THE BEOS PREVIEW RELEASE The web site will be completely updated on Saturday morning and will include a number of new documents in the products section including; the Media OS white paper What's New in Preview BeOS Datasheet A Tour of the BeOS Here are some highlights... At the conference we will begin distribution of advance copies of the Preview Release to developers attending the Be Developer Conference, being held this weekend in Santa Clara. Developers at the conference are receiving an "advanced access" CD containing the BeOS Preview Release and the tools needed for development of applications, drivers and other software. Be is releasing this advance developer release of the BeOS Preview Release to accelerate software development, and to gain feedback prior to finalizing the public CD of the Preview Release. This CD is being released ONLY to software developers - not to end users. In addition, Metrowerks, Inc. is issuing a preliminary version of Release 3 of CodeWarrior for BeOS, including support for the Preview Release, new versions of the CodeWarrior IDE and debugging tools, and the first versions of Java tools for the BeOS. The final version of Release 3 will be available concurrently with the public version of the BeOS Preview Release. The BeOS Preview Release will be the first version of the BeOS to be made available to the public. It contains a wealth of new features, and represents the most significant revision of the software to date. The BeOS is a new operating system environment designed to meet the high-performance needs of digital content design and Internet communications, removing the limitations and complexity of the aging architectures of current mainstream operating systems. The engineering team at Be didn't start with an existing OS and transform it, they started with concept called the "Media OS" and optimized every portion of a new OS - the BeOS - for handling digital media. The BeOS is the first new operating system designed to unlock the door to much more powerful personal computers, and extract more performance from the systems we use today. Among the new features of the BeOS Preview Release: New Be File System. The Be File System (BFS) is now a full 64-bit system, allowing the BeOS to handle files and volumes measured in petabytes (a thousand terabytes). The BFS is fully multithreaded, allowing it to take advantage of multiple processors, and is a "journaling" system, ensuring that the file system is always in a consistent, uncorrupted state -- even after power losses -- and reducing system boot up time to a few seconds. And the BFS is faster than its predecessor found in the DR8 release. New Graphics Capabilities. The BeOS graphics capabilities have been vastly expanded. Among the new capabilities are anti-aliased fonts, full network and direct printing support including Postscript and AppleTalk printer support, and the first software-based version of the industry standard OpenGL 3D graphics libraries. New Inter-application Services. The messaging capabilities of the BeOS have been enhanced and the first level of object scripting capabilities makes its debut. Internet MIME type identification is now used throughout the system, improving integration with Internet applications. In addition, the Preview Release introduces Be's "Replicator" technology, a new object messaging model which allows you to embed active pieces of data and code -- called "replicants" -- from one application into documents and into other applications. Replicants represent the next step in modular BeOS software. Enhanced Internet Capabilities. The native TCP/IP capabilities of the BeOS are improved and expanded, with increased network performance, integrated FTP file server and personal web server capabilities, and mail client support, and remote access capabilities. The integrated BeOS web browser, NetPositive, is enhanced and integrates the BeOS Replicator technology. Using this, you'll be able to install active web pages onto the BeOS desktop. New Java Support. With the release of Metrowerks CodeWarrior Release 3, the first versions of the Java runtime for BeOS, and Java development tools become available to application and web content developers. New User Interface. The BeOS user interface has undergone a complete upgrade and transformation. With the Preview Release, the desktop is controlled by the BeOS Tracker, a new modular and unobtrusive way of getting at your disks and frequently used applications. Icons can now be placed on the desktop. Mac OS HFS volumes can be viewed and manipulated, and support will be added for DOS and NFS volumes, among other formats. And a wealth of new preferences allow you to customize the BeOS. New Hardware Support. The range of PowerPC-based systems capable of running the BeOS has been expanded. PowerPC 603 based systems such as Power Computing's PowerBase, new 604 systems from Power, Apple and others, and Motorola's StarMax line are a few of the newly capable systems. In addition, the BeOS provides full true symmetric multiprocessing support for dual and quad processor systems from Power Computing, Daystar and Apple. In response to the overwhelming interest in the BeOS in Japan, Unicode support now appears throughout the system. A feature originally planned for late 1997, the Preview Release utilizes the Unicode UTF-8 format (the format used by Java) within all text objects and within the font system. This support is a major step towards a fully international version of the BeOS, and further enhancements in this area will be introduced through 1997. Complete details on the new features of the BeOS Preview Release, and complete list of BeOS capable hardware systems, can be found at http://www.be.com/products/. The Advanced Access CD is being distributed to developers who are attending the Be Developer Conference. In