I wrote this essay this morning:
Pinch myself. It's 2011 and I still get to use the Amiga operating system, my friend since 1.2 was the new number. This is a continuation traceable from the days when blue and orange and white and black were the Workbench four colors of the day.
The right button is still for the menu bar, still up top where it belongs. The Workbench still has its projects, its tools, its drawers. Maybe that's just a metaphor change from a desktop with folders and documents, but it's all reassuringly familiar. Hidden yet accessible are c and s and libs, all serving their sensible purposes. There's no Windows registry. No Linux repositories to confound getting the exact new program you want.
Still, AmigaOS fits me like a good glove. It's as comfortable as an old shoe, actually, but as stylish as something new with those millions of colors, high-quality audio that dear Paula could never give and sensibly deployed bits of eye candy. Just look at the use of transparency on the Workbench graphics, for all love. It makes sense -- not something dumb like the translucent menu bar OS X has now!
Docks and task bars? I've banished all that stuff. Why should we try to look like the other guys? I was always more a ToolsDaemon sort of a guy anyway, so a little thing called AddMenu serves the purpose and puts the programs where I can get at 'em.
Got to agree with all of that. The above struck a particular chord with me.
For an Amiga to be an Amiga, it would need to have that same 'comfortable shoe' feel. And the same system layout and workbench metaphor.
I used to use docks, taskbars, themed windows back when we were playing catchup in the mid ninties- then I got rid of them all, I can see all my lovely desktop picture, and have loads of room for windows (at 640x512, seem to have more room than my old pc at 1024x768). Tools deamon does the rest. As I open my start menu on windows to run a program, windows takes 3 or 4 seconds to draw the menu....on a dual 2ghz nvidia 8600GT. Tools Deamon responds straight away.
