General Session
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Be Developers' Conference General Session |
Mr. Paterson: My name is Scott Paterson. I'm the product marketing manager at Be, and I'd like to cover a few general announcements of logistics before we start in on the general session.
I'd like to first welcome all of you and thank you for giving us two days of your valuable time to spend with us here at the developer conference. I'd also like to officially welcome you to the fifth, and possibly most exciting, Be Developer Conference that we've held.
With that, I'll cover some of the agenda. We're going to start with the general session with a few speakers, who I will introduce. After that we will break for lunch, and promptly at one o'clock we'll begin both our approaching and extending tracks.
At the conference this year, we have over twenty technical sessions that we're giving. So we're pretty hopeful that you will walk out of here with all the information that you came looking for.
After the sessions, at 6:30, all attendees are invited to join the Be Team for a dinner reception, and that will be at 6:30.
We also have, in the adjacent room over here, a developer lab. It not only has open BeOS workstations that you're free to use, but we're also featuring a number of developers who are showing shipping products, as well as future products, and those include StarCode, BeatWare, Adamation, Gobe. Metrowerks is there. We even have O'Reilly & Associates, who are selling the Be Developers Guide, as well as a number of other books. So you might want to check that out during the day.
We'll be open all day today, all through the whole night, and all day tomorrow. This evening, after we kind of close off the conference, you will need to have your tag to get in and out of that room.
I will encourage everybody to stick around all the way to the very end of the conference. We have a couple of exciting things that will happen then. We will give away tasty dual Pentium II systems to our next round of Master's Awards winners. So that should be pretty exciting.
And then we'll also do our traditional Be Team Q and A. The whole Be Team will come up here, and we'll be happy to answer any questions that you still have left over after the conference.
So I'd like to start and kick off the general session with a little story. Many of you know who I am through my role as a Be evangelist, and I've actually met many of the developers who are here in this room through the demo tours that I've done over the past two years, trade shows, conferences like these.
One common question that I always get out on the road, after I sort through all the technical questions, I get oftentimes asked about Be itself. And one question that gets asked is, "So, how often do you actually get to see Jean-Louis?"
Now that -- some people might be surprised by that question, but I'm really not, because I used to work for a images unnamed networking company where I not only never met the CEO, I never was ever in the same room as the CEO.
So it gives me great pleasure to answer that question truthfully when I say that Jean-Louis is exactly as any of the employees. In fact, it is very rare that you sit down at lunch in the Be cafeteria -- which consists of a few tattered couches around a few very old coffee tables -- and Jean-Louis will not be there himself, typically eating hot and sour soup. And it's even more rare that a very open and frank discussion doesn't occur during lunch, often led and moderated by Jean-Louis himself, and certainly not limited to topics of Be, Be software, Be developers, or even the computer industry at all. We cover varied topics.
So with that, it gives me great pleasure to introduce a Be employee who is as active today as he was on his first day, our chairman and CEO, Jean-Louis Gassee.
[Applause]
Jean-Louis Gassee: Thank you and good morning and my personal welcome to this conference. It is a great day for us in a number of ways. Of course, I'm being coached about the things I shouldn't say because they're not proper English. I should say we're exposing ourselves, but it is not good.
As you know, we recently successfully financed our little company, thus getting us the funds to move to this incredibly important next stage of becoming the specialized media whiz in the Intel space. So our investors are a little worried, because they think we are starting to spend their funds unreasonably.
For instance, they see that we do double-sided T-shirts, which is very much against our tradition. But I'm also told by my associates, or confederates, tomorrow there will be an even nicer -- is that -- perhaps not totally politically correct, but that is okay. We have no HR at Be, so there is no danger of that.
My brothers will tell you all about the progress we're making with our product. Personally, I would like to say two things from my very own perspective. There have been two moments in the history of the company when I have been the most excited about our prospects. One was when Steve and I shook hands in the Cafe Carlos in Scotts Valley. This was, if I remember correctly, June 22nd, and I was excited, you know, just as you are excited when you start in an academy or when you buy a house and want to remodel it or, as we -- as it turns out to be -- you do this product and it turns out you are doomed.
So I hoped that everything was going to be piece of cake, you know, because we know what we had to do. You know, I've worked with Steve a lot over -- quite various things together. And so I said, all right, it's going be a straight walk. Well, I don't know. I learned, but there we are. There we are.
You know, we made -- we made a number of mistakes, which turned out to be fruitful because, you know, those mistakes, you know -- cost us some pain but also give us another perspective. We simplified what we are doing, because we're not totally focused on the software.
When we started, there was no inexpensive multiprocessor hardware, so we didn't have multiprocessor hardware. Well, now there is plenty of very cost-effective multiprocessor hardware, so we're totally focused on the open systems business.
We were thinking, you know, of the media space when we started the company. We are still focused there even more. What has become clear in making, you know, in these various zigs and zags in our life, is that there is a place for a specialized operating system next to Windows, of course. It wasn't clear to us when we started. You look at the case of Linux. Very successful OS, specialized OS. Does not compete with Windows. Coexists peacefully with Windows.
When we were raising money -- sometimes with great ficklety and sometimes out of my back pocket and a couple times out of the house mortgage, but that is okay. I'm an entrepreneur now. I qualify. -- we encountered great skepticism from observers and investors because, look, IBM couldn't do it with OS/2. Right? Conventional wisdom says you cannot do an OS any more.
Well, it is a little more complicated than this because IBM tried to do a better DOS than DOS from this end and a better Windows than Windows. That is the wrong thing to do.
