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Cosmoe: BeOS Class Library on Top of Wayland
- pjerem 1y agoOkay, I love this :)
- leonheld 1y agoHaiku/BeOS to me is simply peak computer design. This is beautiful!
- jchw 1y agoNow this looks interesting. I am not familiar with the BeOS APIs, but the UI design is very pleasing. One thing I don't see mentioned anywhere including the plans is accessibility though. Not having basic accessibility support would be a serious issue, so I'm hoping it is either already there and just not mentioned or at least planned in some way.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mouse_ 1y agoIn a very real way, Windows XP was more accessible than anything made since, due to it being more friendly to hacks. There's a reason you see so many disabled people who refuse to abandon their ancient setups. Smaller, simpler, more hackable software is inherently more accessible.
- jchw 1y agoOkay. But in practice you do still need basic keyboard control and screen reader support. If Windows XP didn't have robust support for that I suspect it would be a very different story, but it did. Edit: Of all the comments to disagree with, I am blown away that this is today's. You guys desperately need to explain what you're disagreeing with here. Seriously, leave a reply.
- snozolli 1y agoand screen reader support If you look at how classic Win32 applications are constructed, I don't think you need anywhere near the support for screen reader software that you do with modern applications. All of the elements of a dialog box, for example, are constructed from a standard set of controls, and can be interrogated programmatically for their text. I don't know anything about the internals of BeOS software, but I would bet that it's closer to Win32 in this regard than it is to more modern UI systems.
- jchw 1y agoJust to be completely clear I'm not suggesting the BeOS APIs are insufficient to implement robust screen reader support, just that Windows XP actually did implement it, from the ground up, and integrated it into Win32. I would love it if Cosmoe (and in general, more niche toolkits) would do this, too. It's non-trivial work so it's not like I expect it, but it makes using this toolkit for real programs intended for a general audience much more reasonable.
- kosolam 1y agoWhat are the practical benefits of this library? We have gtk,qt,fltk,wx, and a long list of others some cross platform some not..
- mouse_ 1y agoyeah but I don't want to use any of those
- kosolam 1y agoGot it. The practical benefit is that you have a library that you want to use, now? Good for you, sir. But seriously, why have another native c++ gui library?
- touggourt 1y agoBecause his son started studying programming, so he resurrected this 20 years old project. Did you read the History page on Cosmoe website ? You should (https://cosmoe.org/history.html https://cosmoe.org/history.html) Ton of projects exists, ton of cars, ton of bicycles, ton of shoes, ton of pens, ton of keyboards, mices and screens... each of them are just another one and there is no real benefit to chose one rather than another (price excepted). They exist, because someone wanted to try someting or do something. Humans do things that way.
- amiga-workbench 1y agoIf the current UI libraries are enough, then why are people diving for Electron slop instead of using them? Seems like there's room for improvement here if nobody wants to touch any of them.
- bboygravity 1y agoBecause it looks (way) better than any of the others?
- Disposal8433 1y agoBecause that API is nice. Why have a Linux when you already have Windows?
- mouse_ 1y agoCute!
- jbverschoor 1y agoInteresting.. back in the early ‘00, I implemented the BeOS api on top of the win32 api. Naive me thought that would make people adopt programming for BeOS and in turn would make it a popular OS.
- ksherlock 1y agoYou and me both (but for different reasons). Also for Flash/ActionScript.
- netdoll 1y agoWas this an independent hobbyist reimplementation? Gobe did something similar in order to port their productivity suite (sorely missed) from BeOS over to Windows and Linux.
- jbverschoor 1y agoHad juist a hobby. Never released it, but it worked quite well. It was remarkably easy to add the events and controls etc after I got the initial version working.
- NonEUCitizen 1y agoDo you own the rights to it? Can it be published on github? Thanks.
