Using an Amiga with OS4.1 for daily work.

[fondpondforever]

I'm thinking about Using an Amiga with OS4.1 for daily work instead of a PC or MAC. By this I mean using it for your job such as word processing to bring in documents, digital art creation for making posters and leaflets for local events going on such as live music and the internet for communicating such as email and making websites. Your printed labels or slogan could say 'Made By Amiga'.

[Ral-Clan]

Yes. They could.

[Rob]

Are you doing this kind of work already and what software do you, or would you, use on a PC or Mac?

What system are you considering running OS4.1 on?

[fondpondforever]

I do abit of work down a Historic Tin Mine like writing notes and making posters/leaflet's for people locally. Use Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop. Thought it would be interesting to use Amiga Software on a real amiga for this.

[BozzerBigD]

You really do have too much time on your hands! If you are proficient in Photoshop and Word why mix it up? Photogenics and Amiga Writer 2 were my choices on the Classic 'miggy. Though for posters Pagestream 3 is my go to program. Pagestream 4 works on Amiga OS4.x. I guess GIMP and AbiWord would be the OS4.x equivalents of the other two programs.

[Rob]

You can use Cinnamon Writer for word processing.  It' currently freeware but the author accepts donations.

http://desler.be/modules/wfchannel/

There's a freeware drawing program called Mindspace which can also import bitmap art and can be used for DTP.

http://www.ast-workshops.co.uk/MindSpace/

There's also a free version of Andy Broad's painting program, Sketchblock.  The current version is available via Amistore for about £13.

http://www.broad.ology.org.uk/amiga/sketchblock/


I'd recommend getting OS4.1FE Classic and setting it up under WinUAE emulation and have a play around with those programs to get the feel for using them to see if you think they would be sufficient for your needs.

[Rob]

You really do have too much time on your hands! If you are proficient in Photoshop and Word why mix it up?

Some people enjoy the extra sense of achievement of doing something professional on Amiga.  Years ago there was guy who wrote his own plotter driver and used an AmigaONE to print vinyl banners as part of his business.

[Duce]

I only do a light amount of Word and Photoshop work on a day to day basis on my Windows and Mac PC's.

There's nothing that would even come close to it on my SAM.  It's just not viable.

But that's just my opinion.  I've got enough troubles getting an Amiga web browser to not puke while doing GDocs and the other Google cloud apps.

[Rob]

I only do a light amount of Word and Photoshop work on a day to day basis on my Windows and Mac PC's.

There's nothing that would even come close to it on my SAM.  It's just not viable.

But that's just my opinion.  I've got enough troubles getting an Amiga web browser to not puke while doing GDocs and the other Google cloud apps.

Have you tried any of the programs I suggested?  If they aren't up to your requirements the feedback could be useful for the developers.

[agami]

Some people enjoy the extra sense of achievement of doing something professional on Amiga.

And some people like to be productive. Hey-oh! :biglaugh:

[agami]

I do abit of work down a Historic Tin Mine ...

As long as it's just a bit of work. And it helps if your work is self-contained, i.e. you don't have to exchange files with others as part of a workflow.

[Niding]

Seeing what people was able to do back in the days with only Amigas, Id say its more than possible to use only the Amiga for work.
But as people have hinted to, people have gotten so used to plug and play, 2 monitors and high speed processing with all kinds of programs, so using only amiga makes people think of Moses and stone tablets

I guess the best way of motivating yourself to actually go 100% amiga, is to disconnect your Wintel PC, put it in a box and put it in the basement.
Basically forcing yourself to do it. I guess it wont take long before you find out if you can do it or not. (Just dont risk the wrath of customers, if it leads to delivering a subpar product).

[OlafS3]

Some people enjoy the extra sense of achievement of doing something professional on Amiga.  Years ago there was guy who wrote his own plotter driver and used an AmigaONE to print vinyl banners as part of his business.

Amiga (any platform) is not suited for professional work, missing components like 64bit, memory protection or multicore support are the least problem, more problematic is missing drivers for 3rd party hardware like printers and expecially no up-to-date software. I would never even guess to use amigas for professional work, it is a nice hobby I waste some time on when I have some time left, not more not less.

[OlafS3]

Seeing what people was able to do back in the days with only Amigas, Id say its more than possible to use only the Amiga for work.
But as people have hinted to, people have gotten so used to plug and play, 2 monitors and high speed processing with all kinds of programs, so using only amiga makes people think of Moses and stone tablets

I guess the best way of motivating yourself to actually go 100% amiga, is to disconnect your Wintel PC, put it in a box and put it in the basement.
Basically forcing yourself to do it. I guess it wont take long before you find out if you can do it or not. (Just dont risk the wrath of customers, if it leads to delivering a subpar product).

that would be the best way to become so frustrated that he drops amiga at all because he sees the difference ... :laugh1:

Productivity today is very much dependent on the software, most amiga software is stuck in the 90s for obvious reasons. One simple thing data exchange. Most amiga software cannot exchange data with modern platforms of course. If that would be possible it perhaps would be possible to use both Windows/Mac/Linux but it is not. How does he exchange data with a print office? I would guess they do not support amiga software there.

[broadblues]

I do abit of work down a Historic Tin Mine like writing notes and making posters/leaflet's for people locally. Use Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop. Thought it would be interesting to use Amiga Software on a real amiga for this.

The kind of work you describe can easily be done on an AmiagOS 4.1 machine.

I use Wordworth 7 for wordprocessing, poster / flyer creation. Printing to postscrit them converting to PDF with Ghostscript.

(my PDFMaker script isavailable here http://www.broad.ology.org.uk/docs/amiga/proaction/05_A_Simple_App.html , realy ought to split that out of the tutorial an upload it to os4depot)

I use SketchBlock and ImageFX for graphics creation, saving the results inot 3 formats native (.skprj for further editing) , .ps for inclusing in Wordworth docs, and 24bit ilbm for previewing in wordworth (need imagefx for that). And ofcourse jpeg png etc for websueage where required.

Printing wise I have a HP laserjet Pro 200 color M251n which takes postscript data direct. This is important, don;t get any new printer that doesn't support postscript. You want a lasre for quality anyway, and all the other will lack somewhere in the driver chain.