BeGeistert 005 - Arena - 7. to 8. October 2000 Düsseldorf

Article by Oliver Thylmann (BeNews) - Article from the InsideBeOS magazin
* Special thanks to Oliver Thylmann and Bernd Korz, to allow us to add this report into our knowledge base.

Once again, BeGeistert was blast, especially with the availability of a multiprocessing dual coffee machine which made the nights longer and the mornings more worthy of a smile.

BeGeistert has never been an event for sleeping and with more people there than ever, this situation did not improve. Now for what happened (cool stuff) and who was there (cool people). What am I talking about? Read on...

Before i start with anything else I would like to thank the BeGeistert Team for their great efforts and to congratulate them on a successful event. This one goes out toCharlie Clark, Markus Maier and Eric Tiggermann who organised BeGeistert this time. Marcus Jacob took care of the Coding Event and I was there standing on the sidelines mainly as the connection to BeNews.com to keep people informed.

First off, the participants. It is a very interesting list. My biggest surprise was ported the amazing Groovemaker at BeGeistert again. He actually got out of BeOS some time ago tp persue other interests and told me he did not plan attend. Then he registered under a false name because he knew I wes getting all of the sign-ups. To cut a lonmg stroy short, it worked out just fine. I was totally taken aback by his presence, having come to meet old friends. This does not mean he is back into the BeOS yet, but he is a great guy to have at the event (and yes, he was part of the coding event). Actually, after having won the Best Port from another Platform category in our BeNews Guru Awards, he told me that he would be getting back to Groovemaker on BeOS, fixing all of the bugs and seeing if he can implement saving direct-to-MP3.

Same as last year, Ernst came over from Holland to make it two BeNews guys at BeGeister, including myself. But this year Jamie, who is currently living in Belgium for a year came over, too, which made it three and it was a really nice thing. It is interesting to meet one of the people you are doing great things with for over two years in real life for the first time. Jamie proved once again that everybody at BeNews is a great human being and a wonderful person to have fun with.

Then we have the BeBits.com guys. Yeath, they were there. They are currently in London/UK and didn't want to miss the biggest independent BeOS users meeting wolrdwide. I picked them up personally in Aachen, where I live, and we went to Düsseldorf together. They are really nice people and I have to say it was fun having them around and meeting the two people behind the biggest BeOS site on the net.

Bernd Thorsten Korz, who is doing the InsideBeOS magazine was present and had some very nice information for us which we will tell you about in detail once we have it and when we can disclose it in full.

One thing we can already say is that InsideBeOS will be available within a week for the fist time in German, English, French and Spanish. They are currently still looking into how to really get it to the US.

Dirk Olbertz, working behind Ornament Tool and other things at the moment was also there and as insightful and as informative as ever. He is doing some great stuff for BeOS and you should remember his name for the future. He is showed me one of the most amazing bugs in the media kit, with his mp3s playing 13% faster than normal speed. Now that is a cool bug.

Stephan Assmus was there, the winner of the Best Neophyte Coder award in the BeNews Guru Awards. He was doing a lot of things in the coding event and gave a very well-received demo of his applications, showing how you really do things. All his apps are written out of a need for doing specific things and those things have been implemented perfectly into those applications. Just take a look at the beauty of ColdCut and we will keep you updated on eXposer once we have a full review. Not to forget here is Ingo Weinhold who did some of the cheesy parts of ColdCut and eXposer, like the algorithm behind the presentation of audio in both of the applications.

Erwin Coumans from Not a Number, the people behind Blender, was there to demo GameBlender, but really spent most of his time at the Coding Event. I have to say that I am not a person who can judge how good he is at what he does, but from everybody I have talked I have the feeling that I should be amazed. Everybody was shaking their heads in amazement saying that he is really knowledgable at what he does and wants things perfect. I must admit I realized this during his GameBlender demo, when he was talking about collision detection, implementing life-like body movement routines and other things. Look out for those people.

Peter Stegemann was somebody I had last seen at CeBIT 1998 where he was demoing the different server application (e.g. Diner) from Stegemann Inc. It is very nice to know this guy is still araound and I am lookig forward to seeing the servers run on BONE.

Marcus Jacob from BeEurope (though not on official business from there) and AiXplosive attended BeGeistert to have a lot of fun too. He even met some old friends in the city on Sturday evening and was mostly found at the Coding Event getting things done and organized.

Sander Stoks from Adamation came over both days and demonstrated personalStudio on Sunday, a demo I sadly missed. But I saw him listening to the other demonstrations with great attention and we might see some of his work in Inferno, a demonstration that caught his attention as he is still developing Becasso. I also learned that he is part of the OpenTracker team and that they might include some of the features from OpenTracker. NewFS in future releases.
Wonderful news.

Mark Erben from Cologne in Germany got close to standing ovations fr his BeOS advertisment/demo/party video. It is very good stuff and we will see if we can get it to you someshow in the near future. There are some legal issues to be settled on this one but, wow! I will stop here to not get you all too excited.

I see a lot more faces in my mind, like the two people who filmed many of us for a university paper on Interface Design in Operating Systems and boy did they ask good questions.

Then there were all of the coders from the conding event, who took up the task of building a game library with a running game within a weekend.

On to how the event "worked". Most of the attending BeOS lovers slept at the event or stayed awake very long until they went to teir beds one floor above before getting up again just a few hours later. There was too much to talk about at BeGeistert 005 go to bed, really.

You could sleep when you arrived at home, which many probably did, but this turned out to make the organisation of the day a little harder. Some of the people sheduled to do presentations where just not awake or if they were awake, not in a state of mind for a good demonstration. This all meant the paper with the demonstration and workshop shedule ended up being rewritten several times a day.

This does not mean there were no demos orbad demos though. Far from it. There were great demos about eXposer, ColdCut, Inferno, personalStudio, A BeOS Video (no more to say about this time), Siegfried Backup, Squirrel, ... My own BeOS demonstration, which turned out to be more of a chit chat about the OS with interested people, took close to two hours and was a lot of fun.

A lot of the attending people were also locked away in the 48 hours coding event. This was partly due to the nature of the project that was chosen this time. A gaming library including a game. Wow, that was and is all I can say about this.

There were people doing a song, sounds, pictures, caracters, the library, add-something-I-have-forgotten, add-another-thing-that-the-non-coder-that-I-am-tends-to-forget, ... You get the idea. I think that this is really a big project but having somebody from Not a Number there to give his ideas helped the project to achieve some big things and I will be looking forward to seeing the result, which should appear in the coming weeks.

And I will not take no for an answer in terms of a release of the game, as I have endured the search for suitable sounds for the game until early in the morning which was a pain for the soul.

Update: I was reminded that there was a giveaway at the end with two Gobe boxes and even a Pixel32 license among others. Very nice stuff.

There might be a lot more I could say about BeGeistert 005 but it is really something you have to witness to realise how wonderful it is. We will keep you updated on the next event and if you have any questions, just ask and I will try to answer in the Forum. See you at BeGeisters 006.

Article by Oliver Thylmann (BeNews) 2000
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