- jbverschoor 1y agoI’ll see if I can find it :)
- imchillyb 1y ago“There are several sample applications included which demonstrate what it is capable of.” This was the mantra of BeOs. Here’s a technology preview. Watch videos on a cube, now a sphere! The OS was sold as a technology preview that was easy and accessible and the users only needed to wait for developers… …that never showed up. Similar occurrence with Microsoft phones and lack of developers. Pebble watch and lack of developers… What these projects all lack are meaningful engagement instead of a few ‘oh wow’ moments.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cjbgkagh 1y agoMicrosoft Phone was a giant pile of unforced errors on Microsoft’s part, it wasn’t the developers fault, that thing was a POS that never got better.
- Apocryphon 1y agoMicrosoft making it difficult for users to run BeOS didn’t make things easy. > The Flora Prius was preinstalled with both Microsoft Windows 98 as well as BeOS. It did not, however, have a dual-boot option as Microsoft reminded Hitachi of the terms of the Windows OEM license.[4] In effect, two thirds of the hard drive was hidden from the end-user, and a series of complicated manipulations was necessary to activate the BeOS partition.[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Flora_Prius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Flora_Prius
- chipotle_coyote 1y agoI mean, I get that argument, but I actually ran BeOS full-time for over a year. It had a great Works-style office suite (GoBe Productive) written by the people who wrote ClarisWorks, a few good graphics programs including an amazing competitor to Macromedia Fireworks (e-Picture), a solid BBEdit-like programming editor (Pe), a few music programs that did things that I’m not sure I’ve seen other systems do to this day like SoundPlay’s wacky ability to act as a mixer, with speed control, between multiple MP3 files or ObjektSynth’s…object-oriented synthesizer (it’s very hard to describe). There was a stage control system for live performances whose name I forget now—the company is still around, as far as I know—that was used, running on BeOS, for several Broadway shows and Circue de Soleil installations. And an animation program that started on BeOS, Moho, is still around today. The engagement was certainly starting, and I think there’s a chance—a small one, to be sure, but a chance—that if Be, Inc., hadn’t clearly decided that carving out a comfortable niche just wasn’t enough, BeOS might have succeeded. (Instead they decided to go all-in on “Internet Appliances,” which ended up dealing them the death blow rather than a big success. Ironically, I think that market effectively succeeded a decade later, but in the form of the iPad.)
- dkh 1y agoFinally, the killer app to checkmate the Wayland naysayers: BeOS API implementation
- em-bee 1y agofrom BeOS/Haiku i am actually most interested in two things: the way windows are styled/handled. so i'd like to see a BeOS styled compositor/window manager. the database like filesystem, and of course gui and commandline tools to use it. (can the filesystem features be emulated with extended attributes, or is a full port of the filesystem driver needed to get a filesystem with the same features? (i am not looking for compatibility, just the feature set))
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago> the way windows are styled/handled. so i'd like to see a BeOS styled compositor/window manager. pekwm with the right theme looks close enough and tabs windows together, which IMHO is the biggest feature: https://www.pekwm.se/themes/benu.html https://www.pekwm.se/themes/benu.html (Of course, that's an X window manager, so AFAIK it can't be combined with this)
- em-bee 1y agofunny enough, there is also a haiku theme ;-) but yes, need something for wayland. but maybe cosmoe helps inspire someone to work on that.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y agoHah, so there is! ( https://www.pekwm.se/themes/haiku.html https://www.pekwm.se/themes/haiku.html if anyone else wants it) Actually I like the look of that better too
- chrsw 1y agoA window manager using this library would be very interesting
- LeFantome 1y agohttps://gitlab.com/metsatron/BeOS-r5-XFWM https://gitlab.com/metsatron/BeOS-r5-XFWM
- tialaramex 1y ago
- Apocryphon 1y agoMore exciting UI news than Liquid Glass
- tialaramex 1y agoOne thing that's fun about this is that BeOS isn't going anywhere. If you decided to do this for, say, Windows, Microsoft is going to release a new Windows version with new stuff you can't do and too bad. But BeOS itself is dead, and the Haiku project (to basically make BeOS again, once named "OpenBeOS") is about a quarter of a century old yet seems barely closer to releasing anything. A lethargic snail could sleep walk to the finish before Haiku ships version 2.
