Suggestion: can we get these Commodore BOOPSI classes to become part of the official OS distribution?
Yes, more BOOPSI please. Greatly preferred over ReAction.
On that same line, Commodore also had
two packages of v42 datatypes that never made it into the OS. Granted, they're for formats now largely obsolete, but it would be nice to fold them back into the official source tree.
I'm looking at the
uncompleted features originally planned for 3.1 and wondering how many have not already been addressed in 3.1.4 that would still make sense to complete. There's label.image and a new cycle.gadget on the BOOPSI front that never made it out of Commodore HQ. The 1993 DevCon notes also detail planned directions for the UI, of which those BOOPSI classes were the beginning. Would it make sense to continue down that path?
Most of todays users need:
Networking to exchange files with the internet and their PCs. (a big project)
Possibly not as big as you think. I've been an advocate of Commodore's Envoy for years, which is an extremely lightweight and extremely Amiga-like way to do LAN filesharing. If the devs could acquire Envoy and extend it with a hypothetical smb.service, that would allow filesharing from PCs much more easily than the current challenge of setting up an obsolete/incompatible Samba server.
Built in lha and zip support to handle file archives once transfered.
3.5+ did this with Unarc and XAD, but I'm wondering if there's a more lightweight way to do this without reinventing the wheel.
Easy GUI methods to launch favorite applications/games/demos.
Other than the prefs editor for the WB Tools menu I mentioned in a previous post, I'm not sure this is necessary as an OS-level feature.
Even as we're daydreaming about features, it's important to remember the scope: this is an OS for relatively low-spec machines. What absolutely needs to be part of the OS, what might be relegated to some sort of official add-on, and what should just be a regular tool distributed via other means like Aminet? I trust Thomas and co. have that all in mind.