dsandler.org

As I am no doubt the last person to point out, Google Maps has added a street level view to (a few) urban areas. It’s the first Google app (besides Picasa) that I’m aware of that requires Flash, but it’s also (as fellow Be alumnus pixelknave points out) the first Google app to feature the Be Man:

Fig. 1. The BeOS Man.	Fig. 2. The Google Maps Man.

I guess it was only a matter of time, given that there are so many Be alums at Google now. I figured I’d send him home after all this time away (screenshot).

Update: The Google Maps Man now has his own instructional video.

Amar recalls:

Five years ago I was living with Angi in the Inner Richmond. I think she woke me up, I can’t remember for sure. We watched the towers collapse on TV. It was like watching a movie. Sapient called and told us not to come in.

The last sentence reminds me of the contrasting reaction I experienced at the office.

There was a big product group meeting scheduled later that day (or was it the next day?) that was very sparsely attended. I was there, the junior PM was there, and the Big-Shot VP in charge of the team, in addition to maybe one or two other engineers.

(Aside: The Big-Shot VP used to be very friendly with the engineering team, back in 2000 when he started as a Much More Reasonably-Sized Shot Project Manager. A year later, things were not going so well for Be; our big project had just imploded, our stock was in the toilet, and—although there was at least a chance of continued employment for the surviving employees—the office laser printers were seen to spit out résumés more and more frequently. Thus our VP wasn’t quite as empowering as he used to be.)

Right. So, we’re at the meeting.

Big-Shot VP: Where the hell is everybody?

[Silence.]

BSVP: Well?

Dan: I … um, I think people are probably a little freaked out and, you know, maybe they’re just staying home today.

BSVP: That’s ridiculous. I don’t see any airplanes sticking out of this building.

[Shocked silence.]

Classy!

It looks like the open-sourced Binder (the fancy multithreading component framework underneath Palm OS 6, which began its life as BeIA 2.0 during the final months of Be, Inc.) has finally been officially released:

Contributing to the Open Source Community - ACCESS and PalmSource have contributed Open Binder, a component object framework, similar in general concept to DCOM and CORBA, but better scaled for use on small devices. Open Binder provides a unique inter-process communication (IPC) paradigm implemented as a kernel-loadable driver, and incorporates a broad range of programmatic utility classes and frameworks. PalmSource and ACCESS have released the Binder driver and its associated frameworks to the open source community. For more information, see www.openbinder.org.

Elsewhere: Jason (pretty much the mastermind behind the open-source effort).

Update: Eugenia has posted what I think will prove the definitive reportage of this release: OpenBinder introduction & interview with Dianne Hackborn.

Update 2: Slashdot covers the general PalmOS-Linux announcement. Nobody seems to have noticed the Binder part (except Eugenia); who can blame them, given the way it was buried in the press release?

Update 3: Wow, look at that cluttered architectural block diagram. A lot of unpleasant things there, like GTK and GStreamer (when we had a perfectly awesome rendering engine and media framework already built—that is, completed—for Binder). And hey, check it out, the nebulously-named “messaging framework” lives on! I swear, that thing will never be finished until someone decides to actually throw a team at it (instead of a pale blue rectangle on a diagram and a checkbox on a features list).

Tonight I released version 1.1.0 of the Buy Now screen saver. The changes are minor—I added a few translations (which are entirely likely to be wrong) and cleaned up the code a bit. The download is now just a zipfile containing the saver; no disk images or other intermediate junk.

Suggestion: Install it on your friend’s Mac on Thursday night. (You know, the last day in March.)

Big news for a Friday night: Microsoft settles with Be for $23.25 million (AP newswire). Microsoft issued a press release. OSNews has the story too, ending on a melodramatic note: “And that folks, is the end of the legendary Be, Inc.” Other details of the settlement, besides the lack of admission of wrongdoing by Microsoft (fully expected), are confidential. By all accounts, this is a lowball figure, but Be’s attorneys must have been keen to take anything at all. I still have a few shares from my time at Be, so we’ll have to see how much of the settlement makes its way to shareholders.

I just re-discovered the GUI Gallery. It’s a nice overview of graphical user interfaces past and present, and it recently acquired some BeOS screenshots. Kudos!

Some clarification about the “5.1d0″ screenshot:

This is a slightly crashy alpha/beta version of BeOS that was never finished and was reportedly the last release before Be went out of business.

The OS build referred-to as “5.1d0″ was never finished, and was also never released to the public. Many in the (fanatical) BeOS user community assumed that the Next Big Release of BeOS, including several major technological improvements that had independently been part of public beta programs (OpenGL support and 3D hardware acceleration; a completely-rewritten high-performance networking stack, BONE, the configuration panel for which is in your screenshot), was “ready to ship” and “sitting on Jean-Louis’ desk waiting to be released, and he’s HOLDING OUT ON US ALL!”

Sadly, this was never the case — the desktop version of BeOS was instead put on hold (no QA, no spit, no polish — it was pretty crashy at times) while the company worked on BeIA. (BeIA was a highly-customizable reinvention of BeOS for internet appliances, which seemed like a possible business model that might actually turn into money since developing an OS competing with Windows clearly didn’t. BeIA only shipped on one appliance — the SONY eVilla, which had a miserably short lifespan. It would be awesome to get some screenshots of THAT, but I’m not sure if there are any available.)

What you see in the “5.1″ screenshots is the desktop version of the OS used internally at Be for development of BeIA, and not much else. It was probably also included in some of the BeIA evaluation packages sent to potential partners, and was probably leaked to the outside world from there.

There’s a pretty good breakdown of the featureset of “Dano” in a posting to a BeGroovy forum thread. There are other links out there too — just look around for “Dano”. (OS 5.0 was codenamed ‘Maui’; presumably there’s a sort of Hawaii-5-0 tropical theme involved.)

Miriam just brought in Krispy Kremes. I asked her what the occasion was, and she informed me that her rabbi just recently kashered (made kosher) the Mountain View franchise. Happy Kosher Donut Day!