Thanks for posting this awesome video, Steve! I just watched it on my Aros laptop (running Icaros 1.2.4) with the handy YouTube Monitor that's included.
I'm so glad one of my favourite and often-used features of classic AmigaOS is part of Aros now
I tell you, it is actually annoying to grab the screen title bar and try dragging it, only for it to be locked in place. On my A1200 I use screen dragging to quickly check on the progress of a program or game that might be running behind Workbench while I still keep an eye on a chat window, or vice-versa, playing a game on a screen in front, but dragged down enough to show a chat window behind. After using Amiga OS as my main operating system for so long, these things come naturally to me (like multi-select menus and right-click cancel on dragging) so I'm very happy I'll be able to do this in Aros soon too!
Franko! Your Mac is a PC, but that just means it can run Aros! Aros is made by Amigans, for Amigans! If we want a feature added to it, we add it ourselves. We build and work together and welcome anyone who wants to help. This isn't a closed source OS like AmigaOS 4 or MorphOS, so the people decide its future, not one or two people. Aros was written from scratch to be as close as possible to OS3, but adding fixes and improvements along the way to make it much more modern. It's source-compatible with OS3, so if you have written a program on your Amiga you should be able to recompile it for Aros (well except for 68k Assembly stuff, but that'll run through the built-in JUAE emulation). In the last year or so, development on Aros has accelerated beyond our expectations, it's already fully usable for any software you'd use your classic Amiga for since it can run all the OS3 software as well as its own software. We have a modern web browser which has no problems displaying all those sites with CSS. We have a YouTube Monitor which you can watch YouTube videos through, and MPlayer which is an excellent movie and music player, it has lovely subtitle support which is great for me, and it's so fast flicking between windowed and full-screen mode. There's a lot more software being written for and ported to Aros, and the core of the OS itself is being improved all the time.
Aros is free for everyone to use! It runs on just about any regular PC, laptop or netbook. It runs on the Sam440 so people with those can dual-boot into AmigaOS 4.1.2 and Aros. It's being ported back to 68k Amigas, which wasn't possible before because no one had begun working on the Kickstart replacement yet, but that will be ready soon enough too! We'll be able to flash our own Aros Kickstart EPROMs (or use the built-in 1MB FlashROM in the upcoming ACA030 accelerators from Individual Computers) and run Aros natively on our classic hardware. Since Aros is further evolved than OS3, but should still run OS3 software seamlessly, this will be an incredible upgrade.
At the moment there are three ways to enjoy Aros, either in its pure form without any additional software from the nightly builds, or by using one of the two well-maintained distributions; Icaros Desktop and Broadway. Icaros includes heaps of programs, games and utilities already installed, ready to use as your new desktop OS. Broadway also includes programs and games, but is more media-oriented, and uses the cool new media front end AMC, which is a menu for browsing videos, music, games and more. It would be perfect for a media PC hooked up to an entertainment system, run by remote or wireless control pad.
You can download either of these distributions of Aros as a CD or DVD image which you just burn, stick in a PC and boot up. It can be run from within OSX, Linux or Windows, but it also runs natively, so you just reboot the PC and it should boot from the disc.
I personally can't afford a second hand G4 Mac or a new Sam or X1000, so I can't really try out the other Amiga Operating Systems as much as I want to try them all. But thanks to Aros, I still have the opportunity to run a modern Amiga OS through an old Acer laptop that was given to me, and an OEM netbook which was a Christmas present last year.
All it takes is a few clicks and a blank disc to try it out, and wouldn't you feel more at home using an Amiga OS with full access to the system and the sources than an overly simplified OS designed for consumers?
