Be Delivers New Editions of BeOS 5
March 29, 2000
Be Incorporated today announced the availability of the latest
release of its digital media operating system, BeOS 5. The Personal Edition of
the operating system is now available at no charge, via the web at free.be.com.
Additionally, BeOS 5 Pro Edition, a fully-featured version designed for audio
and video applications, has also been made available to third-party publishers
in North and South America, Asia, and soon to follow, Europe.
With the new release, Be is offering a programmers development kit (BeIDE,
or Be Integrated Development Environment) and a library of demonstration applications
at no charge. Additionally, Be is opening access to its desktop, known as Tracker,
and its taskbar, known as Deskbar, by publishing a software developers kit (SDK)
along with the source code.
BeOS 5 Personal Edition takes advantage of an operating system installation
procedure that makes no alteration or modification to the boot drive. The operating
system simply resides on the disk as a single file, which can be moved or deleted
like any Windows file. When the file is double clicked, it switches control from
Windows to BeOS. BeOS 5 Personal Edition is compatible with Intel-based PCs and
includes HTML-based documentation.
The features of BeOS 5 Pro Edition allow it to be installed on both Intel-
and Power PC-based machines. Among the list of audio and video codecs is new encoding
support for Cinepak, Indeo 5, raw audio, P-JPEG, and MP3. Twenty six applications,
many of which are multimedia oriented, are bundled with BeOS 5 Pro Edition by
Be.
Be has placed the source code for its desktop user interface in a site for
access by any developer. The Tracker SDK (desktop) and the Deskbar SDK (taskbar)
can be found at the download sites www.opentracker.org
and www.opendeskbar.org, respectively.
In addition to the open source, Be is publishing a developer's kit that includes
the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and a developer library consisting
of make file scripts, compilers, package builders, sample code, and documentation.
BeOS 5 Personal Edition, the BeOS Developer Kit and demonstration application
packages are available at no charge from free.be.com
as well as dozens of mirror sites throughout the world. BeOS 5 Pro Edition will
be available in the Americas through Gobe Software, in Asia via Hitachi, and should
be available in Europe through Apacabar and Koch.
Be can be found on the Web at www.be.com.
|