Microsoft, in the office information, in the office space, is so entrenched that their position is totally unimpregnable. And even IBM, with all the money they have, couldn't shake Microsoft from their position in the office market. So if we were to do something like OS/2, yes, indeed, we will be done, or about to be done, or about to waste a lot of shareholder funds.
Instead, what we found out, looking at the case of Linux, is that you don't have -- they didn't have the goals of IBM with OS/2, that is, the simple goal of providing a useful, inexpensive, specialized product. Well, we have the goal of providing a useful, specialized, inexpensive product.
And what we found out in the Intel space is that it is a very open space to multiple operating systems. There is genre called the boot manager, so people are used to booting more than one -- not normal people, of course, but the more -- the geekier users are actually welcoming the process of booting more than one OS on their system.
So that is where we are. It is a very important date for us today because it marks our entry into the Intel version of the BeOS Release 3. So that is why I'm most excited about our prospects, because we're well financed.
We have a good team, which has proved itself through bad times and good times. We have what we hope to be a decent product. That is for you to decide. And we have you. Without you, we're nothing.
An operating system in and of itself, as you know, is nothing. It is here only to create opportunities for you to have more expressive power in the API and less software silt that takes power out of the hardware. These are the two benefits that you could look at at the BeOS 4.
And we want to, together, to create opportunities in the marketplace, bypassing the big obstacles in the conventional distribution channel, using the Net as a software distribution mechanism, whereby all you need to be successful in business is what we call "sweat equity."
Now, you don't have to go get yourselves, as we did, with investors. We did it for you. You don't have to go and raise the kind of money we had to raise to do what we have to do with you. When you have a product, you can sell it on the Net. And as we enter the Intel space, you're sure to have a big welcoming market for your applications.
Now, I set up as a domestic. But, you know, as a true interpreter of the -- you know, like the -- in terms of I must be optimistic and I will be scared, otherwise, I'm not doing my job.
So I'm a little sobered in my opinions, because I see all the tasks ahead of us. We have a lot to do. We have a lot to prove. And, hopefully, with your support, we'll be successful together.
So I really appreciate what you are doing for us. I give you my heartfelt thanks for what you've done, what you're doing, and what you'll do. And certainly you have our, and my, commitment to do the best possible job for us to succeed together.
Thank you.
[Applause]
Mr. Paterson: I'd like to introduce Alex Osadzinski. And to do that I would like to just explain something that we do at Be. We have a number of us that people often refer to as Demo Gods, and we throw that term about nowadays. It is totally devalued. But there really, you know, as they say in the movies, "There can be only one."
And having been a student myself, I can say that Alex is truly the Demo God. He has the ability to go as technical as you want. He can do the techno-babble as to the inner workings of the BeOS. But at the same time, he can talk about the BeOS in terms that even my grandmother's investing club could understand. And that's probably why we had such a successful round of financing, because he was so involved.
So with that, I'd like to throw the quadruple demo jinx at him and welcome Alex Osadzinski.
[Applause]
Mr. Osadzinski: What I will say now is it never crashes, the program works perfectly. And I'm not going to reboot before I start. Jean-Louis usually introduces me as the VP of Marketing and Sales, because that makes me sound important. I'm actually the VP of Sales and Marketing.
The difference is marketing people know everything, or think they do, but won't tell you. Sales people don't know anything, but they always say whatever comes to their minds. I am going to combine the best of both. I'm going to lie knowingly to you.
The tradition at Be is to do some audience participation. We're not going to sing this time. We'll start with a show of hands.
How many of you here are registered Be developers? Most of you.
How many of you are registered to develop on Intel but have not developed on PowerPC yet? A surprisingly small number. Okay.
How many of you have already received and tried out Release 3?
How many of you think that it does not suck?
How many of you work for Microsoft?
Okay. So let the abuse begin.
There are three announcements we're going to make today and tomorrow on new stuff. First is we are announcing right now, at this moment -- this is just -- remember, when someone asks you, "Where were you when BeOS Release 3 was announced?" You were here in a dark room in Santa Clara.
BeOS Release 3 is today. We're also, in a couple of minutes, going to announce a new agreement between Metrowerks and Be -- and I'll come to that in a second -- but about a new five-year contract we just signed with Metrowerks.
And tomorrow, as Scott said, we're going to announce the Master's Awards, which is a really big deal for us. There's a lot of previewing applications, a lot of judging, a lot of effort goes into selecting those awards, but not half as much effort that goes into actually creating applications that go behind them. We'll be doing that announcement tomorrow, though.
So let's start with BeOS Release 3. We're announcing it today. It's going to ship to attendees today. If you haven't picked up your BeOS Release 3 CD -- it's in a little trifold -- please make sure you do so. We want to make sure everyone has the full, official release today.
It is shipping free to all of our registered developers in a week's time. We'll be sending that out in about a week's time, as soon as it comes back from manufacturing in quantity. So every Be registered developer will get a free copy of the BeOS Release 3.
It is shipping publicly on March 31st -- or before, if we can do better than that -- on Intel, on Intel Pentium processors. So anyone in the public can go and buy BeOS Release 3 for Intel. We'll ship by March 31st.
We just finished -- we, marketing expression -- Engineering is finishing the PowerPC release, and that should ship on or about April 20th. So those of you who want the PowerPC release as well as the Intel release, we will just send it to you free as soon as that CD is done. We are just finishing up integration and testing on that.
So that's a big moment for us, to ship Release 3. And having had all the jinxes possible, I'm going to show it to you, or at least show some of it to you.
