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Operating System Specific Discussions => Amiga OS => Topic started by: NinjaCyborg on March 10, 2021, 08:15:13 PM

Title: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: NinjaCyborg on March 10, 2021, 08:15:13 PM
Like the title says, what are your Amiga annoyances that you wish would be fixed after all this time?

Mine are:

Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Matt_H on March 11, 2021, 03:10:26 AM
Good idea for a thread! I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I'm sure some will come to me as the discussion progresses.

I agree with your points so far. One note, though:
Quote
Workbench doesn't let you tell it to always show icons for any folder that has no icons in it by default
There are some partial workarounds for this. You can snapshot a window after selecting Show All Files. Then if you copy that drawer's icon to ENVARC:sys/def_drawer.info your new drawers will be set to Show All Files by default. I think you need DefIcons for this to work, not sure about a stock 2.x/3.1 system.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: NinjaCyborg on March 11, 2021, 08:52:33 AM
That's a good one, and even after all these years still tips to be learned. IIRC the def_drawer def_tool def_project def_trashcan icons only pre-DefIcons feature was that they'd be used as templates when new objects were created in iconedit but not by Workbench when it's trying to fill in iconless files.

Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: cgutjahr on March 11, 2021, 01:57:23 PM
Workbench as a whole is one big annoyance, IMHO. Slow, cumbersome and minimalistic - and the concept of every file having its own icon and storing default tools, positions or whole drawer layouts and settings in there introduces a ton of problems in daily use.

The other thing that always annoyed me was the lack of consistency in the UI interfaces: Some twenty years ago, I counted how many different keyboard shortcuts for answeing a simple yes/no? requester I had to remember. I came up with nine or ten different methods of answering such a requester(Amiga-V/B,Enter/Escape, TAB+Enter, "y"/"ny"...) - most working just for one or two applications, none of them working for all requesters.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: NinjaCyborg on March 11, 2021, 02:10:49 PM
IMHO the right way to think of Workbench's DiskObjects i.e. .info files is they are equivalent to the Mac resource forks, where extended metadata about a file is stored. Yes they store icons, they also store arbitrary 'extended attributes' i.e. tooltypes.

The difference is on a Mac, the filesystem hides that abstraction for you and treats the resource fork and the data fork (i.e. the actual file) as one atom. This can be seen not only on CrossMac when reading ancient HFS disks, and today when using a FAT disk on a Mac, where the resource fork is what becomes the annoying ._ files.

But yes it would be nice if more things other than workbench were aware of their existence. Or that perhaps the filesystem could take some responsibility for ensuring they move or are deleted with their 'data forks'.

As for shortcuts and UI, it would have been nice if more apps had followed the AUISG suggestions, unfortunately it was pretty hard to get hold of a copy back in the day I recall, although I have one on my shelf. It is/was totally up to developers to choose their shortcuts so it's on each of them. Perhaps if ClassAct/Reaction had seen greater adoption or Commodore had released their own proper set of GUI controls or even just some complete examples of full features 'document' centric applications we might have all then used as a template. The best example I ever saw was Deluxe Music 2, absolutely it set the standard for how to build a font sensitive, style guide compliant, user friendly, and accessible (due to consistent use of shortcuts) document centric application. Heck, even today I can't think of another app that has a global, floating set of toolbars that crucially, can never itself be selected as the active window - something crucial for free floating 'speedbars'.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: cgutjahr on March 11, 2021, 03:20:43 PM
But yes it would be nice if more things other than workbench were aware of their existence. Or that perhaps the filesystem could take some responsibility for ensuring they move or are deleted with their 'data forks'.
One could debate if icons for executables make more or less sense than a resource fork or Linux's '.desktop' files or just storing the information in the executable file's header. But drawers, project files or media featuring their own custom icons just introduces a ton of problems:
Yeah, you could create workarounds for most of these problems. But it would be way easier to just ignore any icon not associated with an executable file, and ignore position data for executable icons. And then let the system handle all that icon business automatically.

Quote
As for shortcuts and UI, it would have been nice if more apps had followed the AUISG suggestions
Agreed, but I think the bigger problem was that people never used the official toolkit(s) because...

