Interview de Mr X - QuickFox [MAJ]

Quickfox a fait son entrée le 15 septembre sur Bebits, et a déjà capter l'attention de beaucoup. Une petite interview du responsable de cette vague orangée ...


Pour le moment, la voici en anglais (et on ne rigole pas de mon anglais...), la traduction est en cours...

First, Hi ! To introduce yourself with our readers, could you tell us a little bit about you ?

Name: Classified information. City - Vancouver, Canada. Age: 16 years old.
Why BeOS - Well I started on BeOS, in late gr 9. I was on the Microsuck forums, and mmadia was subscribed there, I read one of his threads about BeOS so I tried it out. The next thing I knew, I was playing Quake 2 on BeOS and I really liked it ! I also liked that it was easy to use, and made sense (compared to linux) .

Since I was a microsuck member, I didnt want to use win98 anymore (although I could get it to boot in less than 6 seconds, with massive tweaks) . So BeOS was in - it was fast, reliable, and it was not from microsoft. And it ran well on my celeron 500. I eventually started my own BeOS quake2 clan (it is more for, 'special' purposes, than practical) at eq2.beworld.info.

Early last month I decided to end my hosting with bs0 on his subscribed beworld server (too much downtime) and now he holds a personal grudge against me. I don't really care. The new site is quickfox.illhostit.com/bq2/

Last year was a good time period for BeOS, and I was in close
relationship with Rudolf Cornelissen, (with about 50+ emails between us) beta testing the nVdia 3d driver, and bugs with Quake2, benchmarks, and tips etc that I know.
This year is even better, because we are getting heavy activity with Firefox developement, making it beta quality, instead of useless quality it used to be.


So you are the maintainer of QuickFox, available on Bebits since a month now. How did the idea comes out to you ?

The idea of QuickFox came to me, when I decided that since your hdd is slower than your ram, and firefox takes forever to load, why not try and put it on a ram disk? So my first release was called 'firefox ramdisk' and I had it on BeShare. Talkback was pretty good, and I was encouraged to put it on BeBits. At this time, I was trying to get my DEVID but it took a month to get the BeBits account bugs ironed out, since I didnt get my confirmation email. Then I tried bezip.de but I didnt get a reply email from the owner. So I emailed the BeBits admin and sked to fix it.

It took awhile, but eventually it got working. When the time came for the first version, I knew what I had achieved
really sucked and wasnt practical, so I made my self goals to achieve with each release - ease of use, speed, good looks, reliability. I achieved these as well as I could.

Then I made the scripts that did the magic for you in the background. All this time I never did any programming - I don't even know how to program, except in html.
Just clever ideas, practical applications, good old fashioned tweaking, customer service and hard work.


Since the Bezilla Team is actually pretty active (we have seen the SeaMonkey and firefox releases), why making you own release of Firefox instead of joining the bezilla team ?

The whole time they never had any competition, nothing to compare it to, no body to judge the standard of quality. My standards are pretty high, and I was tired that every time I would have talkback on firefox it was just ignored, along with many others. Nobody likes an app to be slow and combersome, especially when you use BeOS. I mean, the perfect example - Opera 8. This is the best browser in the world. Everything is perfect about it. And I use that as a base of standard, to make QuickFox as fast to load as opera, and as fast to load pages.

I also care about the details - not providing the proper icons for Firefox IMO is just being lazy, and un professional. I change that in QuickFox. Details are important to me, as well as good looks, speed, and ease of use. So if making QuickFox makes the bezilla team have something to look up
to - all the better ! One day we may just have a windows quality beta of Firefox to put into QuickFox :P


Is there any canadian BeBUG ? Do you think there is a lot of canadian BeOS users ?

Yes - many Canadian BeOS users, I do know some, dam0, (creator of the 64BeOS - http://manarti.zelect.org/), (now retired from BeOS, used to be on PhOS), CougarGTR and the BeOS eh BeBug from http://beoseh.neo-programmers.net/
but no, I havent ever spent any time here :/ .

I guess it is not as popular as say, in europe or something, but we've got maybe one or two BeOS users per town/city :)
But, it's nothing to celebrate about. I do like the european activity, as well.


Have you got ideas in mind for new apps ? Concept or needs under BeOS ?

Yes, actually, you can find my 'KISS Bittorrent' floating around on BeShare, my Quake2 package up to version 4 (new this month) available from me, on BeShare. KISS Bittorrent I am working on a release quality version right now (I am taking my time though) that installs all the libs and requirements you need in one .pkg instead of somebody hunting down all the extra requirements and then manually installing them :/ .


Seems you are a hard BeOS user. Are you actually using Zeta or even tested it ?

I would use it, if I had those 800MB overburn CD-Rs (shhh I downloaded it, but after I extracted it was 783MB bin file) so I won't be using it anytime soon. It also would take me a long time to save up for 100$ US, but when I get some employment or Christmas money I will buy it eventually.

I have tried PhOS and I only like beta5, and it is sad what happend to Looncraz quitting BeOS :( . Now, he has came back, and is working on PhOS 6.5, and he is frequenting BeShare more often.


Anything else you would like to tell us about ?

Yes, about QuickFox, I am thinking of a new concept for unzipping the files, instead I would move the zip file onto the ramdisk and then extract it, instead of extracting it from the disk. I currently have this 'new format' setup on my machine, I am testing it but I will need to consult expert advise ramshankar maybe) on what the best way of doing it (for speed, of course).

After testing this design, it turned out like unzipping QF from the harddisk was faster. I have also tried making the RamDisk limit only 40MB, even though it has plenty enough space it is too small, incase the user wants to try a new Firefox version and load it from the ramdisk as well (usually it is around 27 MB).

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