Tracker (BeOS)
More info
- Creator
- Be Inc.
- Type
- File manager and desktop
- License
- BSD-style (OpenTracker, 2001)
The BeOS file manager and desktop of the 1990s, built in Finder's spatial tradition but with database queries as folders, and the first piece of BeOS to become free software.
Tracker was what BeOS showed after boot: a desktop, disk icons and folder windows in which every folder remembered its position, the model from the Macintosh Finder that several people at Be Inc. had brought with them from Apple. Together with Deskbar, the menu and window list in one corner, it was the entire desktop environment; there was no separate window manager, since the frames were drawn by the system's app_server. What Finder lacked was the file system. BFS indexed attributes, so Tracker could show a query, every mail from a given sender or every MP3 longer than five minutes, as a folder that filled up as new files appeared. The columns in list view were the attributes themselves, and the mail client was essentially a Tracker view with a form attached.
As Be was going under in 2001, Tracker and Deskbar were released as OpenTracker under a BSD-style licence, the only part of the system that made it out. Haiku built its desktop on exactly that code, so anyone booting Haiku today meets, in all essentials, Tracker's windows of 1998, yellow title tabs included.