[As a fan of William Adams' smooth, subtle segues into each week's News From the Front, I tried to come up with a similarly suave lead-in to this article about OpenGL®. I think I've gotten fairly close...]

My kid threw up the other day. Speaking of which...

Be's licensing of OpenGL® from SGI will bear first fruit in DR9, with the inclusion of a software implementation of the GL API and several support libraries, including the GLU, GLUT, and AUX packages. In this article, I'll give a quick introduction to GL, outline GL's integration with the Be environment, and expose some limitations of the implementation.

The GL API was designed by SGI as a standard software interface to high-end geometry and rendering graphics hardware. Read that sentence again, and shout out the words "high-end" and "hardware." Now think about these implications:

• Since it talks to hardware, the GL API is pretty low-level C.

• All drawing is done in "immediate mode"—GL has no concept of a "frame."

• GL isn't a lingua franca for ALL 3D applications, or for ALL hardware. There are many situations in which GL is less efficient than a "lighter" solution (such as Be's 3D Kit).

Let's look a these points in a bit more detail.

void LockGL();
void UnlockGL();
void SwapBuffers();

I was surprised by the overwhelming response to the BeOS at last week's Macworld Expo in San Francisco. But the reaction was, really, business as usual: Last January (1996), I was astonished by the crowd trying to get a peek at the BeBoxes; at the August Macworld in Boston, I was amazed by the number of visitors staring at the BeOS running on a Power Computing box. This time, I expected the reaction to be less explosive. After all, Apple was set to describe its most important OS transformation in over a decade, and, anyway, isn't Macworld dedicated to Apple computers and software? But I was wrong, the size of the crowd at the Be booth was even more impressive than at Boston! The enthusiasm was still there, and the demos were faster and better than ever!

This Macworld was also the last opportunity for us at Lorienne [Now BeatWare] to show our software before releasing it. The Reggae Suite will ship with DR9: It includes a word processor, a draw program, and a paint program. We continue to work on a spreadsheet—it should be ready soon. I would like to take this opportunity to thank those of you who were at Macworld for your support and warm reaction: Your regard is, for us, the best award.

As Alex said in a previous newsletter, one of the most powerful agents for software development is adrenaline. Indeed. But I would add dreams: We all need to dream to dynamize our software.

I began to dream almost ten years ago. I was living in Paris, and Sun Microsystems invited me (and about three hundred other developers) to a presentation of their new system, OpenLook. Compared with what we have sitting on our desks today, OpenLook was less than impressive, but it did offer a tool to interactively create applications, a kind of file browser, some graphic stuff, and the power of a UNIX workstation. Nothing funny at all. But what was unusual was that the presentation was made by the engineers who developed this stuff. For the first time, I had the opportunity to discuss the software I was using with those who were creating it! Ten of us spent half of the night with them recreating the world.

Last Saturday, those of us who had the opportunity to be in San Francisco spent the day discussing the features of the BeOS with the Be team. You could think that for me it was simply another day of demos and discussion, but it wasn't: The dream isn't over, and I'm as excited now as I was last year and ten years ago.

Thank you all at Be, for spending this time with us. See you next time!

So the new year begins with a bang! We just traversed the Macworld gauntlet, and boy was that fun. We were in quite a few places showing the BeOS to the best of our abilities. If you visited the show at all, and went by the Power Computing distortion field, you received quite a good dose of the BeOS and Power's commandos.

Our booth was always packed. We were running a continuous stream of demos on two large screens at the front of our booth. It was so packed that the audience spilled over to the Orange Micro booth, which they were none too happy about. They even erected an eight-foot-high curtain to keep people out of their booth, and show management threatened to cut off our power.

There were a number of third-party applications in our booth demonstrating quite nicely, much to the appreciation of the attending crowds. And we were helped in no small measure by the reality of FredLab's VirtualMac product. I've seen any number of times where a new platform is confronted with the "There's no software" mantra. I think we had this licked, with the exception of "Where's Photoshop?"

The developer's conference the Saturday after the show was well attended, and we learned a few things about how we will do things differently in the future. For all developers who sent in applications to be demonstrated, we're deeply grateful. You have helped to solidify our place as a new, exciting, and worthwhile development platform. We'll try to continue to do right by you in the future.

The human mind is complex, intriguing, and often surprising. Most intriguing of all is how memory works: How a sound, a smell, or a combination of sensory inputs can trigger a chain of memories is not well understood. This past week, I've been remembering events from over 25 years ago and have been analyzing the triggers.

By now, you've probably read and heard a lot about Macworld in San Francisco, so I won't dwell too long on the details. My main impression of the show was how fast the days flew by. From the moment the show opened each day to the closing announcement, it seemed like everyone on the Be team was running on adrenaline (or caffeine, or both) and that time was suffering some strange relativistic compression. Our booth was packed throughout most of the show and it was great to meet and talk with so many Be enthusiasts. This is also the _only_ company I've ever worked at where product demonstrators had to be almost dragged away from their demo stations at the ends of their shifts instead of escaping from the booth as quickly as possible. We were all getting a tremendous rush from the reactions of people to the BeOS demos. Those of you who attended the show and saw the big screen demo at the Power Computing booth will have seen Mark Gonzales of Be and Mike Rosenfelt of Power Computing continuing their hourly demos even long after both had almost completely lost their voices; they were both working very (too) hard, but I think they were also having the times of their lives.

