Masters Awards and Q&A
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Be Developers' Conference Masters Awards and Q&A |
Scott Paterson: Okay. If we can have people take a seat we are going to go ahead and start with the Masters Awards. It looks like there is some interest.
Okay. Just a little background about the Masters Awards, this is the third of set of Masters Awards that we have given out. And I think, I kind of did a rough count in my mind because I have been at all the Masters Awards, I think with the systems that we give away today, it will be over 20 dual processor systems that we have given away to developers over the course of all the Masters Awards.
What we are trying to do with these awards is to recognize people who have made some commitment to producing Be software. And that software actually, you know, spans a number of categories. We often promote the BeOS as the media OS and you might expect that we would award awards to people doing digital video, digital audio and those types of applications. And we do, for example, Studio A, in the last set of Masters Awards won a Master Award.
But we also give out awards to other types of applications. For example, applications that once you go into the view BeOS for a specialty app, these apps keep you there, like Mail It. Mail It was a past Masters Award winner.
Then we also give awards to students in college and high school. So that category, the idea there is to promote development of the BeOS applications early on, hopefully we get those experienced developers as they move into the professional world.
So without any more delay I'm going to go ahead and get started with the student category. In that category we have two honorable mentions and one Masters winner. I will start with the honorable mentions. What I will do as I announce these, let me tell you what you win.
Honorable mention winners will receive a Hauppauge WinCast BT848 PCI card that comes bundled with a color video camera.
Winners will receive a dual Pentium II, 266 megahertz system with 64 megabytes of RAM, 32 time IDE CD-ROM, Matrox Millenium II 4MB AGP video card, 3Com networking card, Soundblaster card, floppy drive, mouse, keyboard.
A Speaker: Does that include a hard drive?
Scott Paterson: Yes. I don't know why that's not on there, it must include at least a 3.2 gigabyte hard drive but most likely imagesr than that.
One other stipulation is the Masters Awards winners need not be present to win. As I looked through the list of winners, I think there a number of people who aren't here but there are a number of winners in the crowd.
Without further ado, our first honorable mention, an application called Nelson. How many people have run Nelson? Not too many. It's a pretty unique application. It's a neural network applied to photographic images. The idea behind it, if you provide it with two side-on views of a person's face, it can begin, as it scans more and more photos, begin to deduce what the front-on look should be. I will switch over to the machine here. And in most cases I'm going to give a very brief demo. So let's find Nelson here. We will run that. And start to train it.
What it's doing is training by taking input A and input B, we have the output already calculated and it's starting to learn what the desired calculated output should be, so as you go over time, you should see this third window start to become an image that you can see, it will start off very fuzzy and get better over time. We will let that run and come back to it as I go to the next application.
And I don't believe Ben is here, right? Okay.
The next student honorable mention is HitRun. What this application does, it's a simple app, it allows you to have hot keys to automatically launch documents and applications. I will show you that one. So our image is slowly getting better over time. I'm going to go ahead and quit this one. And I've actually already configured a number of keys. I'm going to press control F1, F2, F3, let's get it running. Okay. Control F1, there we go. Control F2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, so it automatically launched a number of applications and associated documents.
Okay. That's our second honorable mention.
And our winner in the student category is from Dirk Olbertz, University of Dortmund, Germany, is BeInformed. This is a graphical NNTP news reader. I think as the judges went through the student category, they liked this one because it has a very good user interface and can be used as a template for other people doing Internet utilities. I will show you that one.
It also allows you to configure a number of news servers, you don't have to be tied to a single news server, you can retrieve articles from different news servers. I have a couple here. A very simple but elegant application. That's our student winner in the Masters Awards.
Going on to the shareware and freeware category, we have two honorable mentions in that category as well as two Masters winners.
The first honorable mention is to an application called Stamina and Charisma by Sylvain Demongeot. It's a really nifty pair of applications that work together. Stamina allows you to point it to a web site and I will show you it as I explain what it is. I go down to Stamina. If I run Stamina I can point to a web site, in this case I will point it to the Be web site, and tell it to go to a depth of one level, and I will hit start and what it's doing is downloading the web site to my local hard drive. And when that's done, which there it's done. The other part of this is Charisma, if I launch Charisma, it's running in the background. If I go to NetPositive, and in the options preferences, set my proxy to myself, now go to the Be web site, I'm now viewing the Be web site from my own local hard drive.
A Speaker: That's a bad example, right? You wouldn't ever want to do that to the Be web site.
Scott Paterson: Yes. I guess we changed our web site to reflect R3 is shipping, I downloaded most, a couple levels of depth before that, so that's why the graphics are a little funky. You certainly wouldn't want to use it for any site that has lots of graphics, no. It's a great little app.
The second shareware freeware honorable mention goes to Boo by Levent Levai and Attila Mezei. A great realtime image and morphing application. That says nothing about what the application does. The only way you can appreciate Boo is if you play with it. Let me bring that up.
