Wallace Software |

Dove OS

    Dove OS is planned to be a real operating environment with a Linux kernel. Right now it runs on Windows (would run on Linux if I had the compiler,) but soon it will run on nothing but a Linux core. The GUI is revolutionary in it's look, semi based on the glass look of early OSX and MS Vista, but it goes way beyond that. All the graphics are extremely high resolution and fast. The design of the GUI is supposed to give you immediate viewing ability of everything by making everything made of glass, but also to focus your attention at the task at hand by making the objects in the main window completely solid.

    The OS part of Dove has no scripting language and doesn't load and parse programs at all, it simply sends them through the processor. Most (All) Qbasic and FreeBasic GUIs have to parse a scripting language or have a virtual machine which makes the programs run at best ten times slower than they could. Dove doesn't do that, it runs through the processor at full speed with native machine language.

    All of the programs that will be written for Dove OS by me will be written in FreeBasic. All of the programs require a Dove header file to be loaded with it, but there is a header file called Test Dove header (you can see it in the Windows screenshot,) that allows the programs to run under Windows as well. That is the exact same program running under both platforms. Almost all of FreeBasic's commands can be used in making a Dove program, including the graphics ones. You can see an example of the source code in the Windows picture.

    Dove multi-tasks at machine level, you can see it running 2 programs plus the OS in the screenshot. And oh yeah, any of the programs can be multi-threaded for even better performance.

Dove OS Screenshots

This is the Dove envirnment

Proof that Dove's programs can be written and run in Windows

Dove's "Comets" screen saver, it runs faster than you could imagine.

Dove's "Whimsy" screen saver. Modified 'linecube' from Relsoft.

In 1984 Apple released the same image on the first Macintosh (and this is just a demo program.)

My GUI history

Maybe you have heard of one of these.

GIOS - Graphics Interfaced Operating System. It was a very simple program, it wasn't even a real GUI. I wrote it when I first started learning Qbasic. It had a bunch of versions, each got a little better each time.

Gemini - Gemini was my first GUI. It had a pretty good windowing engine. It had a variable space font routine. Screen 12 gave me a nice 16 colour interface with buttons, checkboxes, etc...

Gemini 2 - This was an upgraded version of Gemini. It had animated buttons, tooltips, and, if I remember correctly was the first with my pop-up menu system. This had the first scripting language I wrote, not very functional, but it had a few graphical functions, Gemini was really more of a demo series. I am pretty sure that it multitasked, but not very well.

Cardinal - It was similar to the scripting language of a graphing calculator. It was very simple. It ran in Screen 12, but was very animated, this meant that the graphics was flickery. The windows moved as an entirety, not just the outline. The resized the same way. It was the first with the retro look. I used 30 shade greyscale. It multitasked and had a pretty decent programming language. It was object oriented.

Cardinal II - I used Screen 9 for this, this gave me a background page, so the windowing engine didn't flicker at all. It still had a pretty crappy scripting language, but it was better than the first. I also introduced the 90 shade blitting system. I cracked the LINE scancode so I was able to make some better graphics. I had animated cursors in this one too. I went back to monospaced fonts for this, it made it easier to deal with. This was not object oriented, the scripting language dealt with the objects.

Cardinal III -This was another Screen 9 abortion. The windowg engine was ported from Cardinal II,but the scritping language was far more advanced. The language scripted as fairly simple and low level, but with the use of a compiler I could write programs in a language very similar to Qbasic. The last version had bugs all over the place and was just too buggy to fix.

Cardinal 32 - I wrote this GUI just to get familiar with FreeBasic, I never really planned to release it or finish it.

Downloads

Cardinal III demo - The last release of Cardinal III

Dove Pre-alpha demo - The first preview of Dove (buggy)

Programming for Dove - A small text tutorial on how to make your Freebasic programs into Dove programs in minutes.