...in the eighties there wasn't any (to speak of)
...in the early nineties, most of your users were still on 1.x (and you didn't fancy rewriting your entire GUI)
...in the mid/late nineties, Gadtools was already outdated so everybody was coming up with extensions again
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Matt_H on March 11, 2021, 03:21:24 PM
Workbench as a whole is one big annoyance, IMHO. Slow, cumbersome and minimalistic - and the concept of every file having its own icon and storing default tools, positions or whole drawer layouts and settings in there introduces a ton of problems in daily use.
Ah, for me the minimalism is part of the charm of Workbench. I like the total control separate icon files offer. My workflow has always been Workbench for front-end UI, DOpus4 for back-end file operations. But I agree that sometimes some automation would be helpful. Ambient has made moves in this direction, hasn’t it? You can toggle between auto arrangement and icon-defined arrangement in the global prefs. But it would be cool if you could set it at a per-drawer level. i.e., default to one and override to the other either via a drawer tooltype or by, say, holding LeftAmiga while opening a drawer. (Maybe Ambient already does this?)

Quote
The other thing that always annoyed me was the lack of consistency in the UI interfaces: Some twenty years ago, I counted how many different keyboard shortcuts for answeing a simple yes/no? requester I had to remember. I came up with nine or ten different methods of answering such a requester(Amiga-V/B,Enter/Escape, TAB+Enter, "y"/"ny"...) - most working just for one or two applications, none of them working for all requesters.
This is a good one. I thought LeftAmiga V/B was universally recognized by Intuition? I guess not. What could Commodore have done here to enforce standards? I.e., what was baked into 1990s MacOS/Windows APIs so that they didn’t have this problem?
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: NinjaCyborg on March 11, 2021, 03:42:58 PM
Left amiga shortcuts are universal but there aren't many of them (two in fact). Right amiga shortcuts are application specific.

The comments about Workbench are good, it would be nice if you could set Workbench to (a) ignore default tool on Project icons and read it from the deficon instead, either always, or when the default tool does not exist and (b) set it to ignore the icon image of the project icon and always load the icon from the matching deficon. Only the tooltypes would be preserved which would be ignored when not relevant.

Likewise for drawer icons it would also be nice if you could put Workbench in some kind of 'smart' mode where it picked drawer size and did an auto cleanup of any/all drawers and certainly all drawers with no icons at all by default.

I'd also like it if the RX show ports command only showed ARexx aware ports, not all named ports.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: cgutjahr on March 11, 2021, 04:52:18 PM
My workflow has always been Workbench for front-end UI, DOpus4 for back-end file operations.
Sure, so was mine - and probably every other Amiga user's. But "frontend UI" basically means using WB as a program launcher - and for that little functionality, you had to spend way too much time finetuning it IMHO.

I'm not bashing WB btw. - back in the early nineties, all the desktops had tons of annoying quirks. It's just that WB never evolved, and we've been using it way past it's original expiry date.

I thought LeftAmiga V/B was universally recognized by Intuition?
No, it's an ASL thing, not intuition (IIRC - it's been a while). Meaning that any application not using ASL would usually not respect these shortcuts.

Quote
I guess not. What could Commodore have done here to enforce standards?
The original Kickstart didn't have any UI toolkit worth mentioning, due to lack of time and ressources, and probably Mical's lack of experience and research on the subject. Once you sold millions of machines with that version of the OS, you have a problem. Commodore would have had to come out with a UI toolkit addon ASAP. One that worked under 1.x and was free to install (or distribute with commercial applications). But that's probably asking too much, given Commodore's problems at the time, and the total lack of any UI experience - let alone research on the subject.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Matt_H on March 11, 2021, 04:58:02 PM
The comments about Workbench are good, it would be nice if you could set Workbench to (a) ignore default tool on Project icons and read it from the deficon instead, either always, or when the default tool does not exist and (b) set it to ignore the icon image of the project icon and always load the icon from the matching deficon. Only the tooltypes would be preserved which would be ignored when not relevant.
I wonder if (a) could be implemented currently with a commodity. i.e., if a certain hotkey is detected in the input stream (say, Left Amiga) when double-clicking a project it'll re-parse the startup command using the DefIcon.
(b) sounds like it would be harder to implement. As a first step, it would be helpful if the Info window for projects showed both the current icon and the DefIcon and if you could drag them onto each other. i.e., replace the current icon with the DefIcon or replace/update the DefIcon with the current icon, all from a single window.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Matt_H on March 11, 2021, 05:12:01 PM
Sure, so was mine - and probably every other Amiga user's. But "frontend UI" basically means using WB as a program launcher - and for that little functionality, you had to spend way too much time finetuning it IMHO.

I'm not bashing WB btw. - back in the early nineties, all the desktops had tons of annoying quirks. It's just that WB never evolved, and we've been using it way past it's original expiry date.
Heh. Maybe I'm like Workbench and never evolved, either. :) I never did much customization or tuning beyond the standard prefs editors and I've gotten so used to the quirks that I hardly remember them.

