Ben Herman's audio stream from Amiga Expo

[SlimJim]

Some interesting snippets of information could be made out on the rather poor audio stream:

- Screenshots of Amiga OS 4.0 will be published in the first part of April.

- Magic Menu and Birdie (among others) will be seamlessly integrated into the OS 4.0 interface.

- The new OS 4.0 GUI will look quite different (i.e it will not just look like a fast OS 3.9).

- Opus Magellan 2 has been licensed for OS 4.0 (details unknown).

- For the moment, the new printer system is not due to arrive until Boingbag/OS 4.1.

[SlimJim]

Some more stuff Ben said:

- The _latest_ MUI source code will be used
(there was a question about this)

- IBrowse2.3 will be quite some beast. It will be enhanced
for OS4.0. Not just some Aminet update. It will still miss
some features of Netscape/IE though. There is not time to
fix all to OS4.0. Flash is planned to be implemented. IB
will be _much_ more stable than it is now.

-The guy that did the Warp-datatypes seem to be doing the
new PPC-datatypes.

-The datatype system as a whole is to get a complete overhaul later.
There is not enough time to do that to initial release.

- An office suit (Open office if I remember correctly)
is being worked on. This is a 'high priority' for inclusion.
(although it was not clear to me if it would be shipped initially)

-The development of software -independent of company
size- is difficult to predict. But Mr.Hermans seems quite
confident of a end-user release in May.

I'll ponder some more to see if I can remember anything
else...;-)
.
SlimJim

[SlimJim]

> For Classic PPC Cards or/and also AmigaOne (as
> said by A. Redhouse)?

Not sure. He just said "...consumer release somewhere
in may..."(or similar).
.
SlimJim

[SlimJim]

> when will audio be back? does anybody know?

The guy at the show was probably going for a beer
after that interview - to celebrate it actiually
worked. He dialed up Mr. Hermans /James (in Europe) on his
celphone, linked it up to his system somehow and
both he, people at the show and ICQ:ers could ask
questions. The audio quality was quite bad, but
actually that phone line to Europe was easiest to
make out ;-) I hope they make a transcipt.It was a
fifty minutes phonecall...

.
SlimJim

[SlimJim]

>Ehm, maybe he means that they will include something LIKE birdie. Birdie is an ASM hack
> for CGX SuperLayers.

I'm ALMOST certain he said they were working with
the respective authors to implement these -
specifically in 'non-hackish' way.
.
SlimJim

[SlimJim]

> Any information for an EX amigaian on what Magic Menu and Birdie are?

Birdie makes pretty borders to windows. Don't use it myself though (no gfx-card).
Magic Menu is - as you guessed - a menu enhancer with quite a lot of cool functions
(such as transparent menues etc).

> Nice to see screen shots will be avaliable round early aprile

I wrote first part of april, not early april. Actually Ben was quite
vague on this. Probably on should expect 10-15:th of april (barring usual delays).

> This means updates will come as patches (i know what boing
bag is, but)
> and by 4.2, 4.5,5.0  all updates will be
> totaly seemlesly integrated?

Guess so:-).
.
SlimJim