So here we are. Here's the always familiar Be screen. And we'll start with -- well, I'm not going to show you the Mandalbrot. Everybody's seen the Mandalbrot, right? We will show some stuff that is actually -- try to justify the statement that is the media OS.
And I just know that someone powered up my DVD player here, which is just great. So let me -- it's initializing. Let me queue up a movie. And let's start with a movie on DVD. There we go.
We have audio. I can do something with this. Window on the fly. I can change the brightness. Wait a minute. No, this movie is probably the wrong one. But here we have a movie that appears to involve character development, feelings, emotions, and so on.
[Laughter]
What does this mean?
Audience: Chick flick!
Mr. Osadzinski: Let's get something with spaceships in it.
[Laughter, applause.]
Okay. Look. Films that control. The video can do stuff with it. Let's do something a bit more interesting. Let's bring up a VCR. And here we go. Mess with stuff. And, also, I can operate a movie transport.
Now this is not a high-powered machine. So I can do stuff like rewind and stop and play. I'm going to do some recording here. Some stunt recording. This is my favorite part. And it is recording that. You see, move this around. Stop it. And let's keep -- wait up. There we go. So we've got.
[Applause]
Let's do some more. This is two video feeds. Let's try out this VCR. We've got -- bloody. There we go. So, we've got even more sophisticated material here. That's more than we need. Let's make it 640 by 480. I'm not cheating here. I can move the windows around, video clipping and stuff. I still have control of my sources. I can do adjustments on brightness.
We can do effects, too. Let's bring up a little phone here. Here we go. WJLG is on the air. I can obviously do cuts between the two. There you go. Cut between the two sources. I can do -- let's do a vertical wipe. Huh, huh. He said "Wipe."
[Laughter]
I can go do a slide. Let's set up a little slide there. Let's do a fancy effect. I'm having fun. Let's do a mathematically involved effect, which involves squares and stuff going on. There we go. This is one of the three episodes. It's a classic. You can even do a page flip.
[Applause]
And just to prove there is not a lot of cheating going on, let's turn one processor off and just do it on one processor. There we go. It does get a bit slower, but that is because we're not multiprocessing, we're using most of one processor to do that. So that is kind of fun.
Let's do some audio stuff. Here we have fifteen channels of 16-bit 44.1 kilo of audio playing on the little drive in here, a little tune in the drive. And these things show you relationships in stereo space -- this is left to right -- and amplitudes. Let's take vocals. Let's fatten them up a bit. Let's move them around. Let's turn it around.
[Laughter, applause.]
So there's amplitude. So if you are a musician, you've even got this nice sound select. Move them around. Moves around. Some finger trouble there. Solo instruments. Move them around the wrong way. Use them and just get the whole thing rotating.
So, if you are a musician, for the first time you can just use a regular PC to do digital audio. This is just raw audio. And you've got a nice view of your mix and interactive.
So that is the BeOS Release 3.
[Applause]
And the nice thing is since I'm doing the demo, I can take credit for it. I wrote all of this stuff.
[Laughter]
Not really. So -- oops. Focus follows.
The pricing. First of all, BeOS Release 3 is free to registered developers. That has always been the goal and continues to be the goal. Why would we want you to be our customers, when you're our partners? Then that's where it will be. And so the release continues to be free to developers.
But we also want to start charging for this release to the public for two reasons. One is we need the money, eventually. Despite the appearance of being a huge Ponzi scheme, it really isn't. To start getting money in, we'll have to start generating it from products instead of just investors.
And the second thing is for those people who want to sell commercial applications, it is really hard to sell your application when the OS is free.
We're trying to generate some valuable product. However, although the list price is $99.95, for you and for everybody else, the special introductory price is $69.95. Ordering for this product goes up on the Web in one hour and twenty-seven minutes. Assuming that the Web folks have been pulling all-nighters to get it done, we'll be on time. I'm pretty sure they will be.
So I have a huge warning here, very huge warning. This is for geeks and enthusiasts. And we say geek in the most affectionate sense, because that's what we all are as well.
This is the first release on Intel architecture. We expect several hundred applications -- demo ware, shareware, free ware -- and commercial applications to be recompiled from the PowerPC platform to this over the next two or three weeks. This is pretty simple to recompile and go from one platform to the other.
But the support is still limited. This is the first release. Most of the work that Steve Sakoman, our VP of engineering, is going to tell you about involves support to the rest of this year.
It is still not for the average person who just wants to install something and run Word or Excel or PowerPoint or 1-2-3 or whatever. So the release is designed very much for PC enthusiasts and geeks.
And Steve will take you through the schedule for the rest of the year as we get to more and more commercial releases and more and more regular end users. So that's just a warning. That's how we're going to position this product.
The other big announcement is we just signed this last week a new five-year agreement with Metrowerks. Metrowerks has been an outstanding partner for us. As you know, tools are a huge issue for anyone wanting to develop applications. We're very lucky to have Metrowerks, who are leading tools and a huge margin on the map, and that should make a real name for themselves, both from the Windows platform and the embedded space. We're very lucky to have them as a partner.
What we've done is extended the previous agreement that we had, which is a PowerPC to Intel architecture. There's a little bit more to it than that. From now on Be will manage the IDE, source code to the IDE, probably today or tomorrow, and we'll start to do engineering work on that to take the current and future snapshots of the IDE and tailor it to the BeOS.
That also means that we'll manage technical support. That means the developers have one place to call to get ahold of tech support people. If you have a question about development tools, the IDE, the compilers, or the BeOS itself, you don't have to bounce around between two support organizations, Metrowerks and Be. We'll be taking on that support responsibility effective today.
And Metrowerks will be supplying us with compilers and the libraries because that is where we come from, compilers.