Quote
The original Kickstart didn't have any UI toolkit worth mentioning, due to lack of time and ressources, and probably Mical's lack of experience and research on the subject. Once you sold millions of machines with that version of the OS, you have a problem. Commodore would have had to come out with a UI toolkit addon ASAP. One that worked under 1.x and was free to install (or distribute with commercial applications). But that's probably asking too much, given Commodore's problems at the time, and the total lack of any UI experience - let alone research on the subject.
That certainly explains the lack of standardization in the 1.x era. But then we had ASL/GadTools with OS2.0. In other words, why didn't that "fix" the problem from then on? Was it too late by that point to get compliance from developers?
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: NinjaCyborg on March 11, 2021, 05:21:57 PM
@Matt_H

There's a few reasons:
- A lot of the installed user base and a lot of the application developers themselves were US based but stuck on OS 1.3, whether EA or Newtek - and remember if you changed the UI on a pro tool like DPaint or LightWave your pro users would have to re-learn everything. Sometimes simple is best. Anecdotally version 2.0 and up was more likely to be found in UK and europe not least because the 500+ sold so well
- Gadtools was by no means a full featured 'widgets' toolkit, it's pretty bare bones in terms of what it offers, and you have to do things like dynamic font size support and dynamic layout yourself which is a chore. Although apparently there was a gadtools for 1.3 available to developers? Deluxe Music 2 might even have used it for backwards compatibility, I recall reading in a Medium post by Talin, the developer of it
- Whilst there were some options that helped fill that gap such as Olsen's gtlayout library, really only MUI and ClassAct/Reaction came close to providing what you'd get from say, MFC on Windows, and when I say close, I mean still a million miles away. MUI ran like a dog with no legs on unexpanded machines but without it we'd never have got half the software we got back then, whilst ClassAct came really late in the day, like 1997 I think it was first released by which time most developers had moved on (but there was for a while some really promising software that never shipped full versions, like Voodoo, and a news reader, and a web browser that CAldi and co promised)
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: TribbleSmasher on March 11, 2021, 05:25:22 PM
With Kickstart 2 the StyleGuide was introduced, similar to the Macintosh.
Unfortunately, it wasn't mandatory so every developer keep doing horrible things. There wasn't even a default menu struct or clipboard interface one had to use, everything was by choice so they did...
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: NinjaCyborg on March 11, 2021, 05:30:57 PM
You've reminded me another 'annoyance' - that the clipboard could support 256 clips, but everyone just used unit 0. What would have made most sense I think is for each IFF type to be given a device number so you could always clips one of each type. Sure, at the time they might have thought that's no good, there could be more than 256 data types. In practice though you'll never have more than plain text, rich text, bitmap, vector image, 3d object, audio sample and a handful of others. Heck, check the official IFF registry there are only 37 types of which half are metadata or bitmap types.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: cgutjahr on March 11, 2021, 05:40:16 PM
Quote
That certainly explains the lack of standardization in the 1.x era. But then we had ASL/GadTools with OS2.0. In other words, why didn't that "fix" the problem from then on? Was it too late by that point to get compliance from developers?
Commodore Germany sold about 1.3 million Amigas running Kickstart 1.x (A1000, A500, most A2000s, CDTV) and some 0.2 million Amigas running 2.x (A500+, 600, later A2000s). Obviously, any sane software developer would target Kickstart 1.x.

The situation would only change later, when the A1200 showed up and most A500 users would abandon the platform for the PC.

Gadtools was by no means a full featured 'widgets' toolkit, it's pretty bare bones in terms of what it offers, and you have to do things like dynamic font size support and dynamic layout yourself which is a chore.
Sure, but we're talking 1990 here, I doubt the competition was doing any better back then?
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Matt_H on March 11, 2021, 06:47:00 PM
Commodore Germany sold about 1.3 million Amigas running Kickstart 1.x (A1000, A500, most A2000s, CDTV) and some 0.2 million Amigas running 2.x (A500+, 600, later A2000s). Obviously, any sane software developer would target Kickstart 1.x.

The situation would only change later, when the A1200 showed up and most A500 users would abandon the platform for the PC.