addition, it will be delivered next week to registered developers in the Be Developer Program. More information on this release, and on the Media OS concept, can be found at. The preliminary release of CodeWarrior for BeOS Release 3 will be distributed to all registered CodeWarrior for BeOS users. More information on CodeWarrior can be found on Saturday May 10th at http://www.metrowerks.com. We have not yet finalized our pricing and distribution plans for the BeOS Preview Release but know that our overall goal is to get the BeOS on as many systems as we can. You can expect our rollout plans to be consistent with that goal. Note that this information will NOT be available on the Be web site until the morning of Saturday, May 10. We're sending this Preview Release information out early to the people who took the time to sign up for Preview Release info; you're finding out about it before the rest of the world does. You WILL be notified via e-mail when the Preview Release is available to the general public; in fact, you'll likely know this information before it appears on the Be web site. But in the meantime, please try to be patient with us as we assist developers during this developer-only release of the BeOS. THE NETSCAPE SUPPORT At the conference Netscape is announcing its plans to develop and release the FastTrack server for the Be Operating System. This will be the first Netscape server product available to customers on the PowerPC platform. The Netscape FastTrack server will come bundled with the BeOS, the first software product to participate in a bundling program also being revealed at the conference. This bundling program enables developers to provide customers with a turn-key solution. Distribution plans for the products will be announced during the summer, but it is expected that the products will be made available by CD, electronically, and through BeOS OEMs. The Netscape FastTrack Server is an easy-to-use Web server that installs in minutes. Businesses can use FastTrack to quickly establish a presence on the Internet. It is a complete solution for creating and managing Web sites on the Internet or Intranet and is an open platform for publishing traditional Internet documents as well as developing and deploying live network-centric and media-rich applications. The FastTrack server will take advantage of a number of capabilities built into the Be Operating System. Most significantly, it will be optimized to take advantage of the combination of the BeOS's symmetric multiprocessing design and the system's pervasively multithreaded architecture -- leading to very high performance and high data throughput. In addition, FastTrack will also take advantage of Be's 64-bit, multithreaded, journaling file system to provide fast response times, access to large data files and volumes, and a maximum safety for stored data. The companies expect that third-party developers will take advantage of the Netscape Server APIs (NSAPI) to add additional capabilities, including media-oriented features, to the FastTrack server. "We've designed the BeOS to be a premier media and communications rich platform, for both developers and users." said Jean-Louis GassÚe, president and CEO of Be. "We see Netscape's products and the BeOS as a perfect combination -- providing users with an operating system designed for today's generation of microprocessors and systems and powerful tools to design and deploy web-based content on the intranet or Internet." Both Netscape and Be indicated that they will continue to look at further opportunities for Netscape products on the BeOS platform, and that there are no immediate plans for additional announcements at this time. NEOLOGIC PERFORMANCE NeoLogic Systems, Inc. today announced the release of NeoAccess(r) 5.0 object database engine for the Be Operating System. Utilizing the BeOS's new high-performance file system, as well as the extensive multi-threading capabilities, benchmarks are showing that NeoAccess performs from three to five times faster than under MacOS on similar Power Macintosh hardware, making NeoAccess the highest performance object database engine available for PowerPC-based applications. And since NeoAccess is a cross platform framework, developers can use it to build both BeOS and MacOS applications. The NeoAccess database technology reduces development time and costs for application developers by offering extremely fast storage and management of database objects in an easy-to-use class library. Applications currently using the NeoAccess engine include Netscape Communicator (for mail and news services) and NetObjects Fusion web site construction tool. Now NeoAccess is available for BeOS development as well. NeoAccess provides a real world benchmark that shows what we have always believed -- designing the BeOS from the ground up without legacy baggage results in a high-performance system. ADVANCED ACCESS TO OVER 3,300 BE DEVELOPERS Our developers have been chomping at the bit to start working on the BeOS Preview so we will be shipping an Advanced Access copy to all registered and updated developers. As you can see, there are a large number of enhancements we want our developers to take advantage of, so the sooner they can create Preview Release applications, the better. Of those 3,300 developers, over 800 expect to ship their application before MacWorld in August. We know that you are as anxious to get ahold of the BeOS Preview as we are to get it to you but we need to get it right before putting it in the hands of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of users. Please understand that the Advanced Access CD is being sent out ONLY TO DEVELOPERS and that you will receive information about how to obtain the Preview Release as soon as it's available. Stay tuned to the Be web site for updates from the Be Developer Conference.