Just to put this in context, Greg Galanos, founder, president and CEO of Metrowerks is here. I'm just going to invite Greg up to say a few words about this new agreement. So please welcome Greg.
[Applause]
Mr. Galanos: I'd like to thank Alex and Jean-Louis for having me here today. There is a lot of similarities between Metrowerks and Be. We've been working together now for many, many years, since the introduction of BeOS. And the two engineering organizations really, really, really get on really well together.
You know, when we come to final frantic introduction of releases, we have I think most of the economy-class seats between San Jose and Austin going both ways.
It's just a great relationship to work with this company, and I'm very happy that we've extended this agreement for five years. We've modified the relationship a little bit. It makes a lot of sense for Be to look at where they can take the IDE in a multimedia operating system.
We are bringing all of the new compiler technology that we're developing on Intel architecture. In fact, yesterday night we announced an agreement with AMD for support of the K6 extensions for multimedia and games development. And that will be in the technology that we also provide to Be.
But there is a lot of similarities in some of the things that we're both -- both companies are trying to do. Jean-Louis earlier was mentioning that IBM tried and failed with OS/2. There is a bit of an analogy there for Metrowerks when we go onto the Windows platform.
A lot of people are saying, "Why are you going up against [Visual] C++? Symantec and Borland tried and failed." And what I tend to tell everybody is, you know, we're not in the bus business. Microsoft has built a bus. That is what [Visual] C++ is. What we intend to provide is a Porsche. I believe that is the same analogy for the BeOS. And there's a lot of room on the freeways and on the Intel architecture for Porsches.
So I'm here to commit our company for the next five years to supporting Be developers and the Be Operating System, wherever Be decides to take it.
Thank you very much.
[Applause]
Mr. Osadzinski: So one other little detail remains about the Metrowerks/Be agreement, which is the pricing. We have a very different business market than Metrowerks, so we're announcing new pricing models for Metrowerks tools. We're not in the business of making money on the tools. We have to fund development of them, because we're going to be taking on support and development people to do that. But we're not in the business of making money off tools, which means we're not in the business of making money off our developers.
So we're going to be changing the pricing, effective immediately. The CodeWarrior for BeOS full version is now priced at $129 instead of $299. That is no reflection on Metrowerks' business model, we intend to make our living out of the BeOS.
So all people ordering the full tool set now will be charged $129. We'll be putting ordering up on our Web site within about a week of when we close.
All current subscribers to Code Warrior for BeOS, which is probably most of you, will be receiving free updates as before. There's no intention of changing that.
That ends my little pitch. I kind of was kidding when I showed you the BeOS. It is an incredible demo list. Although, as Jean-Louis puts it, we've been humiliating ourselves in front of investors. It's what's there, and Jean-Louis has been doing that for the last year. It isn't really humiliation, apart from when we get down on our knees right at the end.
Most of it is very fun. So me giving this demo and various others -- gosh, when I think back to the first demo where it was myself and Jean-Louis were having to roll these two huge rolling cases, weighing about 100 pounds each, which United charged us more to ship than for us to ship, and the demos I was giving then to the demos we're giving now, they've really come a long way. That is because the underlying BeOS is getting so much better.
In a sense, I guess myself and Scott give demos the most. It is easy to become blase. I've actually been giving this video demo in one form or another for three weeks now. And it is easy to become blase, but what we can do is -- heck, this is a basic PC that we can buy for 12 or $1,300 and sending two live video feeds which can affect some other good stuff.
What is neat is -- about all of this is, of course, the BeOS. So it is really my pleasure to introduce Steve Sakoman, VP of engineering, who runs and manages the team that's put all this together.
Steve.
[Applause]
Mr. Sakoman: Thanks a lot. I'd like to add the welcome of the entire Engineering team to you this morning. We're really happy to have you here. I know all of us are looking forward to spending the moments in between sessions just sort of catching up with a lot of old friends and some new friends as to what you are up to these days.
The Engineering team at Be has been incredibly busy. A lot of very late nights and a lot of weekend work getting Release 3 out, actually a little bit ahead of schedule. And from what it looks like, as I'm going to show you over the next three or four slides, it is not over yet. It looks like over the next 12 months or so, including Release 3, we have three releases coming out.
So I will go over a quick overview of what is in Release 3, what we have planned for Release 4 and 5, and also a quick prediction as to the schedule for those three releases.
Release 3 primarily has been an effort to move the BeOS from PowerPC to Intel architecture. We weren't satisfied with just doing that. So as you saw from some of the demos, we did a lot of work under the hood in the area of trying to support very live interactive media.
BDirectWindow will probably be the most visible to you as a developer, and I encourage you to attend the sessions on BDirectWindow and learn more about that.
By popular request, Release 3 includes Frame Support in NetPositive, and, also by popular request, 16-bit graphics support.
Moving over to IA, we've been encountering some interesting new hardware that we didn't have in the Macintosh world. At the top of the list I think are two features that we found incredibly useful for media applications, the first of which being Ultra DMA, IDE hard drives -- incredible performance, very low processor utilization -- and AGP.
In Release 3 you will see support for Ultra DMA drives and currently just the single AGP card.
Audio side, we have support for SoundBlaster and some of the clones of SoundBlaster. To support this new dual boot world, we've also bundled Partition Magic in a DOS partition on the CD.
Getting ahead of schedule here. Release 4. We planned to add some features to BeOS to allow some more interaction between the two operating systems. So top of the list, FAT 16 and 32 file system plug-ins for BeOS. We also plan to add SSL support for NetPositive, and, at long last, the new Media Kit.