Okay, and then by the time most software was being written for 2.0+ in ~1994 we had the other GUI toolkits starting to proliferate, each with their own UI conventions. And that's why the lack of standards has persisted. It makes sense to me now. :) Do I have it right?
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: kolla on March 11, 2021, 06:47:54 PM
What really sucks is when you make drawer on the root of a disk, and just happen to name it “Disk”, confusion ensues... lol

Also sucks that despite having “redraw all”, “update all” and “reset wb” as menu options, NONE of them actually resets the icons to their saved positions on Workbench desktop itself (update all only does it on open volume and drawer windows).
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: TribbleSmasher on March 13, 2021, 12:31:37 PM
I really would like to see the whole ixemul idea properly solved, or, well, discarded for good.
Whatever it seems to provide should be incorporated in one way or another into the AmigaOS environment. keeping an API emulation alive for so many years is bonkers, period.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: NinjaCyborg on March 13, 2021, 12:44:42 PM
Ixemul provides a POSIX type environment to help with porting of complex Unix applications that need more than just a basic standard C library. On OS4 this was replaced with newlib which does much the same thing but it is much more up to date and a bit more 'Amiga-like' in it's implementation.

On OS3, there is both the 'libnix' option, which is a static library that does much of what ixemul does, except the latter does it as a shared library so in theory you only need one instance of it in memory, whereas if you use libnix you'll carry some of that weight with you in your own binary (though the linker only adds what you actually use). In practice, memory is cheap now and I'd like to think anyone using Amiga for anything serious, including serious hobby, has at least 6MB RAM if not a lot more. There's also clib2 which is a much expanded standard C library (much more than the old c.lib you got with SAS/C for example) that also goes a long way towards giving you POSIX compatibility.

On OS4 there's the also the most extreme option, AmiCygnix which, like it's inspiration Cygwin, attempts to give you the baseline part of a complete Linux distribution.

VBCC also has a POSIX link library which again covers a lot more than just the baseline C library. Indeed, I'm looking at using that to complete an up to date Python port. But I'm hoping for a decent SDK release for OS3.2.

In short, you can port a lot of non-GUI Unix/Linux software to Amiga these days relatively easily, but of course you'll find a lot of the recent stuff needs far more RAM and processing power than a classic Amiga can provide. And you need a more recent build of GCC too. Finally as always, the lack of Unix fork() creates issues.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: TribbleSmasher on March 13, 2021, 01:24:28 PM
So what are the most used posix/ixemul calls that needed to be implemented?
1. fork()
...

Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: NinjaCyborg on March 13, 2021, 01:32:52 PM
It's more than just the C library, full POSIX compliance dictates shell (command line) behaviour, security model, filesystem conventions, and a baseline set of command line tools. The shell conventions and filesystem can be mostly emulated. The security model can be ignored if you don't care about security. But it's not a small amount of work. But as I said, most of that work has been done, at least for OS4, and you can get by on OS3, I just wish there was a standard SDK baseline we were all using, as collaborating is a pain when everyone has slightly different setups for their toolchain.

fork() is not simple to emulate either if you don't have a Unix-like kernel, and compatible hardware, to begin with. Even Cygwin has to jump through hoops to implement fork(). fork is the tool of lazy developers though too. Dependency on fork is why Apache Web Server is inferior to Nginx for example.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: TribbleSmasher on March 13, 2021, 02:21:09 PM
Is it advised still to persue posix compatibility with AmigaOS just for the sake of faster ports of some nonGUI tools? This ixemul was obviously meant to be a temporarily solution, but seems to stick and i don't like it, it is a sinkhole.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: NinjaCyborg on March 13, 2021, 03:18:09 PM
Back in the early 90s, Amiga was the only mainstream platform with half decent POSIX compatibility that wasn't itself a Unix. This was of course pre- NextSTEP, pre-Windows NT kernel with unix services, pre-BeOS and pre Linux being anything more than a student project.

I attribute this to two things: the Amiga OS developers taking some inspiration from Unix (and the notorious Unix haters handbook I reckon), and more especially, the geekgadgets work. I'm not sure who even did that work, ixemul and friends seem to have just appeared out of thin air. I'm sure someone else will post with more information about that. I, like you, always found GeekGadgets to be a bit too 'un Amiga' like but the fact is it was necessary for some of the more advanced software we got especially in the absence of a more full featured standard C library.

I believe MorphOS has made it a core part of the platform, rather than going down the OS4 path of integrating newlib, which has turned out I think to be the better solution.

