If you created a boot menu for your system by installing Bootman during installation, try pressing the „M“ key when your boot menu appears for a quickie graphical treat. Press the Esc key when the show is over to return to your boot menu.
The new Sounds preferences panel lets you associate .wav, .aiff, or .raw sound files with certain system events. While you can easily choose sound files by selecting Other… from the bottom of the picklist in this panel, you can easily organize your system sounds by dragging them to /boot/home/config/sounds. Any files living in this directory will appear automatically on the picklist in the Sounds prefs panel.
One feature of BeOS that makes the platform appealing to graphic artists is its alpha channel, which builds transparency controls right into the operating system. Grab any icon and drag it around over the top of other open windows or other system elements — the icon will appear translucent. For an extra-groovy demonstration of the alpha channel in action, open any image in ShowImage, drag out a small-ish selection (no larger than a couple of inches). Drag your selection around over the image, the Desktop, or other open windows to see a ghostly, translucent version of the same image.
The degree of user feedback offered by this feature is amazing. On the surface, it seems purely cosmetic, but it really does have a way of making the system appear to come alive. Pure elegance.
Once upon a time, BeOS let you use up to 32 workspaces. With R4, that capability has returned. By default, nine workspaces are enabled. To change this to any number between one and 32, launch the Screen preferences panel and click the Workspaces… button. For a classic example of BeOS real-time behaviors in action, keep the Workspaces preferences panel open while you do this and notice how it rearranges itself dynamically as you change the number of available workspaces.
Note that only workspaces 1 – 12 can be toggled between via hotkeys — you’ll need to use the Workspaces prefs panel to navigate through the rest.
As of R4, you no longer have to launch the Workspaces preferences panel to move windows from one workspace to another. Just click and hold on the title tab of the window in question while pressing the usual workspace-switching hotkey. For example, if the browser window in which you’re viewing this tip is in workspace #1 and you want to move it to workspace #3, click and hold on the browser’s title tab and press Alt+F3.
The yellow title tabs on BeOS windows are arguably the most distinctive feature of the user interface. If you’re not particularly impressed with them though, or if you’re just nostalgiac for the UI of a lesser OS, you can easily change them to that of MacOS, AmigaOS, or Windows 95. Hold down Ctrl+Alt+Shift and access the Be menu — you’ll see a previously hidden entry there labeled Window Decor, from which you can access any of these operating systems‘ window styles.
Click thumbnail for full-size view.
In R3, query results windows were „generic“ and appeared the same regardless of the type of file you were searching for. This made little sense if you were hunting for, say, bookmark URLs, since the query would return the bookmark filenames without displaying the URLs you wanted to see unless you physically manipulated the Attributes menu.
R4 has much more intelligence in this department, and gives you 100% control over the appearance of query results windows for any given filetype. Take a look in ~/config/settings/Tracker and you’ll find a folder called DefaultQueryTemplates . Within this folder you’ll find a handful of folders named after common MIME types (but note that slashes have been replaced with underscores). Take for example the folder called application_x-person. Drop a copy of one of your Person files into this folder and manipulate its Attributes menu to display whichever attributes are most important to you, such as just the name and email address. Drag columns into whatever order you please.
Close the folder, then run a system search on Person files — the query results window will appear in the exact configuration you just established for that filetype. You can, of course, create a query template for any filetype on your system.
Note: You’ll find another template folder in this directory as well: DefaultFolderTemplate . Because all Tracker windows inherit their configuration and layout from their parent folders by default, this template is used only when a parent folder cannot be found. The best example of such an instance is when you create a new folder on the Desktop.
When working in an open/save file panel in any application, you can quickly navigate to the root of the filesystem (your Desktop) by tapping Alt+D.