We also encourage people who are interested in doing media to attend a couple sessions. We're going to have a preview of the Media Kit where we go into a little bit more detail on what is under the hood on the media apps that were demoed in Alex's demo, and also to an extending track session where we will go over the API for the new Media Kit and look for some feedback.
Continuing in enhancing our support of new hardware on the Intel side, Universal Serial Bus will also make its first appearance in Release 4, as well as a new driver structure allowing multiple levels of drivers.
We'll also start seeing some more support built in for video input and output, starting with Release 4 video in and out. Moving toward AC 97 audio support, which you will see a significantly higher quality than Legacy sound support on Intel architecture.
We'll be bundling at that point color printer drivers for the most popular Epson and HP printers. And as part of the Media Kit, we'll also be bundling some codecs. We're going to concentrate at Be on realtime or near realtime codecs for things in Release 4 like Indeo, MPEG1 and MJPEG, and we'll support some of the most popular media file formats.
Also for our Japanese market, we will be shipping input methods for the first time in Release 4.
Release 5, we'll add support for NTFS to the file system, as well as for the first time some support on the Windows side for peering over into your BeOS partition.
On the media side, this is when we begin our big push supporting the hardware that will be appearing around the introduction of Release 5 with 1394, now present on motherboards. We'll also move towards supporting digital video, DV codecs, as well as MPEG2. And there we're aiming for realtime encode and decode of those codec formats.
We'll be adding additional media file formats at that time and moving toward the Energy Star, and hopefully portable support with power management. Along some of the lines, PCMCIA and card bus support will start with Release 5, and OpenGL® hardware acceleration, something lots of folks have been asking for.
Schedule-wise, as Alex said, we'll begin shipping Intel architecture version of Release 3 next week, and on April 20th the PowerPC version of Release 3.
Release 4 will probably be shipped to the public around September of '98. And Release 5, you notice as we get further out in time, the dates get a little bit more vague -- Q1 '99. So no exact date, no exact time, but that's what we're targeting for.
Okay. Now, back to some more demos.
[Applause]
Mr. Paterson: Thanks very much, Steve. Okay. We're going to spend a little bit of time now having a few of our third-party developers come up and give you some demonstrations of their own software.
So without any delay, I'm going to ask John Barman from BeatWare to come up.
[Applause]
Mr. Barman: Does it still work? That's the question. Always the best way to start. As Scott so kindly said, my name is John Barman from BeatWare.
For those of you who are not familiar with BeatWare, we make essential software for the BeOS. What that really means is we're committed to software that performs well, that is definitely high in technology, and that is innovative.
I want to kick things off with our most popular application. This is Mail-It. It's an e-mail application. What makes Mail-It special is probably -- let me move the mike up -- what makes Mail-It special is that it is one of the first three commercial applications available for Intel. In fact, this is the Intel version that I'm running right here.
Just to prove it, I'll bring up the performance monitor. And you can see it is Intel. And this is available today. This is the announcement from StarCode Software at www.starcode.com.
For those who have seen it on the PowerPC, you know what it's all about. But it has powerful filtering supports, support for multiple applications, multiple accounts, as well as a convenient library.
When you open up a message here that I prepared for the talk here, and this is basically the announcement. What I'm going to do is double click on one of the exposures that's here that's included, and this brings up our word processor.
And I said, one of the things that BeatWare was all about was performance. What I've done is -- the file that I've double clicked on is fairly images. I don't know if you can see it up here. It is Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. In hardcopy form, this is 1,440 pages, which Tom's got over there. In softcopy form, it's about 3.2 megabytes. That took about ten seconds, maybe 12 seconds, to come under the BeOS.
I did a test on this very same machine. A cold boot. It's a Pentium II 233 with 64 meg of RAM. It did come up under an unnamed word processor under Windows NT that was from a very images company, and it took 25 seconds to come up.
If I switch to multicolumn mode -- oh, by the way, this is 1,024 pages. Well, only seven words on the last page. 1,023 pages, call it, here in softcopy, and it came up in 12 seconds.
When I set it to two-column mode under Windows NT, it took about 20 seconds to get there throughout the full document.
While I think that this product has a lot of good engineering behind it, I think the real message is that the BeOS is a really hot product, a really hot OS. And we saw pretty dramatic performance improvements available under Intel as well. So that's kind of a good indicator of the performance that we're very interested in.
Let me go ahead and close that one out right now and open up our Paint product.
The other area where we focus is innovation, and innovation can take several forms. First form, it can be innovation within products, and that is what I'm going to show you right here. It can also be innovation across multiple products, and I'll get to that in just a minute.
And then finally there can be innovations outside of a particular product that are -- or any known product -- that are entirely new.
So I'm going to drag and drop a file in here and close up the load box. If you've seen Paint before, then you're familiar with the interface. There have been a few changes. A couple of the innovations are that we now support layers and we can add multiple layers before or after image. And I'm going to keep editing the flower here, and I'll go ahead and bring up color window, our color wheel.
We're in the process of putting a new user interface on all our products. And this one, at the moment for the color wheel, is a little bit further behind. But in some ways, of course, it is ahead.
I'm going to bring up one filter and make a real quick change. This is just changing the color scaling. What I'm going to do is truncate the number and not let it go too far. But I think you can see that I can do some pretty drastic movements here.
I'm going to lighten if up a little bit, and I think I'm going to increase the green -- maybe I'll decrease the green --just slightly. So that is one quick change I can make. And as I hit "okay," it does a good job of demonstrating one of the other features in Mail-It. It creates a patch, what we're calling a patch, a mini layer over that.