[Edit] - well I did some research and apparently Fred Fish was behind it, and in his day job he also worked on the early GDB which explains his familiarity with the GNU suite of software that it was built on, and he worked at Cygnus i.e. he was part of the Cygwin team. Remember, GNU on its own is the layer of common tools that sits on top of the Linux kernel, to make a mostly POSIX compatible complete Linux operating system. RIP Fred. And look at that photo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fish - Matt Dillon (DICE C compiler and lots of other stuff), Oliver Wagner (Voyager and all those other MUI internet tools).
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Matt_H on March 13, 2021, 05:02:59 PM
Given that ixemul on 68K has fragmented into so many non-compatible implementations now, I think static/compiler-side linking is the way to go for the future. As said above, memory is cheap now.

And I’ve said this ever since they were introduced, but I think OS4 has its own problems with the SObjs: implementation. With softlinks/hardlinks and different versions of a given SObj mutually incompatible with each other (and none of them have $VER strings), it’s creating dependency hell on AmigaOS. As a user, it feels like it provides zero benefits but lots of headaches. Yes, there’s a convenience factor for developers for porting from *nix, but I’d rather this was handled statically as an improvement to the SDK.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: NinjaCyborg on March 13, 2021, 05:23:13 PM
Yeah SObjs is bad enough on Linux where it somehow originated as a way to share small amounts of resident code by forcing the MMU to do loads of unnecessary extra work. So much for Torvalds obsession with efficiency. In practice as you say it leads to DLL hell, worse even than on windows where everybody long ago gave up and just keeps their DLLs in their own directory. Releasing things as SObjs in theory incentivises developers to do interface management. In practice they don't. The only advantage it brings to OS4 is making it slightly easier to port code that's structured that way. But if you're going to use it you best put the versions you need in your own application specific PROGDIR:SObjs drawer.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: nyteschayde on March 13, 2021, 07:04:46 PM
Fonts!

The severe lack of fonts. All the tools to get truetype fonts to work are all kludges. The closest to best is using AFAOS, which doesn't always work, but when it does, it adds support for anti-aliasing which makes a huge difference with larger screen resolutions and RTG.

My dream is that 3.2 would support truetype fonts out the door.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Gulliver on March 13, 2021, 08:11:29 PM
Fonts!

The severe lack of fonts. All the tools to get truetype fonts to work are all kludges. The closest to best is using AFAOS, which doesn't always work, but when it does, it adds support for anti-aliasing which makes a huge difference with larger screen resolutions and RTG.

My dream is that 3.2 would support truetype fonts out the door.

Unfortunately, truetype was not planned for 3.2.

However, I reiterate the invitaion to join us, and maybe then you can help us accomplish that for AmigaOS 3.3.

Think about it.  ;)
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Matt_H on March 13, 2021, 09:55:49 PM
But if you're going to use it you best put the versions you need in your own application specific PROGDIR:SObjs drawer.

While I hope that the OS4 roadmap calls for phasing out SObjs entirely at some point, this is a great interim/medium-term solution. I admire the OS4 devs' desire to make *nix code more portable, but I think that effort would be better spent on build systems and development libraries rather than new runtime paradigms for users.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: NinjaCyborg on March 13, 2021, 10:05:04 PM
Fonts! Oh a huge annoyance for the longest time was the difficulty of making font aware user interfaces. Thanks be for Reaction and those who did the work in 3.9 and now 3.2 to reimplement everything using it. That's one annoyance that can be crossed off the list.

But I know what @nyteschayde means. Steve Jobs was famously as picky about fonts and font rendering as he was about rounded corners and that's one area where classic MacOS undeniably beat us back in the day. Both the default choice of fonts and the font engine leave a lot to be desired. Praise be also for the freetype2 port.

I'd also settle for a redesign of topaz 8 that is easier on the eye but which has all the same glyph dimensions.

Even OS4 comes with some pretty iffy fonts from the limited pool of fonts that were totally free in 2005. Let's hope the next version leverages some of the nice free for all uses fonts Google has been spitting out in recent years.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Matt_H on March 14, 2021, 01:10:05 AM
OS4 has made some progress on fonts by unifying all (most?) outline font types under a single TypeManager/Intellifont/Fountain-like program. On OS3 we still need separate font install utils for TTF, PostScript, Intellifont, etc. So step 1 would be bringing a similar unified utility to OS3.

Step 2 would be  better font family detection across the board. I'd like to see ASL font requesters display, e.g., just Arial and not all of Arial, Arial Bold, Arial Italic, Arial Bold Italic, etc. The subtype should be selectable from another gadget in the requester. And if I have a font and I set it to be italic I want the system to automatically use the italic variety of that font, not apply some algorithmic distortion to it.

