What's with all the broken icons (OS4)?

[Aegis]

Hey everyone - I've lost track of the amount of apps I've downloaded from OS4depot with busted icons (a PNG.info instead of a *real* .info) - anyone know a quick way to fix this?

Also, *damn* the OS4 coders like to rely on third-party libraries and sObj's - I don't remember it ever being quite this bad on 3.x or it that the rose-tinted glasses??

[Aegis]

Thanks guys - I downloaded png_im and it works as you said - still having problens installing/running software though - in this case it's Fuse for OS4.

It says it needs libbz2 (only after you run it, after installing png_im so you *can* run it) so I go download that, libbz2 says I need to enter the following:

Copy SDK/#? ALL SDK:
MakeLink SOFT SDK:local/newlib/lib/libbz2.so libbz2.so.1.0

Except I don't have an SDK assign (of course) - I dunno - I hate to be mean-spirited about free software but stuff like this is so sloppy.

[Aegis]

Hey everyone - thanks for replying!

Chris - it's great to hear from you in this thread and I appreciate that stuff can slip through.

As I mentioned, I hate to be critical of software that people like yourself have dedicated time and energy to and made available to the community for free - without contributors such as yourself the Amiga community would have disappeared a long time ago.

That said, (and this is a general observation, not directed specifically at you) I'm a stickler for things 'working out of the box' - everything I do I have the user in mind and were I to create some software for the community (ha! I wish) then I'd make sure that any dependencies are mentioned in the documentation - not just what they are, but where to find them and where to install them.

WinUAE's just about to become significantly more useful with the 3.3.0 update and I've been testing a lot of apps and games with it to uncover bugs and also to form the basis of a beginners guide to getting OS4 running optimally under emulation - something that's been made quite frustrating by the large amount of undocumented dependencies I'm finding in OS4 apps and games.

Snoopy's useful in tracking down what's missing in a given app but the user really shouldn't have to - there's tons of software on os4depot that I've quite simply discounted from mentioning in my guide since I've been unable to get it working in a reasonable time-frame.

[Aegis]

Well I got it working turns out I already had the SOBJs I needed, I just had to make soft links for the versions Fuse was looking for - in this case:

libbz2.so.1.0
libxml2.so.9

I guess after you've been using OS4 for a while this becomes second nature but it's a big gotcha to newbies like me (and somehow I got a ton of stuff working without having to do this at all) - the only other soft links I have in SOBJs are for libz and libpng and I'm pretty sure I didn't make those

Regarding Fuse, (and again, I'm not picking on you Chris - it's just as good an example as many I've encountered) - here's the readme:

This is a port of fuse 1.0.0.1

The Amiga port supports decompression of files using xfdmaster.library,
and uses ASL for the file requesters.

32-bit Deficons are included for the main Spectrum file types, courtesy
of Ken "Ken's Icons" Lester.

See XFD.OS4 and Icons.OS4 files in the Docs directory for more info on
the above.  For general information about Fuse, see
http://fuse-emulator.sourceforge.net

I'd love it if you and other devs would stick notes for any dependencies in here - and telling users they need to hit F1 to bring up the Fuse menu wouldn't hurt either since by default it launches fullscreen. (I found it in the fuse.guide but you know what us users are like )

One last general gripe - *what* is with all these OS4 apps that have console windows you have to >NIL: away to get rid of? Must be a developer thing but I hate seeing these - could we not have a tooltype to hide them (and God yes, *please* use and document tooltypes ).

Fuse is very slick though Chris and runs nicely under WinUAE/OS4 - thanks for taking the time to port it!