The BeOSJournal previously asked the community to come up with some earth shattering questions for Dianne Hackborn. You responded, we picked the most interseting ones, and she answered them.

Dianne commented to me in email that she was worried her answers were a bit blunt. I told her we like it that way, and not to worry. Besides, we have a healthy supply of asbestos suits in storage. ;)

Welcome Dianne, and thanks for allowing us to barrage you with some questions from the community.

You're very welcome. I hope the answers are somewhat interesting to people, even though I don't think I was actually at Be long enough to have much to say that isn't already known. (Heck, the only code I ever had included in a real BeOS release was a couple fixes to the most egregious bugs in the Interface Kit that had always annoyed me.)

TBJ : How did you get started working with Be Inc.? Did you know much about BeOS before starting, or was it just an IT job you thought was interesting? Did you know anyone at Be Inc. before you started working there?

I had been doing BeOS programming for a long time before working at Be, starting with the original 66MHz BeBox. I had an Amiga before that, so found BeOS to be a strangely attractive switch, moving from a dead platform to another doomed platform. ;)

Early on (when I was still in school and actually had free time), I was fairly active on the BeOS newsgroup, and later on the developer mailing lists. Mostly just making a nuisance of myself.

I did a fair amount of programming on BeOS in my spare time, but nothing significant. When I finished school, I went to work at a company in the Chicago area doing a data visualization application for Unix and Windows machines. Eventually I got sick of Chicago and decided to move back to the west coast. From my experience with BeOS I thought it would be great to work at Be, so I applied there and -- after months and months of annoying them -- I finally wormed my way in. I started at Be right after the IPO.

Memsom : How did you forsee BeIA progressing? How much of a leap forward was BeIA2.0? Similar to R5.03 -> Dano?

Well I didn't personally forsee much about it, but from what I know BeIA 2.0 probably would have been a redesign and rewrite of large parts of the OS, so it would have been a much bigger change than anything planned for BeOS.

TBJ : How do you view the integration of computers in our society? Are we moving towards a more "Star Trek" or "Star Wars" world?

Are we moving to a fantasy world? I somehow doubt that. :) Computers will continue to become more significant and less obvious in our lives, usually in ways we don't expect. If we try to stuff the future into some particular fiction, we'll miss what is really going on -- and often to our detriment.

LutonHatter : Babylon 5 or Star Trek?

Did you really need to ask?? Babylon 5 of course! First because of my Amiga background, second because I enjoy complexity, and last -- but certainly not least -- because Ivanova rules.

garapheane : If you could go back in time and change one single event regarding Be Inc / BeOS, what would it be?

I got there after the writing was on the wall, and I don't think there is any single event that would have mattered. Personally Be was a success for me -- it was an incredible experience, and has been an important part of my career. I have no regrets about the time I spent with BeOS, both before and while working there.

TBJ : What is your fondest childhood memory?

Ummmm... leaving childhood? Not that I had a horrible childhood, but in general I don't think being a child is all that pleasant.

Shintaro : What are your personal views of Zeta?

I doubt you really want to know, however...

Personally I find Zeta depressing. From what I have seen, it is basically the work we had in progress at Be plus various things dumped on top. Unfortunately what we had at Be was half-finished, if that. I hate seeing all of the half-finished parts of the UI being thrown around as a real product. I worked on a number of the things in there, and find it personally embarrassing that it is being presented that way. (It's enjoyable showing work in progress... but always with the caveat that it is under development, and not finished, and certainly not something you are going to ask people to pay for.)

Of course, I guess I shouldn't be all -that- embarrassed, because Yellow Tab doesn't seem to make much effort to point out that most of what they are selling is work that was done by the engineers at Be.

But ultimately I don't care all that much about any of this, because BeOS is dead and in my opinion anything that happens now is about as relevant to the rest of the world as the continual attempts to resurrect the Amiga. It's time to move on.

lichtgestalt : Provided Zeta/OpenBeOS/another OSBOS turns out to be moderately successful, will we see a comeback of Sequitur and other apps? Ever considered open-sourcing it?

