Introduction

Many changes and improvements to the user interface have been made between BeOS R3 and R4. These release notes describe only the most significant ones.

The Deskbar

News in brief from the Deskbar:

To add or remove items in the Be Menu, you now add files or folders to the /home/config/be folder.

Changes to the Status View:

• Now shows time and date: click on the time to change it to the date, and vice versa.

• Expands as needed to display new icons. Additional icons that appear in Status View are

• A blackboard icon that indicates the presence of open applications when the Deskbar is in its compact (as opposed to expanded) form.

• A modem icon that indicates an active dial-up connection. You start the connection with DialUpNetworking preferences. The movement of arrows in the icon shows incoming and outgoing traffic.

Twitcher

Twitcher is a new applet that lets you switch between running applications. To bring up the Twitcher, press and hold Control, and then press and release Tab. Continue to hold down Control while you Tab (or use the left/right arrow keys) to cycle through your open applications. Use the up/down arrow keys to cycle through an application's open windows. When you release the Control key, you're switched to the app (and window) that Twitcher is pointing to. The application's window comes to the front on your desktop; if the window is in another workspace, you're taken to that workspace.

The Tracker

Several new Tracker features contribute to over-all ease of operation:

• All volumes are now mounted on the desktop. (Mounting disks makes their contents available to the operating system.) If you right-click on the desktop or on the icon of a mounted volume you get a context menu with a Mount/Unmount command. All available disks appear in the Mount menu pop up; disks that are already mounted have a check mark beside them. The context menu also gives you the option of mounting all attached disks with the All Disks command. If you click Settings in the context menu, you'll see the Disk Mount Settings panel, which lets you specify automounter settings--which disks you want mounted on your desktop automatically when you boot.

• The Find mechanism works the same as in previous releases, but the interface has been rearranged. One additional feature is the Temporary checkbox, which appears when you toggle open the bottom of the panel. If Temporary is checked, queries are deleted after some amount of time (a week or so); if unchecked, they remain until you delete them. Changing a query name automatically unchecks Temporary--the system takes the change as an indication that you want to keep the query.

• Transparent icon dragging has been added. When you drag an icon on the desktop it becomes transparent until you drop it.

• You can drag windows between workspaces by grabbing the window's tab and pressing the numbered function key (F1, F2, etc.) of the workspace you want to drag it to. The workspace changes underneath the window.

• Tracker windows have sliding tabs: Hold down the Shift key and drag the tab across the top of the window.

• Attributes columns in Tracker windows have been improved. You can delete an attribute by grabbing it and dragging it out of the "attribute bar." By right-clicking in the attribute bar you get a pop up Attributes menu that lets you add and remove attributes. You can resize an attribute column by pressing and dragging the divider between two attributes; a special cursor indicates that you're in resize mode

New and Substantially Modified Preferences

Meiosis, mitosis, and spontaneous generation.

Audio

Audio replaces the old Sound preference. The new Audio panel has four tabs: Input, Output, Hardware, and Mixer. You set the type of hardware source and sound level in Input and the type of hardware output and level in Output. The Hardware setting lets you see (but not yet choose) sound in/out devices if you have multiple sound cards on your system. The Mixer setting is for mixing sound from different inputs, including other audio inputs and video. Settings on the panel change appearance depending on whether the input source is mono or stereo. When you add another input source, the panel expands to accommodate it; the number of input sources is potentially unlimited.

Backgrounds

Backgrounds lets you set the background color or image for the desktop and for Tracker's folder windows (setting screen color was previously part of the Screen preferences). In the Backgrounds panel you can set the color and image for the current workspace or for all workspaces. A new Icon label backgrounds checkbox makes the backgrounds of desktop icon label transparent if it is unchecked or lets you choose a color from the Backgrounds color panel if it is checked.

Boot

This preference is different in the Intel and PPC releases; the information here applies to PPC. If you click the Easy pop up in the PPC Boot preference into Expert mode, you get a panel that lets you select the partition you want to boot from.

DataTranslations

DataTranslations is a new preference that brings data translators to the user level. Data translators let you open or save a file as a particular type. For example, if you want to look at a GIF file, you need a GIF translator on your system to open the file. The DataTranslations window shows you which translators you have on your system, and, if they have settings (not all do), lets you adjust them. The BeOS ships with TIFF, Targa, StyledEdit, JPEG, and BMP translators. Other applications may add translators to your system when you install them. To add a translator, drag it into the DataTranslations window.

Devices (Intel only)

A new Devices preference lists all the devices on your (Intel-based) computer. You can use Devices to see what devices you have, what their capabilities and configurations are, and whether or not they are enabled. You can also use Devices to add devices to your system and to reconfigure existing devices.

A particularly useful feature of Devices is user-level debugging for jumpered devices. A jumpered device is an ISA, non-plug and play card (generally an older device). If you have an internal modem on your system and it isn't working with the BeOS, you may be able get it working by changing its settings in the Devices preference device editor.

DialUpNetworking

The DialUpNetworking preference lets you configure your modem's connection to the Internet. Previously, this was part of the Network preferences. When you create a dial-up connection definition, a modem icon appears in the Deskbar's Status View; the icon is animated to indicate modem activity. You can reestablish your modem connection by clicking on the icon.