As of R4, the Desktop becomes the root of the filesystem, meaning that all of your mounted disk volumes are mounted directly on the Desktop, rather than in the Disks window. Depending on your OS heritage and personal preferences, this may or may not be what you want. For example, if you’ve got dozens of mounted disk volumes, you may find that this results in a very cluttered Desktop. Or, you may simply prefer the R3 Disks window to the new „Mac-style“ mounting method. Fortunately, you have the option to bring it back.
Open the file ~/config/settings/Tracker/TrackerSettings in a text editor. The first lines should read:
ShowDisksIcon off
MountVolumesOntoDesktop on
Just toggle the ‚off‘ and ‚on‘ arguments of these two lines, save the file, and restart Tracker to return the Desktop to more R3-like behavior.
Note: You must restart the Tracker. If you try to simply reboot, the changes won’t take hold, because when Tracker quits, it writes out it’s settings. If you make changes with Tracker running, they will get wiped out. This will get cleaned up when BeOS gets a Tracker preferences panel.
You’ll notice that this settings file also contains options for configuring the behavior of the Desktop when you have multiple BeOS volumes mounted. Because the Desktop is an aggregation of all mounted Desktop directories, you can end up with duplicate icons on your Desktop if you have the same folders or files living on multiple mounted volumes. Just toggle these settings between ‚off‘ and ‚on‘ to achieve the desired behavir.
Finally, this settings file will let you establish whether the Desktop should appear as the root of the filesystem when working in BeOS file panels.
NetPositive now has many more options and settings than it used to, but believe it or not, there are yet more configurable settings that you can’t access from its Edit | Preferences menu. But before you bother looking around for a text-based configuration file, don’t bother — you won’t find one, because preferences are now stored in attributes attached to ~/config/settings/NetPositive/settings.
You can use any method you like for editing these attributes (the command line, for instance), but you’ll probably find that the easiest way is to drag this file onto the DiskProbe icon, then pull down DiskProbe’s Attributes menu. Most settings are either on or off, as specified by a zero or a one. A good example of a setting you can edit from here that you can’t establish by normal means are the HaikuErrorMessages — set this Attribute to 0, close DiskProbe, restart NetPositive, and you’ll now get standard, boring error messages from the browser.
If you’d like to make the process a little more user-friendly, save the script below (written by NetPositive’s chief engineer, Scott Barta) to /boot/home/config/bin/nphaiku and run either
nphaiku on
or
nphaiku off
from the command line. Note that you can easily hack this script to control other hidden NetPositive settings.
if [ ! -G ~/config/settings/NetPositive/settings ]
then
echo
echo "You must run NetPositive at least once for this script to work"
echo "properly. Please start NetPositive, quit NetPositive, and run"
echo "this script again."
echo
exit 1
fi
RUNNING=`/bin/roster | /bin/grep application/x-vnd.Be-NPOS`
if [ -n "$RUNNING" ]
then
echo
echo "NetPositive must not be running when this script is invoked."
echo "Please quit NetPositive and run this script again."
echo
exit 1
fi
if [ "$1" = "on" ]
then
# Turn on haiku error messages.
rmattr HaikuErrorMessages ~/config/settings/NetPositive/settings
addattr -t bool HaikuErrorMessages 1
~/config/settings/NetPositive/settings
echo
echo "NetPositive haiku error messages enabled."
echo
exit 0
elif [ "$1" = "off" ]
then
# Turn off haiku error messages.
rmattr HaikuErrorMessages ~/config/settings/NetPositive/settings
addattr -t bool HaikuErrorMessages 0
~/config/settings/NetPositive/settings
echo
echo "Normal NetPositive error messages enabled."
echo
exit 0
else
# A correct option was not given. Print out the help and exit.
echo
echo "NPHAIKU - Turns NetPositive haiku (poem) error messages on and
off."
echo " Error messages are in haiku form by default."
echo
echo "USAGE:"
echo
echo "nphaiku on - Turns haiku error messages on."
echo "nphaiku off - Turns haiku error messages off."
echo
exit 1
fi