If I use another filter real quickly, and I'll pixelate it a little bit. I can go ahead, and you'll see the original, the before picture, and you can see the changes, just like on the last one. I can just kind of create a nice fuzzy look, and I can easily cut and paste this into another image or anything along those lines.
Just to really let these patches take effect, I'm going to draw a couple quick lines on here. And you can ask anyone in my office, I am not an artist. That is probably the farthest thing they would describe me as.
Notice I am still operating all in one layer, and in my great efforts, I'll draw one more. What I can do is -- with this selection tool, I'm no longer committed to just adjusting the last entry on here. I can select and I can move any of the -- any of the objects that I've already put within this layer.
This makes for a very efficient technology. You can easily picture a situation where, for example, you want to have a drop shadow in there and then you want to adjust it later on. And if it is in the same layer as some other objects here, you may not be able to get back to it.
So this is a quick example of innovations that we have within a product. We also have innovations that are going to stay in all of our products. I'm going to quickly bring up our Draw program here. For this innovation, what I'm really showing you -- while Draw is interesting to look at, is our new Interface Kit. What we've been working on is providing some more options to users.
Let me just put an object up here. I'm just drawing a quick curve. Close that off. So you can see the effects. I can make adjustments through my attributes panel window here. And if I go ahead and apply those, you see they're live.
What we have is a live interface, a live user interface that can be customized to look exactly how you want it to. The change I just made was to make this live. So that is nice.
What I can do is, I have a little drop down combo box here. I can add round-ins to the line, and, in fact, I can cycle through the various types of ends on the line. I will continue back around with this button. See it up on the screen.
And, in fact, I'm not restricted to just round-ins or to just a solid color, rather. I can have textured patterns appearing in there. We have a images number of textured patterns. I can use the interface to cycle through those very quickly, all realtime. In fact, I can go through and I can fill -- I can use the fill routine -- as I stick it in the pattern texture -- to go in and fill. And I can also cycle through those very quickly.
As I go back to stroke, I can also choose a solid line. And, again, it's our new user interface, so we have color chooser. This is just a simple RGB mode. In advance, you can go and really play with the colors. And there you see the standard color wheel as well.
So since I have live updating on, if I change my mind, back to a solid color, you can see that the line changes. And, again, we have live update patterns while you're doing that.
The other nice feature about this user interface, as I said, it is entirely customizible. That's not just limited to one or two check boxes here. These sliders may not be the form you prefer to work with in your application. You're not limited to just a slider. Basically, any input device that is appropriate, I can change to. So a BW text float slider, I personally prefer these. It is just a slider with the text in the middle. And, again, I can adjust it there.
Likewise, these drop-down combo boxes are essentially radio buttons. I can make the change live in my application to be those radio buttons, and I can change them back. So depending on whether you're constrained for space on your application or you prefer radio buttons, you can work with virtually any interface you want -- or you will be able to when these products are available come June -- and really work with your time very effectively.
And then finally, you can also save off sections of this. I think I'm going to hold off on doing that until my closing little bit here -- don't save -- and show you how you can save off bits of the interface on your desktop and bring those back in at any time. And that will even work across applications.
The third bit of innovation that I mentioned was innovation that is completely new. You saw Benoit's very cool example of the mixer. Here we have something fairly similar in some ways, fairly different in others. Can you bring up the sound in back?
This is not only a mixing application, but it's an effects application as well. So you have all the standards. I can change the baseball. I can change which output device, where the output is coming out of. I will keep that. That is number 4. I will bring that down a bunch more. I'm slowly eliminating elements here. If I want to add some feedback to the flute, I can go ahead and do that, and change the delay on the fly.
What makes this so powerful is that you can impact multiple channels at once. Right now we've got 16 channels of input, and impact multiple channels at once and apply these effects to multiple channels all at the same time. This is an advanced technology that we're working on in our R&D lab.
One other advanced technology I'm unable to show is our relay technology. That allows communication between machines. So if you have two machines that are linked via the Internet, they can be half way around the world. You can have a single application that will modify a given document that will show up simultaneously within a second on both machines.
So, in a simple example, if you have, say, a text document or a graphic document and you have two people working on it remotely, each can see the other's changes live. It is not a great imagination needed to see how this could apply to video conferencing or some other effect.
You can see that in the demo room, after I bring this over there and get things hooked up, you can see all these things.
I'll just leave this running as I finish up here. We do hope you come visit us in the demo room. Look for the big BeatWare banner as you walk through the door. You can find information on our products at www.beatware.com.
And, as an added bonus, for everybody who comes and sees us today, you can get your souvenir BeatWare yo-yo. I've already noticed a couple people with near misses on these things, so be careful out there. Thanks.
[Applause]
Mr. Paterson: I'd like to invite Mark Hall and Simon Clarke to come up from Adamation. They are here. Great.
Mr. Hall: Good morning. Adamation is very pleased today to be given the opportunity to showcase our suite of applications to you developers and give you an idea where we're coming from and where we're going. We have a very limited amount of time, about ten minutes, to showcase five applications, so we're going to get right into it. Hit it, Simon.
What we're looking for is the experience -- or to experience the promise of digital media.
[Applause]
What you just saw there was a new scriptible version of audio elements that we'll be actually releasing to developers this evening. It's just not ready for public consumption, but we wanted to get it out to you. And very much thanks to him for writing some very creative, innovative applications.
Let's focus on some imaging tools now. What we're going to do is go out and get a couple of still images that we can use in conjunction with a Paint application.