DriveSetup (Intel Partition Map only)

The Intel Partition Map panel in the DriveSetup preference has some new features:

• Two sliders (rather than one) in the partition bar make it easier to create a partition of a specific size.

• There is more built-in security against accidentally losing data in a partition:

• A padlock icon at the left end of the partition bar must be clicked open before you can modify a partition. A dialog warns that you may lose data if you modify the partition.

• The color of the partition bar changes from blue to red when the change you're making to a partition's size is about to cause you to lose data.

Filetypes

The FileTypes preference has new appearance, but its functionality is essentially unchanged, with the addition of these two features:

• The New Resource File command in the File menu brings up a panel that lets you create a new, empty resource file if you're writing an application.

• You can now drag and drop multiple files onto the FileTypes window. This brings up a Multiple FileTypes dialog where you can changes the attributes of a group of files at once. This is useful for setting the preferred application for a number of files at the same time (for example).

Also, Icon-O-Matic, which used to be a separate icon editor application, is now part FileTypes. To launch Icon-O-Matic, double-click inside the Icon box in the FileTypes window.

Joysticks

New for gamers: The Joysticks preference lets you add joystick descriptions to your system and calibrate them, making games on BeOS far more interesting.

Menu Preferences

The Menu preference lets you choose the system "shortcut" key--this is the key that's used to activate a menu's keyboard shortcuts. Your choices are Control and Alt on a PC keyboard, or Control and Command on a Macintosh keyboard. The defaults are Alt (PC) and Command (Macintosh).

Networking Preferences

The Networking preferences interface has changed substantially in appearance, though not in functionality. Connecting by modem is now a separate preference--DialUpNetworking (see above).

Printer Preferences

A single Printers preference now combines the features of two previous ones: Add Printer and Select Printer. In addition, when you click the Add button to bring up the printer selection window, you'll see a choice for Preview. The "Preview" printer is a virtual, onscreen printer that lets you view print output onscreen, and make decisions about font, layout, and so on, without wasting paper.

Screen Preferences

Screen preferences now lets you set the number of workspaces you want (up to 32) and apply whatever changes you make to resolution to one or all workspaces. Color control has moved to the new Backgrounds preference.

Sounds

Sounds is a new preference that lets you set system sounds. To use it you need a BeOS-compatible sound card (see http://www.be.com/support/guides/beosreadylist_intel.html for the latest compatibility information). You can add your own sound files, in .aiff, .wave, and (maybe) raw format. Just drop them into the /home/config/sounds folder, and they'll appear in the Sound File pop up in the Sounds window.

New and Modified Applications

With the exception of NetPositive, changes to BeOS-native applications in Release 4 are modest.

BeMail

BeMail has been improved:

• The mail form window now has scrollbars.

• You can drag and drop URLs and enclosures into and out of messages. For example, if you drop a URL onto the desktop, it lands as a bookmark.

• The Previous Message and Next Message commands in the (new) Message menu let you toggle through your mail as long as your mailbox window is open. The keyboard shortcut for this is Alt+Up/Down arrow.

Magnify

A new, improved version of Magnify has an extensive pop up menu of controls, along with a built-in help doc. You can resize the Magnify window through Alt++ and Alt+-.

NetPositive

Release 4 brings many new features and improvements to the NetPositive browser application. The most significant ones are

• Improved frame support.

• Floating table support. In sites with both fixed and floating tables NetPositive previously displayed one table beneath the other instead of putting them side-by-side as other browsers do. This has been fixed.

• Font support. You can now specify fonts in the Preferences Display tab.

• Improved GIF support. Most of the display problems with GIF images and animated GIFs have been solved.

• Document encoding for web pages. To read a Japanese (or Cyrillic, Greek, etc.) web page, you must set Document Encoding (in the View menu) to Japanese. You set the font that's used for a particular language in the Display tab of the Preferences panel. For languages with more than one document encoding, all encodings use the same font preference. To view Japanese web pages, or pages created for any multibyte character language, you need to install a font that contains the language's characters.

• SSL (secure socket layers). SSLs have been added in Release 4. The Security tab of the Preferences panel uses the SSL machinery as it gives you the option of accepting or rejecting a web site's "cookies." (A cookie is a chunk of information that a web site stores on your hard drive so it can keep track of who you are.)

PoorMan

The PoorMan interface has been reorganized, and a feature added: You can now specify the number of people who can download simultaneously from your web site. Go to the Advanced tab in the PoorMan Settings window.

SerialConnect (Intel only)

SerialConnect replaces Connect. It is a Terminal-type application (that is, it opens as a terminal window) that lets you send and receive data over your computer's serial port. You can also connect through a modem by choosing Connect via Modem in the Connections menu of the SerialConnect window.

ShowImage

ShowImage replaces Rraster. ShowImage is for opening image files; you can open any file type for which you have a translator (see DataTranslations, above); BeOS ships with JPEG, TIFF, Targa, PPM, and BMP image translators. You can select a portion of an open image and drag your selection to the desktop, where it's saved as a file.

The Be User's Guide, in lovely HTML, for BeOS Release 4.

Copyright © 1998 Be, Inc. All rights reserved.

Last modified November 10, 1998.