Step 3 would be the ability to drop some .ttf or .otf files into Fonts: and have them just work - without having to "install" them.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: NinjaCyborg on May 16, 2021, 06:44:04 PM
With OS3.2 about to ship, thoughts can turn to OS3.3! What ideas would you like to see addressed in 3.3? (this is not an official question! I'm not part of the team working on it)
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: TribbleSmasher on May 16, 2021, 07:20:21 PM
That would require experiencing the newly added features in 3.2. Who knows, maybe everything we ever need is already included?

like i wouldn't mind booting a CF from the PCMCIA slot, with boot priorities properly respected.

With OS3.2 about to ship, thoughts can turn to OS3.3! What ideas would you like to see addressed in 3.3? (this is not an official question! I'm not part of the team working on it)
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Matt_H on May 16, 2021, 07:30:36 PM
With OS3.2 about to ship, thoughts can turn to OS3.3! What ideas would you like to see addressed in 3.3? (this is not an official question! I'm not part of the team working on it)

From reading the 3.2 FAQ, it looks like there's quite a bit of functionality controlled by Env vars. I'd like to see that moved into Prefs programs instead - seems more polished that way.

Similarly, ASyncWB and RAWBInfo are back. I'd rather see those features integrated into Workbench and controllable via Prefs. Keeping them as separate programs makes them feel kind of hacky, like they were in 3.5.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: NinjaCyborg on May 16, 2021, 07:57:10 PM
I assume those are still separate to stop them using up memory on lower memory systems and/or so that workbench library isn't bloated in size.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: nbache on May 16, 2021, 08:07:16 PM
And for comparison, they are still separate in OS 4.x, even though lots of other stuff has been done to Workbench.

So probably for a good reason ...

Best regards,

Niels
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: lionstorm on May 16, 2021, 09:59:50 PM
I bought 2x AOS3.1.4  floppies + ROM for my A1200s, installed only on my A1200/B1260 and still annoyed by :

- no unarchiving tool (Unarc rulezzz)
- no autopupdate of drawer/RAM after copying something in it
- no autoresize of drawers
- no filemanager like view (Filer rulezzz)

Anyway it is great to see some update released, sadly I should have waited for AOS3.2 which seems to be more features rich than 3.1.4
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Matt_H on May 18, 2021, 12:23:29 AM
I assume those are still separate to stop them using up memory on lower memory systems and/or so that workbench library isn't bloated in size.

That's an interesting point, but I still wonder if there''s a cleaner way of implementing that functionality. As arguments for LoadWB, maybe? RAWBInfo and ASyncWB have been around since 1999 or earlier. Surely that code could be optimized/moved into some other component without much bloat?

I also wonder if there's a conceptual lesson/design that could be brought forward from OS1.3. My understanding is that the info window was contained in info.library back then. Based on that precedent, could RAWBInfo be moved into a new iteration of info.library? Or maybe an info.class for ReAction? That would keep it out of workbench.library.

And for comparison, they are still separate in OS 4.x, even though lots of other stuff has been done to Workbench.

So probably for a good reason ...
My criticism/suggestion applies to OS4, too. They're in OS4 because they were carried forward from OS3.5/3.9. My overall point is that it seems like Workbench functionality is still being conceptualized as though it's 1999. Let's think bigger! :)
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Minuous on May 18, 2021, 06:28:08 AM
Based on that precedent, could RAWBInfo be moved into a new iteration of info.library? Or maybe an info.class for ReAction? That would keep it out of workbench.library.

It's already out of workbench.library, so I don't see much benefit in having it as a class rather than an application.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: nbache on May 18, 2021, 08:35:33 AM
Plus one of the big advantages of AmigaOS in general (classic as well as NG) was always IMHO the tendency towards modularization rather than monolithization (if that's even a word ...).

Best regards,

Niels
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: chris on May 18, 2021, 11:24:56 AM
And for comparison, they are still separate in OS 4.x, even though lots of other stuff has been done to Workbench.

So probably for a good reason ...

Best regards,

Niels

RAWBInfo I think is because it needs ReAction, which isn't guaranteed to be available if you've booted a barebones WB installation (the built-in info window uses gadtools, which is always available)
ASyncWB I guess is separate because it is easier to have a program which patches the OS and is already a separate process, than trying to make WB spawn a new process internally when copy operations are initiated (also it probably uses ReAction again?  Although there's no reason why such a simple UI would need it)
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: nbache on May 18, 2021, 11:48:45 AM
@chris:
Quote
(also it probably uses ReAction again?  Although there's no reason why such a simple UI would need it)
The progress meter when copying etc., I assume.