Sequitur is my brother's (Eric) app, so you'd have to ask him for any real information about it. Some day I hope to wear him down to port it to Windows, but until then I am happy to continue using it on BeOS.

From my perspective, however, I would say that it doesn't make any sense to continue developing it on BeOS, where there is no market. Eric got screwed pretty hard by the whole BeIA and death of Be. The first version of Sequitur was finished about the time of the focus shift, and the current polished "ready to be sold" version was finished at the same time as the announcement of Be being acquired by Palm. It would be extremely difficult to do any more work on it without a clear and strong target market.

As far as open-sourcing it... well, there -is- an extensive add-on API for writing your own tools and other extensions, which lets you do a tremendous amount of stuff with it. (Most of the features of Sequitur are implemented in these tools, and not the app itself.) However I am not really aware of anyone making use of that to extend it, so I think it is unlikely that much useful would be done on a completely open source Sequitur.

At any rate, just taking a big piece of code, throwing out in the woods and proclaiming "thou art open source!" is very unlikely to result in a successful open source project.

choulth_unlogged : What are the most important skills BeOS engineers delivered to Palm?

The years of experience with system design (both good and bad) from developing BeOS.

Sandwich Boy : What is the state of the OpenGL in BeOS 5.5? (Dano, whatever)

I don't know anything directly about that, but I have been told that it was very broken (crashing) because it was in the middle of some big changes to support another part of the system.

Commander_Sozo : What is your favorite smoothie flavor?

Peach flavors are good, and I can do without banana. Besides that it's all negotiable.

TBJ : You just know we gotta follow that up with a Muppet question. ;) Which is your favorite muppet and why?

Unfortunately I've never been that much into the Muppets, at least not enough to have a meaningful favorite. If there's a queer Muppet with an attitude, I'll pick that one.

Jace : Do you feel your work at Palm is more/less/as fullfilling, enjoyable and/or interesting as what you did at Be Inc.? (assuming you felt fulfilled at Be Inc.) I'm basically asking about job satisfaction on a level of the work you do and not the company's environment or political structure.

Be was a very unique situation, and I feel extremely fortunate to have had a chance to experience a small part of. PalmSource (we are no longer Palm!) is in many ways a much more difficult environment than Be was, but at the same time I think there is a lot more potential at there to really do something that makes a difference. The jury is still out on where it will go, however, so I wouldn't want to make any direct comparisons at this point.

mario : Do you still compose? I really liked your stuff back in the day when I would download Sequitur. 1.x and then 2.0. I think you have talent, and hope to hear your new compositions.

Thank you very much. I appreciate that!

I definitely still compose. I finished up an album late last year, and a lot of the songs are available on my web site at . Some day I may actually get around to making packaging for the thing so I can distribute it in some way. :)

Since then, I have still been writing music (still with Sequitur), though it has slowed down lately as I have become more buried in work. But I doubt I will ever stop writing music -- I have been doing it since a little after elementary school!

TBJ : Does music run in your family? Have you always been musical, or was it just a phase?

I have always been into music, especially drums. Most of my strongest memories from when I was little involve drums -- playing tympani in the second grade school play, listening to songs with strong drum parts over and over and over again on my dad's stereo, etc. I started playing drums (much to my parents' chagrin) in the school band in sixth grade, and continued that all the way through college.

alphaseinor : What do you think of Wine versus Win4Be?

All I know about these is that Wine is a Windows emulator.

TBJ : What is your OS of choice these days?

I still do composition with Sequitur on BeOS, but otherwise I use Windows. I wouldn't say Windows is my "OS of choice", but it's what's there and for the most part does what I need.

moooooooo : Can you write PalmOS apps on BeOS?

Not that I know of. Someone could conceivably port the Palm OS emulator to BeOS for doing development, but I can't imagine a 5.x or later simulator ever running on BeOS.

TBJ : Thanks Dianne for your time and willingness to answer our questions. Please stop by the forum sometime to say hi, in the future. ;)

You're welcome! Thank-you for all the nice questions; I hope the answers at least have some entertainment value. :)

-- Dianne.