Is there any chance Hyperion would let us ask for what we want in OS5?
I'd like to see web site set up with polls and comment areas designed to give the community a chance to tell them what we want. I know there will always be a few a55hole5 that try to hijack anything productive but overall i think our community is well behaved and would provide valid feedback.
I like the motherboard they announced (not sure about this "Xena" co-processor, but will wait and see what it can do) and i expect OS4.2 to mainly be support for the new hardware. Certainly planning for OS5 must be going on now or very soon.
We often talk about needing memory protection to improve stability and give the user a list of running applications where they can select one and close it at any time. Why only duplicate what others have? It needs to go a step further.
The average user doesn't care what applications are running. They care about their work and their games. The average user wants to know if they could lose two hours of typing or that awesome high score from Bubble Bobble level 99. Give us a list of each running applications/games open documents, showing whether each has changed or not, and let us save, close, or switch to each document from the list. The system could also have a preference setting to save everything from time to time and warn us if we forget to save something before shutting down.
The original Amiga OS was way ahead of it's time and OS5 must be to. We must think beyond what is already out there and the more minds we have working together in an orderly fashion the better the system can be.
