Tave Imagination

Tave Imagination was an image manipulation program for BeOS — essentially “Photoshop for BeOS.”

I co-founded Tave Software with Adrian Ziemkowski and worked as a developer on the application. Adrian lived in Cottonwood, the next town over, and showed me BeOS on his old Mac before we got it running on my box. By his account the team set out in 1997 to build a full-featured graphics and photo editor, and he remembers me as a freshman in high school when we started. My title was “Coder Love God,” which I also put on my BeNews staff page. We were building professional graphics software for an operating system we believed in.

The team

Adrian’s write-up of the project names the core team:

Adrian Ziemkowski, project manager and lead designer
me, founding engineer, building the custom classes we needed because BeOS was missing them
Matt Lewinski, color systems and algorithms, whose work fed into the Document Kit Adrian built near the end
Zeid Derhally, QA and engineering, author of the BeOS FTP app NetPenguin, who also ran our build environment
Shafer Stockton, founding member and sysadmin
John “Soco” Robinson, core engineer
Eric Lanehart, who designed the Tave logo
John Huerta, founding member, who with Shafer designed the distributed, modular “Mozart” suite

John Merolo, Ian Loudon, Tim Olson and Kelsey Womack were part of the Tave crew too.

The product

Imagination was a native BeOS image editor designed to take advantage of the platform’s legendary multithreading and media capabilities. Per Adrian, it had nestable layer folders and separate raster and vector layer types before Photoshop did. Several windows on the same document all updated live as you drew. Images were split into tiles so huge files didn’t choke on RAM, since BeOS had no mmap. We wrote a lot of basics ourselves, down to combo boxes and twisties. Adrian also credits my “icon on folder” designs and icon builder. The long-term plan was a suite of apps where people in different places could edit the same video, audio and images live. That idea was about twenty years early.

Mockup of an Imagination document window on BeOS: a yellow Be tab titled Untitled, a File, Edit, Image, Layer, Filters, Selection and Help menu bar, rulers and a blank white canvas Imagination document window mockup by the Táve Software team.

Mockup of the Imagination toolbar: two columns of tool icons for selection, lasso, brush, pencil, fill, eraser, text, lines, hand, zoom and eyedropper, above blue and red color swatches Mockup of the Brushes panel with a grid of brush slots and labeled New, Delete, Load and Save As buttons Toolbar and Brushes panel mockups by the Táve Software team.

Diagram titled Application Model: a Main App loads a Main GUI and Plug-ins as add-ons, which talk over BMessages to a monolithic Graphic Engine that takes engine add-ons and third-party modules The Imagination application model, by Adrian Ziemkowski for Táve.

By April 1999 tave.com announced that Táve Software Group was incorporating as Táve Software Corp., getting a new logo and heading into a beta of Imagination.

The Táve logo in blue script over black, above a note saying the Táve software group is working on a painting program for BeOS, with a DR this summer and a public beta in the fall An early holding page by the Táve Software team, promising a developer release that summer.

What happened

BeOS didn’t make it. Adrian writes that the app “finally started coming together” in late 1999. Tave Software disbanded in 2000, when Be, Inc. shifted its focus to the BeIA internet appliance platform. Be sold its assets to Palm in 2001. Imagination never shipped publicly.

Adrian kept the Táve name. He and Jason Pirkey started Táve the photography studio-management company in 2006, which ShootProof bought in 2019. He bought it back in November 2022, and in 2025 VSCO acquired its Studio Manager and relaunched it as VSCO Workspace.

Tave Imagination

The team

The product

What happened

See also

Links