Best regards,

Niels
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Matt_H on May 18, 2021, 02:05:49 PM
Based on that precedent, could RAWBInfo be moved into a new iteration of info.library? Or maybe an info.class for ReAction? That would keep it out of workbench.library.

It's already out of workbench.library, so I don't see much benefit in having it as a class rather than an application.
The point I’m trying to make is that as a separate program that replaces the default info window, it feels like a patch/hack. Ideally it would just be part of workbench.libray, but if bloat is a concern then packaging it as a library/class would make it feel like a more integral part of the OS.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Minuous on May 18, 2021, 09:13:47 PM
The point I’m trying to make is that as a separate program that replaces the default info window, it feels like a patch/hack.

It isn't a patch or hack, it uses the defined hooks which Workbench makes available for this purpose. Doing it this way means anyone can write an enhanced replacement for this part of the OS.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Matt_H on May 18, 2021, 11:55:16 PM
The point I’m trying to make is that as a separate program that replaces the default info window, it feels like a patch/hack.

It isn't a patch or hack, it uses the defined hooks which Workbench makes available for this purpose. Doing it this way means anyone can write an enhanced replacement for this part of the OS.
That's great that it works in an OS-legal way, but it still feels like a hack or an add-on. Maybe I'm alone in that opinion. Since it's an OS component I just wish it was a little more transparent or less noticeable. I like what it does, I just don't like it adding clutter to my WBStartup drawer.

Anyway, I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this. Let's move on to another subject. :)
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: kolla on May 20, 2021, 01:52:01 AM
RAWBInfo (RA as in ReAction) *is* an addon, one that replaces the WBInfo built into Workbench.library with one using the addon collection of boopsi classes known as ReAction. It is almost ironic that RAWBInfo is back in the OS, as in the “drama” that went down with Os 3.1.4 release, ThoR made it very clear that WBInfo window is NOT an editor (despite the obvious fact that tooltypes are edited there) and that essentially all features of RAWBInfo (all file system flags, copy/paste icons, palette manipulate, icon type manipulation etc) are somehow “wrong” and anyone thinking otherwise just don’t know how dumb they are. Well, and now RAWBInfo is back, hopefully less buggy than previous versions.

Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: QuikSanz on July 04, 2022, 07:50:10 PM
Thread resurrection!

A Printer System, it's high time we had something. Turbo Print is long gone, at least a spooler or something. Gutenberg? probably not coming...

Chris
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Matt_H on July 04, 2022, 08:57:08 PM
Thread resurrection!

A Printer System, it's high time we had something. Turbo Print is long gone, at least a spooler or something. Gutenberg? probably not coming...

Chris

CUPS has been floated as a possibility for a long time and I was always skeptical of how it could be implemented in a clean, Amiga-like fashion. But recent versions of MorphOS have done something like this pretty successfully. It's a bit clunky because it's alongside TurboPrint for now, but as it gets refined I think it might be worth borrowing the concept for regular AmigaOS.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: BozzerBigD on July 04, 2022, 10:55:43 PM
@Thread

By far it's the stupid 'Drawer Clean Up', 'Snapshot All' and 'Show All Files' rubbish! Just make it so that drawers are always tidy and all files are always visible and when you close the window it automatically saves it's layout etc. All this archaic rubbish needs overhauling! TurboPrint is an absolute dream still but Workbench is showing its age IMHO.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Matt_H on July 05, 2022, 06:16:52 AM
@Thread

By far it's the stupid 'Drawer Clean Up', 'Snapshot All' and 'Show All Files' rubbish! Just make it so that drawers are always tidy and all files are always visible and when you close the window it automatically saves it's layout etc. All this archaic rubbish needs overhauling! TurboPrint is an absolute dream still but Workbench is showing its age IMHO.

Gotta disagree, slightly. :)

Manual snapshotting is something I absolutely *love* about the Amiga. Similar to the Save/Use/Cancel philosophy - I know that if I'm messing around with something, none of the changes will be permanent unless I explicitly make it so. Hiding clutter in a drawer by only displaying files with icons is another valuable feature for me. On Windows/Mac, I can't stand it when I make a change to a window for a particular one-time scenario and then need to undo it by hand the next time.

MorphOS is sort of doing something like you describe. There's a view mode that will ignore icon positioning info and automatically place things in a grid. What I don't like about it is that it also scales the icons up or down to fit the grid, which can make them look weird. And it's a system-wide toggle buried pretty deep somewhere.

That being said, if auto-tidy or auto-snapshot could be set on a system-wide *or* per drawer basis I think I'd be interested. There are certain drawers where I could envision using it, but would still want the regular behavior elsewhere.

