As some people may have read my comments in the
recent news announcement, I'm a little worried that OS4 is taking a sharp turn towards Unix. In the interests of not getting that announcement too cluttered up with a side discussion, I'm continuing said discussion here.
After three years in demi-release, I think it's time for some more dedicated software to appear for OS4. Quick and dirty ports are fine as a stopgap measure to get much-needed core programs available, but building the entire OS4 software catalog out of them is a very dangerous move. Why should I run OS4 when I can run Linux if there's nothing unique about the programs it runs?
"ZOMG st0p teh ports!!11 we need teh rael am1ga softwears!!11" - No, that's not what I'm saying at all. Ports are great if they're well and truly ported - copy the ScummVM options pages into pulldown menus, integrate a GUI into shell tools, change the commandline arguments from -options to OPTIONS/S. Improvements like these give the Amiga versions an edge and make them a greater asset for the platform.
See the MorphOS version of SDL for a fantastic example of how things could be done: shared libraries, and system-wide and per-application preferences. In terms of native OS4 software, Wet is another great example of Amiga programming as it takes advantage of dockies, AppIcons, and ENV vars.
Bottom line, I don't want to run Firefox on my Amiga, I want to run the Amiga version of Firefox. If the shared objects help get Firefox running initially, that's great, but my concern is that the shared objects wil discourage developers from actually Amiga-izing their ports and that such a thing will turn us into a "me too" platform.