What we are going to do here is -- first of all notice that there is a QuickTime movie playing with sound, and this happens to be an escape, compressed with the escape codec. You might know the folks from the Tomb Raider thing. There is a codec recorded in an afternoon in our media technology.
And, Simon, when the hippo comes up, why don't you stop the movie and copy this frame from the edit menu. It's going to go to the clipboard. And since we have an Image Elements network open with a clipboard input, what is happening is, very quickly, in fact, it's gone through the gamma adjustment and the image has been sent on to Picasso.
This is probably a very good time to let you know that Adamation and Sum Software have entered into an agreement where we've come to terms on publishing future versions of Becasso. We're very excited and thank you Sander Stokes for your creative work in the BeOS community, and we look forward to further integrating our tools.
What you see is an afternoon's integration of Becasso and Image Elements, allowing them to talk together through the standard BeMessaging architecture.
So now, since this is a very powerful image editing tool, what we'd like to do is create a gradient and apply it to the alpha layer of this immage.
What Simon is doing is creating the gradient, circular gradient, and applying it to the alpha channel. Since we want to retain the alpha layer, what we're going to do is export this image as a PNG file and save it out to a disk.
So we're creating a lot of things. This is all about the creation of digital media. We're not going to take the time to show you yet how they'll be used. In the end, we'll kind of tie everything together.
Let's go straight on to movie making. studioA is our flagship application. You've probably heard little bits about it here and there, possibly seen it at trade shows. What we're going to do today is show you how some of the applications are integrated with studioA.
But first, we took a trip out to a local soaring center and took our VX1000 digital camera and shot some great footage. What we're going to do now is show you the live footage that we've created -- actually this is a completely rendered movie from studioA, and it's playing back from the VX1000 camera.
I hope none of you were standing too close to Steven Adams. He gets very dizzy every time he looks at all these loop-to-loops. So stand clear.
Like you just saw using studioA, this is a studioA interface where we took some of the media with -- Simon is taking the audio slip, the still image that we got from Becasso through MPlay and ImageElements, and we're going the take a movie that is a DV-encoded movie clip that came from the same day of footage.
Making movies is all about sequencing things over time. So what Simon is doing now is putting things out onto the timeline. There you see the audio being laid out. Here is the QuickTime encoded DV movie and the image that we got from Picasso.
You can see already that we can structure the timeline, we can play back this movie without any batch rendering, the speed and power and flexibility of the BeOS at work here, all of the great APIs that we're taking advantage of.
Of course, you have the ability to add motion pass. So you can see that now this hippo eyeball is moving around the screen. This is all about content creation.
Let's now export this movie and create a QuickTime movie. And this is a very small movie. You can hear that, yes, it's rendering frames of audio, as well as video. And in a few short moments, we'll have a brand new QuickTime movie that we can play back for you.
Now, what we're very excited about today is that for the first time we're releasing a lot of these -- basically everything that you see, to you as developers.
Many of these applications, you utilize shared libraries and add-on technology. So this evening at six o'clock, we're going to release for the first time our studioBuilder disk, which for you developers means that you can very easily create movie players, filtering applications, filtering add-ons. Basically anything similar to what you see in this demo. If you're interested, please make sure that you come to the that session this evening.
Let's take a look at this movie quickly that we just rendered.
[Applause]
Thank you. Of course, some of these applications are very sophisticated and complicated. So we heard from our customers, people at trade shows, people interested in distributing software to consumers at very low price points.
What I'd like to show you is an artist's rendering of a program that we announced at Demo '98 this year called PersonalStudio. We announced it as HomeStudio, but today and forever more, you should know this application as PersonalStudio.
You can see that the interfaces are much different and much more consumer oriented, but you will have the same power of studioA and all of the integration in the other applications that you just saw.
So this is a great framework that we're building, a great environment for developers to participate in. You don't have to know about QuickTime formats. If you know how to write a page curl or just a whirl or twirl, this is a great place to start.
Lastly, we will go on to a imagesr movie that we created for the purposes of Demo '98. Instead of playing it back from the camera, we're going to play this movie in realtime and, in fact, in full screen.
[Applause]
That is a little bit of the power and the flexibility. This is Adamation's Frameworks Alive. Please come see us. Anybody that you see in a black shirt with an Adamation logo, please capture us and pull us off to the side if you have comments or questions throughout the day, and come see us this evening for our distribution of all these great tools.
Thanks for your attention.
Mr. Paterson: I believe that we have Bruce Hammond -- yes, there he is -- from Gobe Software.
Mr. Hammond: I'm going to be demoing Gobe Productive. People come up and say, "What is Gobe Productive?" I tend to call it an extensible document creation system. And that really doesn't describe what it is.
Other people have compared it to a Works project or a Works program of some sort. And a Works program is kind of a Swiss army knife type of application, and we're kind of building a Swiss army chain saw.
What I'm going to show off is some basic features of the framework. We have a plug-in API, so that you can create parts that can create their own document, such as a graphics document or a word processing document or a spreadsheet document, or it can be dropped in frames for any of those other types of documents.
I'll start off with a graphics document, just to kind of show you some functionality of the framework. You have some drawing tools here, in a drawing environment, of course, and up here you will notice that we've got some graphics type of information, called the part bar. So I can actually manipulate my shape directly by typing in data here.
If I -- one of the things you will notice is that everything is live, in kind of the spirit of the BeOS, which is nice. If we rotate a shape or if we manipulate it in any way, we give this thing a nice fill. And go ahead and give us something like that.
If I move this thing around, if I rotate it, you will notice that it is live direct manipulation. And people -- since you have the BeOS developers, you're very used to seeing that sort of thing. The rest of the world isn't. If you play with FrameMaker or Claris Works or Microsoft Office, you see proxies on everything.