We like this application because it shows off realtime manipulation, realtime feedback in the BeOS. This is a very boring image to use (indicating the Mona Lisa), we will have to import another one (indicating Jean-Louis Gassee) and I will use the translate tool.
A Speaker: What about the original?
Scott Paterson: Now if I just had a textual I could write "I have an idea" across the front of it.
(Applause.)
I'll do a little twirl here and let's zoom in, zoom in right here, there we go.
(Applause.)
Actually the tool, I was very impressed with this application when I started playing with it, but what really put it over the top for me was unBoo, I think this is great as well. So you can return the image. Much better, yes.
(Applause.)
Scott Paterson: Is Attila here? Yes, Attila, why don't you come and get the award.
(Applause.)
Scott Paterson: All right. Let's see, is that the first one or the second one?
A Speaker: Second.
Scott Paterson: That was the
We don't have the machines here at the conference, we will be sending them to the winners but we do have a Masters shirt to give to the Masters winners.
Congratulations, Joe.
(Applause.)
Scott Paterson: And here is 3D Starchart, it's one of my favorites. Mostly because as an evangelist and as one of the people who does the main demo at our trade shows, it's a great application for showing off the BeOS with realtime tools for spinning this on any axis, make this a little bit bigger, zooming in, zooming out, zooming way in. It also has great information included in here.
So if I bring up an information panel I can take a star out of the field of vision, drag it across, it tells me what the name of the star is, spectral class, visual luminosity, it will also tell me distance between the stars. And it's based on the catalog of stars which is all the stars that are within 85 million light years from the earth. You can turn luminosity way up or way down. It's a great application.
All right. Shareware and freeware, we have one more Masters winner. The Epson Stylus color printer drivers by Matthias Agopian.
(Applause.)
And I will show you this and I'll explain why I think the judges awarded this a Masters award. Let's bring up NetPositive again.
A Speaker: Switch.
Scott Paterson: I will switch. And let's turn off our proxy. So even on, for example this page which has some nice color, I don't have the color printer here, but I do have the printer driver loaded. What we believe is that anybody working in printer drivers can look at this printer driver and use it as a grid on how to build a really good interface for printing. If I say okay, I can go in here and get a preview. And if you want to, you can come up later on, I have some output from our Epson Stylus color printer back at work and it does print in beautiful color and exactly as you see on the screen prints on the printer. Okay.
(Applause.)
Scott Paterson: I don't believe Matthias is here. Okay.
In the commercial category we have one honorable mention and two winners. I will start with the honorable mention. Pe by Maarten Hekkelman. I believe Maarten is here.
And I know Maarten gave a demo on Pe during one of the talks, I'm going to bring it up. I in no way can show you all the stuff that he showed you.
Let's bring it up and I will show you what I use it for. I'll open up a file, let's go to our Masters directory, and I will find myself a HTML file, there we go. You can see this is what I typically use it for, to add HTML when I produce marketing documents for the web. It's very nice, it has great color coding for the tags in there. I understand from the engineering team it has great color coding for syntax in programming as well. All right.
Okay. Our first commercial Masters winner goes to...
A Speaker: Switch.
Scott Paterson: Switch. Gobe Productive.
(Applause.)
Scott Paterson: The Gobe software incorporated team, I can have how many... if I could have the team members come up, I have a number of shirts to give to them.
Bruce, congratulations. Way to go, guys. Scott, there you go. If there is wrong sizes we can fix that a little later. Okay, great.
(Applause.)
The Gobe folks gave a great demonstration during the first general session and the only reason I'm going to add to that is I heard a question out in the crowd when they were demoing and Bruce didn't hear it, so he didn't get to show it, so I will show it now as my short Gobe demo. Bring up the graphics. The question was, we have to bring this up, of course. The question was he brought up the clock frame, and someone in the crowd yelled can you rotate the clock? And I assume... I assume, without testing it beforehand, that sure, you can rotate the clock.
A Speaker: You can rotate the balls.
(Applause.)
Scott Paterson: And to wrap up the Masters Awards with our final commercial winner, we have image elements by Adamation and Attila Mezzei. If we can have Attila come back up again. I only have one shirt left.
(Applause.)
Scott Paterson: Congratulations on a great job. I will give, again they showed the image elements in the general session but I will do something real quick here.
A Speaker: Switch.
Scott Paterson: Okay. I will bring it up and then I will switch. Okay. So if I... let's open up something here, a sample. Let's do maybe a linear transform. So the only thing I really do here that I find kind of neat is we will send it to process, I open up the linear transform here, I can be changing in realtime you know, what shape that it conforms to. So it's great image processing networks. Obviously you can see some of this coming out of Audio Elements, which I believe is also a Masters winner, as well.
So congratulations, Attila.
(Applause.)
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