Developer Release Notes: BeOS Release 4, Headline News

Headline News
Developer Release Notes
BeOS Release 4

The Move to ELF
The Intel binary world has moved to ELF. None of the R3-compiled binaries will work with the libraries that are included in R4 for Intel. This means you have to recompile all of your R3 apps. Although recompilation should be straight-forward, you may want to look in the /optional/experimental/ directory for a directory that holds contains sample code and an example makefile.
BeIDE
The BeIDE on Intel may not fully support old project files, and could damage them. You should make copies of your project files before opening them.
The New Media Kit
The Media Kit has been completely overhauled. The new kit understands video as well as audio, and features a much more flexible data streaming design and modular (add-on) architecture.
The old Media Kit headers files are not included in Release 4. The old media library is included in libmedia but will disappear no later than Release 5.

The Input Server
The new Input Server monitors all user events (from the mouse, keyboard, joystick, etc.) and tells you about them -- if you need to know. If you're creating an input method mechanism, or if you want to make the cursor move right-to-left when the user moves the mouse left-to-right, this is the server for you. Most developers can ignore the Input Server: After the Server examines an in-coming event, it passes it along to the App Server, which passes it to your app just as it always has.

Asynchronous Controls
The Interface Kit's control objects no longer block the window's message loop while they're tracking the mouse. To emulate this behaviour in the views that you create, you're encouraged to track the mouse by implementing the MouseMoved() function rather than by polling GetMouse() within MouseDown().

Draw on Children
A BView can now draw on top of its children. After the normal sequence of Draw() calls (i.e. parents are drawn first, children later), the parent is given a second chance to draw through the new DrawAfterChildren() function.

Transparency is Supported
The new drawing mode constant enables transparent drawing in views.

Enhanced System Snooping
Just as the Node Monitor and the live query system keep you in touch with changes to the file system, the BRoster and BMimeType classes have been enhanced to let you monitor changes to the roster and the MIME database.

Bus Configuration Manager and Driver Architecture
The driver world has been redesigned: There's a new bus configuration manager that lets your driver query the devices on a bus, and request a device that fulfills certain criteria.

Avante-garde STL
If you live for the latest C++ Standard Template Library, look for a directory named STL somewhere within the /optional/experimental/ directory for copies of the SGI STL 3.11 header files. The version of STL that's installed in the develop/headers/cpp directory is 3.0; we'll switch to 3.11 for R4.

BeOS Release 4