But, exciting and enjoyable as the show was, our Developer Conference, held on Saturday at a San Francisco hotel, was the pivotal event of the week for me. Standing at the back of the room watching demos of BeOS applications, I was remembering events that profoundly affected me in 1971.

In 1971, I was in England at the UK equivalent of high school. Our school had an arrangement with a London-based timesharing company to have free off-peak access: Two 110- baud dial-up lines driving 10cps teletypes connected to a Xerox Sigma 5 computer. The environment was simple, character-based timesharing and the ability to develop and run BASIC, FORTRAN, and assembler programs. With 1,100 students at the school and few on-line hours, access was limited to 6th form (equivalent to the first year of US college) math and science students. As I was a mere 2nd form puke, computer access was a far distant possibility. But, after a demo at an open day, I was hooked. I took the big red London bus to Xerox Intergalactic HQ in the far reaches of the city, begged a set of manuals, devoured them on the long ride home, and wrote my first program (a pitiful effort, to be sure, but a start). After pleading with my math teacher to have the opportunity to run it, I was finally admitted to the holy inner sanctum where the teletypes were kept, allowed to watch the incantations required to establish a 110-baud connection, noted how laughably easy the password was to guess (which much later led to nefarious activities we won't go into here), and then, gasp, laid hands on keyboard to type in my miserable little program. Amazingly, it worked and prime numbers (yes, you guessed it) started to churn out of the machine.

At that moment, I had a rare flash of insight (they happen about once a decade) and realized that _here_ was something wonderful, powerful, exciting and, most of all, _fun_.

On January 11, 1997, I had the same feeling, and it reminded me very powerfully of that first computing experience 26 years earlier. OK, I'm biased, but this past Saturday, with over 400 Be developers in one room, showing off some tremendous applications, I felt strongly that we were on the right track. Sure, we have a long way to go. We have to continue to improve the product, to populate hardware platforms, and do everything we can to help developers ship real-life applications. But based on what I saw and heard on Saturday, I haven't been this excited in many, many years.

In my next column, I'll go into some detail about our sales, marketing, and support plans for 1997.

Macworld is never boring, but this one was even more interesting than usual. Apple's announcement of its acquisition of NeXT and of the return of one of its founders, Steve Jobs, provided a great deal of exciting news and created a context for whatever we had to say.

For us, this was the opportunity to state our case with facts. We were fortunate to have a slightly larger booth (20' by 20') than last year. Still, it was packed all day long. Demonstrations ranged from the serious to the cheeky. The prize for cheekiness, surprisingly, goes to one of my fellow countrymen, Marc Verstaen. Marc's company, Lorienne [Now BeatWare], developed several products for the BeOS. Among them, a word processor, Reggae, and AppSketcher, an application-building toolkit with ties to CodeWarrior, Metrowerks' native development environment for the BeOS.

Strangely enough, Marc thought of using AppSketcher to reproduce the patented Steve Jobs Interface Builder demo: Building a window with a slider and a dialog displaying the numeric value controlled by the slider. Marc used to be a NeXT developer, he couldn't help himself. The connoisseurs in the crowd chuckled. For a broader audience, we showed how the BeOS could project the real-time input of two video cameras on two faces of a rotating cube while the other four displayed QuickTime movies —and still have power left for other activities.

Thus making two points. First, with fresh, modern, lightweight system software one can realize more fully the potential of the PowerPC architecture. Second, this is the system for creative multimedia applications. The enthusiastic reactions in the audience lead us to believe both points came across quite clearly.

Speaking of the potential contained in the PowerPC architecture, one company did the most to promote it: Power Computing. They had the most animated booth, with a huge video wall for demonstrations and much martial paraphernalia to promote the idea they were fighting, and winning. This included a convoy of Hummers circling the Moscone trade show building, shouting slogans from roof-mounted bullhorns, and posters reminiscent of the more subversive days of the Red Army.

Spectacular and effective at a time when the gloom of financial losses and uncertain strategic pronouncements could otherwise lower the mood in the Mac community. In keeping with our partnership with Power Computing, we demonstrated the BeOS on their podium. FredLabs' VirtualMac got great reviews from a crowd agitated by Mike Rosenfelt, Power Computing's marketing wizard, who never failed to point out that if you can run Word 6, you can run anything. On second thought, I was perhaps wrong when I gave the prize for cheek to Marc Verstaen.

After such a week we can't help but feel excited and humbled. Excited by the possibilities ahead of us, a fast growing digital media market and a system well received in it. Humbled by the work and the risks ahead of us, delivering the next revisions of our OS, developing partnerships with PowerPC hardware builders, facilitating the development of exciting applications, and generally keeping ourselves focused and organized.

More about that in the coming weeks, starting with our developers conference at the end of last week.

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