. If they
could "hire" Axel, Marcus and 2-3 more "big brains" from the BeOS dev
community and OpenBeOS, they could definately get some great results
with time.

For version 1.0, I can say that I understand that the product needs to
play catch up with the competition because of the lost time Palm
created, but from now on, I need to see some achievements in order to
draw attention in the market. BeOS was always about impressions and
"wows". So, impress me.

Installation: 9/10
Hardware Support: 6.5/10
Ease of use: 10/10
Features: 6.5/10
Credibility: 8/10 (stability, bugs, security)
Speed: 8.5/10 (throughput, UI responsiveness, latency)

Overall: 8.08
-- 
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