- chrsw 1y agoThat's a shame because the the Haiku code base is relatively easy to get into. It's not overly complicated, it's consistent, it doesn't have layers of different styles from different eras and origins, and so on. It's C++ but it doesn't use last C++ feature to show off how clever you can be. At least, I'm pretty sure that's still the case because it's been years since I looked at it. I remember being surprised about how easy it was to form a metal model of the design and a model of the design-behavior interaction.
- calvinmorrison 1y agoHaiku is pretty conservative with their versioning. You can definitely daily drive it.
- tmountain 1y agoBeOS is the Latin of operating systems. LOL
- i80and 1y agoHaiku is in genuinely good shape. I contributed some code to it years and years ago and even back then it ran nicely even on bare metal. About the only thing I think you miss out on is GPU acceleration and maybe wifi? I haven't kept up with the current state.
- dleslie 1y agoWifi is as good as FreeBSD, because they share drivers. But yes, graphics drivers are a problem.
- sockboy 1y agoEmulating extended attributes for a filesystem is a fascinating approach. It can significantly streamline lightweight OS customization without needing a full port of the filesystem driver. Has anyone experimented with this in open-source projects? Would love to hear about practical results or challenges.
- wmf 1y agoLinux has supported xattrs for many years; there's no need to emulate them.
- jdboyd 1y agoLinux's xattrs appear to only be an array of bytes, while Haiku's extended attributes are typed (string, mime, int, llong, float, double, bool, icon, or raw). This means a compatibility layer is probably needed to handle encoding types into the value of the xattr. Xattr(7) says there is a limit of 64kb for the value. Some haiku programs allegedly use more, but i dont have an example handy. Further, specific file systems may impose additional restrictions. For instance ext4 requires all xattrs to fit in a single file system block (assuming that the man page I'm reading is not out of date).
- jonhohle 1y agoFor compressed files, HFS+ puts the entire contents in an (xattr né resource fork).
- yencabulator 1y agomacOS resource forks values are "file-like" with position-based "block" read/write, Linux xattrs is a key-value map with atomic get/set operations on the whole value only.
- danans 1y agoBeOS sold to Palm. Palm developed WebOS and sold that to LG. I wonder if any of BeOS ended up on my current WebOS powered LG TV. I bet someone here knows.
- hollandheese 1y ago>I wonder if any of BeOS ended up on my current WebOS powered LG TV. I bet someone here knows. None at all. Palm split into two companies in 2003, PalmOne and PalmSource. PalmOne handled the hardware and PalmSource handled the software. BeOS went with PalmSource. PalmOne eventually bought the full rights to the Palm trademark from PalmSource in 2005 and switched back to being Palm. This is the company that made WebOS and got bought by HP. PalmSource got bought by ACCESS (the company that made NetFront, one of the early mobile webbrowsers) and the rights to BeOS went to them in the sale.
- lproven 1y ago> ACCESS (the company that made NetFront, one of the early mobile webbrowsers) I think that Access provides the web browser in the Kindle. That's probably the most widely-seen product by the most people. It also tried to made a multitasking multimedia-capable PalmOS, PalmOS 6 "Cobalt." https://www.palmsource.com/palmos/cobalt.html https://www.palmsource.com/palmos/cobalt.html My submission of it here got some discussion 9mth ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41522434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41522434
- tchbnl 1y agoAFAIK the only thing carried over from Be was Binder (from BeIA), which made its way to Android before being completely rewritten later on.
- p_l 1y agoA lot of concepts from BeOS survive in Android, to the point that some APIs look pretty much identical at low level.