Per earlier posts in this thread, I believe permanent Show All Files can be mostly done now by copying an icon with that setting to ENVARC:sys/def_drawer.info. All new drawers should then have Show All Files enabled as default.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: OlafS3 on July 07, 2022, 12:35:43 PM
You get a problem...

if you f.e. change behavior like proposed some people will like that but others will refuse to use it because of that

I experienced that with my distributions, some people like magellan (including me) because it is unbeatable what you can do with it and f.e. ambient is orientating at it, but for others morphos is alien because it is not amiga-like enough. I tried to overcome this by also using Scalos as desktop that is much more amiga-like than magellan (that replaces much).

Here I not even talk about people who prefer amigaos because it is the only amiga platform to them
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: SHADES on July 08, 2022, 12:26:30 AM
- A system UPDATER package!!! some sort of package manager!
- A Multi User login Workbench desktop!! so others can use my Amiga without stuffing up my layout!
- Re sizeable fonts! RTG is a nightmare trying to read anything on Hi-Res screens
- Better RTG support in general.
- TCP-IP stack included
- Audio mixer control would be nice
- Printer support
- A modern browser would be flippen awesome but on classic? is that even possible with the speed and memory requirements?
- Theme swapping on desktop would be nice but no biggie.
- Right click to open a customisable Copy/paste/delete/open/edit  drop down would be nice.
- A universal search function like VoidTools "Everything" would be great
- A re-design of the HD-Toolbox would be nice. PFS3 inclusion as it's now public domain...
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Steady on July 08, 2022, 01:10:16 AM
@SHADES

Isn't the current find tool enough? It can search everywhere and also in content if needed.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: TribbleSmasher on July 08, 2022, 03:43:26 PM
RTG is getting better too, since Thor is fixing bugs and cludges and implementing new features and drivers for more cards into P96. :)
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: SHADES on July 11, 2022, 10:49:37 PM
@Steady
Not really. Have a look at "Everything" by void tools and how it can live in the menu bar at the bottom of windows screen. Very useful. I don't even use windows search anymore, it's that good, and the queries... oooh. It's like CSH shell replacement auto complete search function in real time but as part of a gui.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Steady on July 12, 2022, 01:21:30 AM
Cool. I'll take a look.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: TribbleSmasher on July 17, 2022, 02:22:31 AM
Another thing came to my mind, (might have been mentioned before); the Installer copies files, creating directories etc..
It creates an optional log file but there is no way to use that to reverse the installation.
so it would be a logical step to enhance Installer to create logs that can be used to reverse the installation of software.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: QuikSanz on July 17, 2022, 08:32:23 PM
Very true, installer puts stuff all over. Removing the software can be very tricky. The only thing you really want left is any MUI Class.

Chris
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Minuous on July 17, 2022, 09:45:45 PM
Ha, speak for yourself...I do not want any MUI crap cluttering up my system :-D
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: QuikSanz on July 18, 2022, 04:42:11 AM
In that case you should not have installed it in the first place.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: gwalp on July 21, 2022, 07:19:14 PM
How about a "Task Manager" like windows so when a task hangs up and freezes you can check tasks to see what is hanging up and end the task.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Matt_H on July 21, 2022, 11:49:52 PM
How about a "Task Manager" like windows so when a task hangs up and freezes you can check tasks to see what is hanging up and end the task.
Would be wonderful, of course, but being able to kill crashed tasks cleanly (without bringing down the whole system) would require major architectural changes to the OS.
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: BozzerBigD on July 22, 2022, 07:37:12 PM
I'd like to see the CD32 joypad usurping the one button mouse once and for all as the standard control method system wide! Support in the OS should be built in for JoyMouse type mouse control with the joypad out of the box. This should have happened with the launch of the AGA machines with CD-Rom support as standard too! C= made the CD32 the exception rather than the machine leading the charge!

While we're at it, why not support separate 2No Mouse ports and 2No. Joystick ports to save on port wear and tear?
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: BozzerBigD on July 22, 2022, 07:39:16 PM
... why did C= not bundle the CDTV/CD32 animating CD player with a CD equipped A4000 or A1200 with CD1200? Crazy?!  :-\
Title: Re: What are your top AmigaOS annoyances that you'd like to see addressed?
Post by: Matt_H on July 23, 2022, 12:52:10 AM
... why did C= not bundle the CDTV/CD32 animating CD player with a CD equipped A4000 or A1200 with CD1200? Crazy?!  :-\

I believe this was planned, but the bankruptcy got in the way.