Let's see. We have the plug-in system, so this plug-in a word processing frame. And people hate it when I start with raw documents the show off the functionality, so that's why I'm doing it.
This is just another graphic in the system. So, of course, we can rotate it around. We can style it. We can do all kinds of other things.
Now, one of the things that we have in this environment as a characteristic of the system is an undo history. So we can actually back it all the way off. And we actually have a history pallet that will show you all of the things that happened to the document.
I'll drop in another part, which is a spreadsheet, and this spreadsheet is living in a graphics environment. Let's go ahead and type some random information here. Actually, let me bring my other document here.
This is a -- this document I created on a curve. And, again, you'll notice that everything is live direct manipulation, which gives instantaneous feedback to the user. If I make a new window in the document, and I can wide zoom it and I can manipulate in this environment -- let's see it over here.
If I create this document, this document is just a little bit imagesr work space. And over here I will go into a page view and shrink that down. You can actually see that if I move these shapes around -- this is how -- if it were to be printed right now, this is how the document would look when you do this. Across -- across the page. You can see it's all a page over here.
[Applause]
This is the kind of functionality and kind of responsiveness that I think users are going to be expecting in the future from even something as mundane as a Works or an Office-type package.
Let me -- one of the wonderful things you can do here is create new sheets into the -- onto the document. So it actually creates a compound document in a way. In this one I'll add a word processing sheet to this graphics document. I actually have some -- okay.
We've got some data here, and let's actually take some of this chart information that we created -- this spreadsheet, and let's take a chart onto it. And we made a nice chart of our data. And let's make it a little more interesting. Go to a 3-dimensional chart and zoom around here.
[Applause]
Now this chart is a drop-in. It is in the plug-ins folder talking to our API. It is actually composed of -- itself is a graphics environment. So all of the styling that we can do to graphics we can do to the chart, including -- we can do something odd with it. And we'll show one other thing we can do. We can actually take and copy this guy and put it into that word processing sheet that we made. There it is.
If we change it here, it shows up with the changes propagated -- propagated through the word processing sheet over here. And so everything is live, updated, rescaled, or whatever.
And all of these tools which we're trying offer a complete user interface. The same tool, say, to style a shape, would create in the graphics environment a fill. If I go into my spreadsheet environment, I should be able the use the same tools in exactly the same way to style that.
And to show you just more silly things we've done, we've basically made some drop-ins that do odd things here. Clock frame.
We're looking on the external API for this. And it should be able to -- developers can write parts -- wanted to write an equation editor, which we think would be wonderful.
There is quite a lot of function given to a parts writer -- these drop-ins, we call them parts -- such as the history. And also things like style sheets and the ability to change dynamically -- we've got some dedicated part of the API -- of the function -- the interface area up here for use by your part.
And a part can put up any kind of user interface it wants to, in addition to using this area up here for specialized functionality.
And we've got some -- we can bring up one more thing here. Let's see here. And I made a very simple slide show. It doesn't do much. You can use all of the tools to create presentations with the presentation part.
Supposing I want to change something in the background, I could take this guy here -- maybe a little bigger -- drop it in there. And let's see. See the entire slide. Like that. And I'll even position it. Let's see if we can get here for a presentation.
And I put it on the background of the slides that fast. I can put any part there in the background. So it is -- try a clock frame. There we go. Clock frame there. Change our slide show that easily. We can use all the tools this way. In fact, let's make this guy a gradient -- gradient text on this slide. That's it.
[Applause]
There's more functionality we can go into, and we'd like to in more depth in the other room. Find Carl Rice or Scott Lindsay or myself, and we'd be happy the show you some more functionality. Thanks.
Mr. Osadzinski: This is the video demo again. Slightly modified back here holding still in my hand. Hello.
[Laughter]
Here is an Intel BunnyPerson. And one more effect I didn't show you -- BunnyPerson bigger. And the lighting is somewhat low because it's not exactly full screen studio here. Before we go up there, let's do a chroma key. Hello, I'm a BunnyPerson.
[Laughter, applause.]
This is my way of a tasteful introduction for the next speaker, and I'll let Scott make the introduction.
Mr. Paterson: Okay, with that, as you can tell, our keynote speaker for the meeting comes from Intel. He is the vice president of an Intel content group, as well as director of worldwide developer relations.
In the 15 years that he's been at Intel, he has been responsible for marketing products, including Intel's first 32-bit processor. He's also the director of Software Publishers Association.
What makes him a really exceptional choice for our keynote -- not that all of those things don't already make him such a great choice -- is his recent involvement in managing a major program that's targeted to encouraging and assisting the independent software vendor community to produce applications that utilize the Pentium II processor. And how appropriate could this be, because we're all working on applications and operating systems that use multiple Pentium II processors.
Without further ado, I'd like to introduce Mr. Claude Leglise from Intel.
[Applause]
[Applause]
Mr. Paterson: When I first came up earlier this morning, as I started to walk up to kind of kick off this conference, I got one word of advice from Alex, of all people. And he just kind of tapped me and said, "Scott, just don't suck."
[Laughter]
So I hope that you have found our general session today hasn't sucked. And what we're going to do -- we still have 15 minutes before lunch -- we're going to go ahead and break from the general session.
You might choose to take the time to go and look at the developer lab. The lunch will happen over in rooms E and F, which are just around the corner. And just so you know, we have lots of Be engineers who are here at the developer conference as well, and they'll be milling about. And just feel free to grab them if you have questions.
Thanks very much.
[Applause]